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3 “The South Is a Single, Homogeneous People”: Canonizing Southern History and Literature By the world at large we are held to have been an ignorant, illiterate, cruel, semi-barbarous section of the American people, sunk in brutality and vice, who have contributed nothing to the advancement of mankind; a race of slave-drivers, who, to perpetuate human slavery, conspired to destroy the Union, and plunged the country into war. —Thomas Nelson Page, “The Want of a History of the Southern People” Though we tend to praise the fact of community as a good thing (as in general we tend to praise unity or freedom as “good” things) its goodness is not a priori or absolute. If a community is a society which shares values, likings, and aversions, then the goodness of the community depends to some extent on what kind of values it shares. . . . the South, as an authentic community, has held to some values that surely were, and are, questionable. —Cleanth Brooks, “Thematic Problems in Southern Literature” “Much of what Dr. Page has said is correct,” wrote Julian A. C. Chandler in his introduction to the twelve-volume history, The South in the Building of the Nation (1909). “No true history of the South has been written.”1 But if Thomas 88 “The South Is a Single, Homogeneous People” Nelson Page and Chandler had cause to regret the absence of a “true history ,” it was not for want of effort by their fellow southerners. Even before Appomattox,whitesouthernersweredoggedlyspillinginktogettherecently unfolded story right. Secession, war, and the shattering of the Confederacy struck writers of the immediate postwar years as their most pressing narrative problem—that is, the story most worth getting right. In a solemn tone common to these early efforts, clergyman and Confederate apologist R. L. Dabney wrote: “my purpose . . . is to lay this pious and filial defence upon the tomb of my murdered mother, Virginia.”2 But the great bulk of these histories and memoirs written during the 1860s and 1870s did not satisfy the next generation of white southerners, especially those who, like Julian Chandler, were academics. Overtly partisan and often narrowly construed, this first generation of Confederate apologetics would not meet the emerging professional historical standards of the 1880s and 1890s. Indeed, some early chroniclers of the Confederate experience realized that “an accepted history can never be written in the midst of the stormy events of which that history is composed, nor by the agents through whose efficiency they were wrought.”3 Further, these accounts had little appeal for lay audiences eager to move beyond contentious arguments over the legality of secession, the course of Confederate leadership, and the relative effectiveness of particular Confederate generals, and to reembrace an identity as patriotic Americans.4 The early works may have stretched up to 1,500 pages, as did Jefferson Davis’s Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881), but the task of these histories was simple: to assign praise or blame in what they hesitated to call the “Civil War.” Whether apologetics (regional or personal) such as R. L. Dabney’s A Defense of Virginia and the South (1867), Alfred Taylor Bledsoe’s Is Davis a Traitor? (1866), or Joseph E. Johnston’s Narrative of MilitaryOperations(1874),orconstitutionaltoursdeforce,suchasAlexander Stephens’s Constitutional View of the Late War between the States (1868), their efforts were not intended to be full histories of the South or of the war itself.5 Instead, they were problem-oriented. Was secession constitutional? Was Johnston treated unfairly by Jefferson Davis? Should Davis have been clapped into irons in Fortress Monroe?6 But by the 1880s and 1890s a rich body of southern histories, as well as histories and anthologies of literature, began to emerge, both from professional scholars and the South’s indefatigable host of amateurs. It is this gen- Canonizing Southern History and Literature 89 eration that began to move toward the goal that Thomas Nelson Page articulated , that of producing full and ideologically satisfying examinations of the South’s history and letters, of accomplishing what one turn-of-the-century scholar called the “difficult and important task of providing for a general history of the South.”7 The studies of southern history and southern letters written in the 1880s and following years did not neglect the Civil War, of course, but they differed from the earlier accounts in one fundamental way. They began to fulfill the next generation’s desire for full, sustained narratives of a distinct but fundamentally American...

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