The Southern Tradition at Bay

A History of Postbellum Thought

Richard M. Weaver

• Publisher: Regnery Gateway
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781684511815
• eBook ISBN: 9781684511853
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While Richard M. Weaver is best known for the classic Ideas Have Consequences, the foundation of his career was this study of his native South. Calling the Southern tradition "the last non-materialist civilization in the Western world," he traced its roots to feudalism, chivalry, religiosity, and aristocratic conventions. The Old South, he concluded, "may indeed be a hall hung with splendid tapestries in which no one would care to live; but from them we can learn something of how to live."

Weaver’s exploration of the ideals and ideas of the Southern tradition as expressed in the military histories, autobiographies, diaries, and novels of the era following the Civil War—especially those written by the men and women on the losing side—is offered to a new generation of readers for whom that tradition has fallen into disrepute and who can scarcely imagine a life rooted in nature, the soil, and a powerful sense of honor.

The Southern Tradition at Bay is, as Jeffrey Hart noted, the work of a man who admired what "is admirable indeed, and that is the foundation of wisdom and indeed sanity."

CHAPTER ONE The Heritage

The mind of the South, which has been conspicuous for its resistance to the spiritual disintegration of the modern world, is traditional in the sense that it exhibits important connections with European civilization. The habit of contemporary publicity has been to treat it in terms of superficial contrasts and to ignore the fact that it rests upon conceptions more fundamental in human nature than those envisaged by certain modern philosophies. Like the being contemplated by Aristotle, the Southern tradition has a fourfold root.

The most obvious of these is the feudal theory of society which, although a transplantation from the Old World, appeared in the South so natural a principle of organization that the Southern people have not to this day been persuaded to abandon it.

Another is the code of chivalry, a romantic idealism closely related to Christianity, which makes honor the guiding principle of conduct.

Connected with this is the ancient concept of the gentleman. First presented by Aristotle, and passed down through Castiglione, Sir Thomas Elyot and others, it significantly presupposes a stable social order and a system of class education.

Finally there is a religiousness, difficult of explication because, having little relation to creeds, it stands close to the historic religiousness of humanity. It is briefly a sense of the inscrutable, which leaves man convinced of the existence of supernatural intelligence and power, and leads him to the acceptance of life as a mystery.

All of these existed as determining forces in the antebellum South and are discernible in the peculiar complex of Southern culture today.

1. The Feudal System

The South developed as an agricultural region through the institution of a feudal system. The type of society which it created was patterned on an order then declining in Europe, but in the New World it grew to notable proportions, modified by features of land and climate, and especially by the presence of Negro slavery. The impulse behind it was both economic and political; a large estate under central management and worked by laborers who were bound to their station proved the best means of acquiring wealth from the soil of Virginia, and settlers here, as in the other Southern colonies, had come primarily to make their fortunes. From the incorrigible gentlemen idlers of whom Captain John Smith complained in his dispatches to England, to the host of indentured servants who poured into the settlements in the eighteenth century, dwellers in the South aspired to acquire estates and become masters, and though many did not progress beyond the status of yeomen or small farmers, the plantation ideal was dominant in the general ordering of Southern life.¹ Politically the feudal structure was desirable because by making the owner of broad acres true lord of the domain it simplified administration. Lord Baltimore recognized this when in Maryland he offered manorial powers to those able to take up large holdings. Some three score estates were granted on such terms and were run more or less in the fashion of an English medieval manor until in the course of time they turned into its American counterpart, the Southern plantation.² The number of truly baronial estates was indeed never great; in many inland districts and especially toward the mountains they were lacking, but in Tidewater Virginia, in the coastal regions of the Carolinas, in the lower Mississippi Valley, and in the Blue Grass region of Kentucky they were numerous enough to be thought of as the characteristic economic organization and to support a society which produced the first Americans popularly identified as “gentlemen.”

The structure of the plantation mirrored the structure of the entire Southern social world. Its organization demanded stations, and the stations which men held in their local community bred in them a peculiar pride and dignity, which came to be associated, not always favorably, with Southern character. The method of its operation, moreover, enables one to understand why anything other than a class society was unthinkable to the Southerner of the old regime. In the social order which was overthrown by the Civil War there existed a feature of feudalism incomprehensible to the modern mind with its egotism and enlightened selfishness, subordination without envy, and superiority without fear. This was made possible, as is always true, by an articulation. The typical plantation was a little cosmos in which things were arranged by a well understood principle giving coherence to the whole.

