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6To Restore Their Broken Fortunes Reconstructing White Southern Identity During the summer of 1865, a piece in the Montgomery Advertiser drew a distinction between ‘‘Young America,’’ the ‘‘fast young man of the glorious United States,’’ and the new ‘‘Young South,’’ born in 1860 or 1861, ‘‘very hopeful and full of life.’’ Young America was somewhat of a rake—he could be a dashing filibusterer or ‘‘an unmitigated vagabond and villain’’—and a bit of a dandy as well. Before the war, Young South had been an upper-class man of leisure with gloved hands and stylish clothes. But he lost his fortune in the war and could now be spied on top of his wagon ‘‘with his ungloved hand holding the reins made of Southern cotton, on his head a Southern palmetto, going to market to sell his ‘country produce.’’’ The war had strengthened and changed Young South, leaving him only the ‘‘peerless, priceless spirit of a noble manhood.’’ His new values of hard work and determination made him a ‘‘prize of a husband’’ for any Southern girl. Young South was to provide the Advertiser’s readers, specifically former Confederate soldiers, with a model for recreating themselves and their nation: he was a man with new ‘‘faith in the dignity of labor,’’ whose newfound ‘‘self-reliance’’ rescued him from the idle dissipation that would have been his lot before the war. But Young South was not to be a replica of Young America. Southern men were supposed to be better than that: ‘‘He has learnt, at last, that ‘Young America’ will be unpopular and unprofitable in this country now; and from the constraints which go to make up the character of Young South, we may look for a society of staunch, strong, reliable men who will be capable of bearing this section of country on to honor and prosperity. Vive la Young South!’’ In essence, Young South represented the continuation of the Confederate notion of a virtuous and hardworking Southern people. Within months of the end of the war, the destruction of slavery was to be perceived as a blessing in disguise, for it allowed hard work to be treated with a new respect and dignity.1 ‘‘Young America and Young South’’ neatly encapsulates one strain of Southern thinking about labor, patience and masculinity during the early years of Reconstruction. White Southerners told themselves repeatedly to put the past behind them and look to the future, even if that meant abandoning their self-image as an agrarian people (and certainly as a master class). In a sense, the rhetoric of economic rebuilding, which was often tinged with calls for new industrialization, worked in tandem with demands for local political control. Both were concerned with strengthening the South’s position within the Union as a whole; both were concerned with preserving Southern distinctiveness, if not independence. ‘‘we must build up anew’’ Once the initial shock of emancipation wore off, white Southerners were faced with the question of how to rebuild their economic lives. About 10,000 of them decided that they could not bear to live in the South any longer and left the region entirely, hoping to rebuild in regions where slavery was still tolerated. Exponentially more ex-Confederates dreamed of leaving, using the idea of emigration as an emotional safety valve for those who stayed behind . It gave them the illusion of control, the possibility of escape from their troubled situation.2 But in the end, few Southern whites were either willing or able to leave, and so the majority were faced with the vexing questions of how to rebuild their lives and their region. White Southerners confronted with economic ruin, the loss of their capital in slaves, and the specter of politics being controlled by their twin bogeymen—Republicans and freedmen —could easily fall into depression. Too, Southern white men’s identity had long been bound up in their sense of themselves as chivalrous and fierce fighting men, a self-image dashed with the loss of the war. Add depression to a culture that, because of slavery, had long devalued both agricultural and industrial labor, and it appeared that the South might never be able to lift itself out of its economic and spiritual doldrums.3 Recognizing this, white Southerners both publicly and privately exhorted their fellow countrymen to get to work rebuilding their region. They put aside politics for the time being, adopting the attitude that material and economic strength would eventually lead to a...

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