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Notes 1. The Origins of Invisibility 1. Webster attempts to write a history of twentieth-century American literary criticism by employing a methodology based on Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Part 1 ofWebster's The Republic ofLetters (3- 59) discusses the nature and formation of "charters." 2. Charles A. Beard authored, co-authored, or edited over seventy-five books, pamphlets, and texts. rThose germane to this study are History ofthe United States and The Rise of American Civilization (with Mary R. Beard), The History of the American People (with William C. Bogley), and American Leviathan: The Republic in the Machine Age (with William Beard). 3. Webster (Republic, 63-206) uses the term "tory formalist" to identify specifically the ideas of, initially, Eliot, Tate, Ransom, Brooks, Blackmur, Winters, and Warren, but I think the term can be used fairly to include many others of the Pound era. 4. According to the statement of principles, agreed to by all twelve authors, one of the purposes of the book was to ask "how far shall the South surrender its moral, social and economic autonomy to the victorious principle of union?" (I'll Take My Stand, xxxviii). 5. See Main Currents, vol. 2, book 1, part 2, chapter 3, 99-108. 6. Since this topic has been the concern of countless books, my handling it here as part of one chapter no doubt invites overgeneralization. It is important, therefore, to remember that there was a great deal of regionalism within the South, as were there many vying forces, local interests, and political enigmas. rfo some extent, nevertheless, a body of beliefs united, however loosely, these regions , forces, and interests-beliefs which often correlated less with their sundry lives than with their shared vision of themselves. Since this study does not have space for a segmented history of the South, I don't want to treat the South as a monolith so much as discuss a few specific circumstances which enabled it to ascribe-in the eyes of many of its citizens, adversaries, and historians-to some codes and nlyths which had specific consequences for blacks and, subsequently, for twentieth-century literary criticism. 152 Notes 7. Although many historians have noted this phenomenon, perhaps nothing reveals the degree of southern uniqueness in this area more clearly than comparing southern criminal statistics with northern. Violent crime was responsible for 61. 5 percent of all indictments in the Carolinas, from 1800 to 1860. Ohio County, Virginia, from 1800 to 1810, recorded ninety-one assault indictments, three murders, one robbery, and two breaking-and-enterings. In Massachusetts, however, between 1833 and 1838, burglary charges made up 30.4 percent of all indictments, while crimes of personal violence represented 17.4 percent (WyattBrown , Southern Honor, 367). 8. As I stated earlier, any discussion of the South as a whole is prone to overgeneralization. Certainly this does not hold for all southern whites. The mountaineer from East Tennessee or the Ozarks, for example, who had little money or desire to buy slaves, probably found his caste "status" as a free white much less important than did the nonslaveholder in Tidewater or the Mississippi delta. 9. Degler: "In a society that puts a premium on mobility and individual achievement it was not an insignificant gain for a white person to know that blacks, as slaves and free people, were kept in an inferior social position. Such a hierarchical arrangement brought not only economic advantages, but social and psychological status as well" (Place over Time, 82). 10. Wyatt-Brown: "Ownership of slaves and land [in the nineteenth-century South] continued to offer distinction and moral imprimatur beyond their monetary value" (Southern Honor, 73). 1 1. See The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, and The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. I am also indebted to Edward Said's comments in Beginnings: Intention and Method, chapter 5, 279-343. 12. See Lovejoy, The Great Chain ofBeing. 13. See Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South and The World the Slaveholders Made; Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery; and Time on the Cross: Evidence and Methods-A Supplement, and extensive list of further references, 247-67. For responses to Time on the Cross, see Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game...

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