Even those estates which grew a single staple for the export trade and depended on foreign sources for their manufactured goods had slaves and servants trained in special occupations. Large estates had a great representation of trades and skills. When “King” Carter of Corotoman devised his will in 1726, he listed seventeen indentured servants among the personnel of the homestead, including “sailors, tailors and carpenters, a glazier, a bricklayer, and a blacksmith.”³ A later member of the Carter clan, Robert, the master of Nomini Hall, counted among his slaves eleven carpenters, two joiners, two postilions, a bricklayer, a blacksmith, a miller, a tanner, a shoemaker, a hatter, a sailor, a carter, a butcher, a cook, a waiter, and a scullion from the men; and from the women three housemaids, two seamstresses, two spinners, a laundress, a nursemaid, and a midwife.⁴

Mount Vernon under the administration of George Washington displayed a comparable diversity of occupations. When he received title to the estate, it amounted to 2500 acres, which he, as a land-loving Virginian, eventually increased to more than 8000. In his operations the owner availed himself of the labor of both free and indentured whites in addition to that of a considerable number of slaves. From the indentured whites he usually expected some form of specialized service. In 1760 he wrote to Philadelphia for a joiner, a bricklayer, and a gardener; in 1786 he purchased the services of a Dutchman, who was to serve as ditcher and mower, and in the same year he got “from on board the brig Anna, from Ireland, two servant men… Thomas Ryan, a shoemaker, and Cavan Bower, a Tayler Redemptioners for three years service by indenture.”⁵ His slaves included waiters, cooks, drivers and stablers, smiths, waggoners, carpenters, spinners, knitters, a carter, and a stockkeeper.⁶ With his hired laborers he commonly drew up a contract which allowed them a house, a stated amount of provisions, and which sometimes placed restrictions on their moral conduct.⁷

General John Mason, son of George Mason of Gunston Hall, has testified regarding that division of labor which made each plantation a relatively self-sufficient community: “It was much the practice with gentlemen of slave and landed estates… so to organize them as to have considerable resources within themselves; and to employ and pay but few tradesmen, and to buy little or none of the coarse stuffs used by them… thus my father had among his slaves carpenters, coopers, sawyers, blacksmiths, tanners, curriers, shoemakers, spinners, weavers, and knitters, and even a distiller.”⁸

A fine glimpse of a feudal paradise which survived until 1865 is given by Mrs. Virginia Clay in A Belle of the Fifties. During the closing months of the Civil War she spent some time at Redcliffe, the magnificent estate of James H. Hammond, of South Carolina, who had contributed the chapter “Slavery in the Light of Political Science” to the Southern symposium, Cotton is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments. On this spacious property, tilled by the labor of 400 slaves, were a gristmill, a forge, a wheelwright’s shop, a hospital and a church, to which there was summoned once a month a white preacher to give the Negroes a somewhat more decorous introduction to Christianity than could be expected from one of their own emotional exhorters. Redcliffe grew not only cotton, but also corn, wool, vegetables, and grapes.⁹ In the palatial residence were marbles, statuary, and paintings, so that this plantation measures up even to the romancer’s conception of the antebellum slaveholder’s estate.

With such diversity of occupation, there was a task adapted to everyone, and when a worker grew too old for a certain kind of employment, he would be shifted, in paternalistic fashion, to another better suited to his condition. The strong sense of particularism which developed in these communities derived principally from the circumstance that everyone had his place. The feeling of being bound to a locality, which has been almost wholly lost by the deracinated population of the modern metropolis, was a part of the plantation dweller’s daily consciousness and an important factor in his self-respect. In the midst of traffic in human beings there was, paradoxically, less evidence of the cash nexus than in the marts of free labor, and even the humble could have the deep human satisfaction that comes of being cherished for what one is. Between the expression “our people,” euphemistic though it may have been, and the modern abstraction “manpower” lies a measure of our decline in humanity.

As the plantation freed its members in large part from dependence on institutions outside its bounds, it encouraged an intense provincialism. The lords of these agrarian strongholds regarded foreign influences—and the expression must be taken in its most provincial sense—as undesirable. John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn, which presents the most complete plantation setting in early American literature, gives a good notion of this distrust. Here Frank Meriwether is the benevolent despot. A portly Virginia gentleman of forty-five, he had studied law at Richmond more to learn how to defend his own rights than to represent clients before the bar, and then had retired to his estate to enjoy as a birthright the finest existence a man could conceive. He managed accounts, dispensed hospitality in traditional open-handed style, made himself court of high appeal to override the decisions of overseers, and took a distant interest in politics, exploding now and then over some novelty of invention which threatened to disturb the calm of his Eden. He saw in the steamboat a menace to isolated communities and a forward step toward that “consolidationism” at which Southern statesmen were to point for the next fifty years. “This annihilation of space, sir, is not to be desired,” he told his visitor from the North. “Our protection against the evils of consolidation consists in the very obstacles to an intercourse.” He felt that “the home material of Virginia was never so good as when the roads were at their worst.”¹⁰ Swallow Barn is little dependent on the outside world even for amusements; its wholesome fun comes from annual celebrations, droll incidents, and the kind of interest which humane people naturally take in one another.

