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XI Collision To bring all this to a conclusion and a focus, it is clear that eyewitness accounts of life in the United States before the 1860s reveal vast and important differences between Southerners and Northerners . Throughout the antebellum period a wide range of observers generally characterized Southerners as more hospitable, generous, frank, courteous, spontaneous, lazy, lawless, militaristic, wasteful, impractical, and reckless than Northerners, who were in turn more reserved, shrewd, disciplined, gauche, enterprising, acquisitive, careful, frugal, ambitious, pacific, and practical than Southerners. The Old South was a leisure-oriented society that fostered idleness and gaiety, where people favored the spoken word over the written and enjoyed their sensual pleasures. Family ties reportedly were stronger in the South than in the North; Southerners, whose values were more agrarian than those of Northerners, wasted more time and consumed more tobacco and liquor and were less concerned with the useful and the material. Yankees, on the other hand, were cleaner, neater, more puritanical, less mercurial, better educated, more orderly and progressive, worked harder, and kept the Sabbath better than Southerners. Many an observer also recorded that Northerners and Southerners tended to retain their old ways when they moved westward. The Yankee preacher Timothy Flint, for example, noted that Ohio was called a "Yankee state" because of the New England institutions that prevailed in the northern three-quarters of its territory. "The prevalent modes of living, of society, of instruction, of associating for any public object, of thinking, and enjoying," which Flint found there "to be copies of the New England pattern," were as solidly entrenched in the upper Midwest as southern ways were along and below the Ohio River. Flint and others recognized that New Englanders and denizens of the upper Midwest shared fundamental beliefs and habits: "[They] naturally unite themselves into corporate 268 Collision unions, and concentre their strength for public works and purposes. They have the same desire for keeping up schools, for cultivating psalmody, for settling ministers, and attending upon religious worship ; and unfortunately the same disposition to dogmatize, to settle, not only their own faith, but that of their neighbour, and to stand resolutely, and dispute fiercely, for the slightest shade of difference of religious opinion. In short, in the tone of conversation, the ways of thinking and expressing thought upon all subjects, in the strong exercise of social inclination, expressing itself in habits of neighbourhood , to form villages, and live in them, in preference to that sequestered and isolated condition, which a Kentuckian, under the name of 'range,' considers as one of the desirable circumstances of existence; in the thousand slight shades of manner, and union of which so strongly marks one people from another, and the details of which are too minute to be described, by most of these things, this is properly designated 'the Yankee state.' "I What antebellum observers described were more than trivial variations between the inhabitants of different areas of the United States; they were deep cultural contrarieties between two distinct peoples who not only disagreed in their ways and values but by 1861 were ready to meet each other in mortal combat. The Southerner who wrote Sociology fOl the South and Abraham Lincoln's law partner probably agreed on very few things, but one of them was that the North and South were discordant cultures. In 1860 George Fitzhugh announced that the division between Southerners and Northerners was more than a "sectional issue"-it was a clash "between conservatives and revolutionaries; ... between those who believe in the past, in history, in human experience, . .. and those who ... foolishly, rashly, and profanely attempt to 'expel human nature,' to bring about a millennium, and inaugurate a future wholly unlike anything that has preceded it." That same year William H. Herndon proclaimed that "Civilization and barbarism are absolute antagonisms. One or the other must perish on this Continent.... There is no dodging the question. Let the natural struggle, heaven high and 'hell' deep, go on. ... I am thoroughly convinced that two such civilizations as the North and the South can-not co-exist on the same soil. . . . To expect otherwise would be to expect the Absolute to sleep with and tolerate 'hell.' ,,2 Nor were these exceptional views. Of Southerners, a Northerner I. Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years. ed. C. Hartley Grattan (1826; reprint, New York, 1932), 45. 2 . Fitzhugh quoted in Jan c. Dawson, "The Puritan and the Cavalier: The South's Perception of Contrasting Traditions ," Journal of Southern History 44...

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