The Lazy South (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Lazy South. By David Bertelson. (New York; Oxford University Press, 1967. Pp. xi, 284, $6.75.) The enigma of the South, as David Potter has pointed out, has an irresistible attraction for imaginative and speculative historians. Mr. Bertelson's book, despite its misleading title, is in that genre. Simply put, his argument is that the South's difference from the rest of the nation began in colonial times and that its basis was not the usual factors of the land, slavery, the Negro, or the economy. It was that the men who settled the region came with no other aim but economic self-interest and advancement; unlike the settlers of New England and Quaker Pennsylvania, they lacked a sense of community that gives to work a social context and therefore a meaning. (Bertelson's failure to fit New York and New Jersey into this dichotomy is an obvious weakness in the book.) Instead, the South has been a land in which men have sung the praises of economic individualism. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, southerners themselves accused the South of being a land of the lazy. But as Bertelson makes clear, the accusation did not stem from a lack of actual busyness on the part of southerners , for all admitted that southerners labored hard, but from the lack of social justification for work. Only in the nineteenth century, Bertelson contends , though he does not explain why or how the change came about, did southern self-accusations of "laziness" become metamorphosed into a positive defense of "leisure," which, in turn, was raised to a central value in the southern way. In several ways this book is iconoclastic. For one thing, it stands on its head the usual generalization about the South by making southerners proponents of economic egoism, while northerners exemplify community and social responsibility. The land of anti-capitalistic agrarians now becomes the region of Manchesterian liberalism. For another thing, he explains the South and southern ways by reference to ideas rather than to social or economic practices. In one place, for example, he attributes the expansion of slavery in the South to a belief in economic individualism rather than to the opportunities of staple agriculture. He is also iconoclastic in his rejection of the explanations for southern distinctiveness advanced by Cash, Potter, and Woodward. In fact, the best chapter in the book is the epilogue, in which he contrasts his own views with those of his predecessors. Moreover , Mr. Bertelson is a courageous as well as an imaginative thinker, for some of his reflections border on the outrageous. How else, for example, is one to take his remark that the beating of a slave might well be "an af259 260CIVIL WAR HISTORY firrnation of vitality in a man who desperately wanted to prove that he was not lazy" (110)? The principal weakness of the book is its method. Ranging from the first setdements in Virginia through the Civil War, the book makes no pretense of exhausting the vast literature on southern history. The basis for Bertelson's analyses and conclusions L· the popular published literature by southerners, with an occasional glance at similar writings by northerners. His most thorough canvassing of writings is for the colonial period; for the ante-bellum years he is content with analyzing a few novels and writings of prominent southerners like Calhoun. In his analysis, the words in promotional literature like Hammond's Rachael and Leah are taken at the same face value as those in Byrd's diary or Beverley's history; the circumstances that might have affected a piece of writing are not taken into consideration . Quotations from the literature of the North that offer the kind of contrast in which he is interested are cited, but no attempt is really made to survey the writings in any systematic fashion. Thus the slovenliness of southern farms in the eighteenth century is noted, but the fact that European visitors also found New England farms poorly kept is not reported . Benjamin Franklin's urban attitude toward work is taken as typical of the North and contrasted with that of the isolated southern frontiersman, though most northerners at that time also...