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Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 54-63



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Ordering Southern Thought

Michael O'Brien. Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 2 vols. xxi + 1354 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, and index. $95.00.

The contours of American intellectual history were set in part by two very different responses to the caustic journalism of H.L. Mencken. In the 1920s, Mencken famously blamed the nation's cultural lethargy on a crabbed, self-interested elite who defended inherited institutions and outmoded beliefs from a relatively isolated corner of North America. He held these men responsible for the reactionary tenor of modern American life, despite the fact that they had long been stripped of meaningful power. That few historians now accept this portrait of the seventeenth-century Puritans is a tribute to Perry Miller, who began in the early 1930s to present New England Calvinism as the work of a hyper-intellectual, cosmopolitan assemblage of first-rate thinkers. Puritan specialists have since built on Miller's insights, showing how the New England clerisy assembled a mountain of print that justified the ways of God to Man and probed the depths of the human experience. The Puritans' federal theology of covenants and their language of errands became the surest evidence that Americans were capable of rigorous thought. Their muscular realism even came to be pertinent to twentieth-century concerns, most notably in the cross-fertilization between their austere Calvinism and the neo-orthodoxy of Reinhold Niebuhr.1

While Perry Miller was recovering the rich intellectual life of early Massachusetts Bay and assessing its significance, Wilbur J. Cash was adding to Mencken's caricature of an American South "ruled by morons and cowards, manacled by clergymen and politicians, void of intellectual or cultural contributions." Cash's The Mind of the South thoroughly repudiated its own title by insisting that the South's mindlessness had roots in frontier revivalism and proslavery hedonism. Cash's dismissive portrait had long-term consequences, which are still evident in the slave South's marginality in American intellectual history.2 An important reassessment began as the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s entered the American literary canon, where it came to rival the New England Renaissance of the 1840s and 1850s. [End Page 54] Allen Tate and other leading figures of this regional burst of creativity also laid the groundwork for reassessing the Old South, since in casting a backwards glance they found a society far more hospitable to intellect than Cash had suggested. The early reflections of Tate and others about the Old South's intellectuality reached a critical point by the mid-1970s, when historians launched a collective attempt to rebut the assumption that antebellum "southern thought" was little more than an oxymoron.3

Michael O'Brien has been a central figure in this emerging re-evaluation. Recalling Miller's own complicated stance towards the Puritans, O'Brien's efforts seem to have been motivated less by personal connection or ideological affinity than by an outsider's puzzlement at an inexplicable—and ultimately inexcusable—scholarly oversight. O'Brien project of rehabilitation began in his first book, which explored how Chapel Hill sociologists and Nashville Agrarian men of letters grappled with the "idea of the South" between the first and second World Wars. He has subsequently focused his attention on the years between the opening of the nineteenth century and the Civil War, directing his fire not at Menckenian hyperbole (which was so easy a target that Perry Miller all but ignored it) or even at Cash, but at Henry Adams's smug observation that southerners had temperaments rather than minds. Since the early 1980s, O'Brien has produced a steady series of essays, an acclaimed biographical study, an indispensable edition of antebellum southern texts, and another collection of private writings from single white women. As important, he has fostered southern intellectual history as a legitimate professional enterprise in symposia, conferences, and publishing ventures both within the United States and in his native United Kingdom, where he is now...

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