With the protection of this seclusion, the hierarchy stood firm. From the owner of the estate at the top, down to field workers, bond or indentured, who, if not bound to the soil, were at least under some constraint to work it, the ranks were plain.¹¹ The master, as justice of the peace, preserved order and settled disputes. In actual practice he usually possessed more authority than the title or office he held would imply, for his power extended beyond the sphere of business and legal relationships. Though sometimes in practice an autocrat, as John R. Thompson of the Southern Literary Messenger described him,¹² he usually took pride in exercising his power with justice; and he ordinarily acknowledged a responsibility for the welfare of his dependents which proceeded from moral obligation.

Under the owner was the overseer, a sort of lieutenant, who for his subsistence and a moderate wage assumed the direction of planting and harvesting, made the innumerable decisions which wind and weather force upon an agriculturist, and most difficult of all, disciplined the slaves. The overseer was assisted by a “driver,” who was often chosen from among the more capable and reliable Negroes. He generally worked as foreman, but sometimes he was given the responsibility of assigning tasks to the other slaves, and even of administering punishment.¹³

The upper-class Southerner developed a notion that only gentlemen were entitled to stand at the head of this hierarchy. Only those habituated to self-restraint and brought up in the “proper sentiments” could wield a degree of authority so terrifying in the abstract. Perhaps experience with overseers from the North encouraged the idea that Yankees lacked the requisite qualities; at any rate a writer in the Southern Literary Messenger contended that Northerners were unfit to be masters. “In obedience to isothermal laws,” he said, “slavery has already made its exodus from the inhospitable shores of New England, never to return; there is no climate there; there is no soil there, and there is no master there.”¹⁴ Years later Ellen Glasgow was to make Major Lightfoot in The Battle-Ground say contemptuously of the low-caste Rainy-day Jones: “There’s no man alive that shall question the divine right of slavery in my presence; but—but it is an institution for gentlemen.”¹⁵ Although some slave-owners were not gentlemen, there was moral truth in the observation that only under the rule of gentlemen was the peculiar institution tolerable.

The noblesse oblige of the plantation owner has been made so prominent a part of the romantic tradition that it might be regarded with suspicion were it not well supported by the records. Washington, for example, who was far from a sentimentalist on the subject of slavery, was accustomed to visit his sick slaves and on occasion to take over personal supervision of their treatment.¹⁶ The spectacle of this typical landowner riding daily about Mount Vernon, which he had divided into five farms, each under the management of an overseer and all under the authority of a single steward, keeping a sharp eye on operations and often reprimanding underlings somewhat impatiently, furnishes a striking picture of this paternalistic social structure.¹⁷

The sense of trusteeship thus developed has been one of the enduring legacies of the plantation system. The landholder, if he belonged to the tradition, would not concede that his servants meant nothing more to him than the value of their labor, nor did the servant ordinarily envisage the master as nothing more than a source of employment. The master expected of his servants loyalty; the servants of the master interest and protection.¹⁸ Each working in his sphere “went to make up a whole, through which there ran a common bond of feeling. It was a type of the corporative society, held together by sentiments which do not survive a money-economy. At this date it seems a condition of primal innocence, before the disintegration of society into competitive and envious groups, kept at peace by a state which must grow more and more powerful to intimidate them.

This is the spirit of feudalism in its optative aspect; some abuses were inevitable, and in the South lordship over an alien and primitive race had less favorable effects upon the character of the slave-owners. It made them arrogant and impatient, and it filled them with boundless self-assurance. Even the children, noting the deference paid to their elders by the servants, began at an early age to take on airs of command. After an extensive tour throug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Heritage
• Chapter Two: Writing the Apologia
• Chapter Three: The Testimony of the Soldier
• Chapter Four: Diaries and Reminiscences of the Second American Revolution
• Chapter Five: Fiction across the Chasm
• Chapter Six: The Tradition and Its Critics
• Epilogue
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright