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The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (review)
- Civil War History
- The Kent State University Press
- Volume 17, Number 2, June 1971
- pp. 180-183
- 10.1353/cwh.1971.0056
- Review
- Additional Information
180CIVIL WAR HISTORY for, designed, financed, constructed, and eventually spirited out to sea. The discussion of Confederate activity in Clydeside shipyards is enriched by use of the records of Alexander Stephen and Company of Glasgow. While praising the individual efforts of Bulloch, Mallory, and Maury, Merli is not uncritical of overall Confederate strategy. He argues that the policy of building rams should have commenced sooner, that faulty financial policy retarded construction for almost a year, and (in an illuminating chapter) that earlier use of government-owned blockade runners might have produced decisive results. Merli's best chapter deals with the Laird Rams, those innocuous-looking but much feared vessels building at Birkenhead. Here, as in other parts of the book, he takes care not to exaggerate the importance of his subject. In discussing the British decision to seize the ironclads, he contends that Adams's famous "superfluous" note of September 5, 1863 ("It would be superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war.") did not actually threaten war. According to Merli, "when read in its entirety, "by its four comers/ as the lawyers say, the note indicates that Adams did not intend his remarks as a threat. Had he substituted 'unneutral act' in place of 'war' the note would have attracted much less attention from historians." (p. 201) In an interesting epilogue, the author also shows—by tracing the post-1865 careers of the Confederatebuilt rams—that these vessels were neither powerful nor seaworthy enough to be as dangerous as so many northerners feared. Footnotes at the back notwithstanding, the Indiana University Press has provided the book with an attractive format, which includes contemporary cartoons, naval illustrations, and photographs of ship models. The book concludes with a superb twenty-five page bibliographical essay —the best introduction to the historiography of Civil War diplomacy that this reviewer has encountered. John Garry Clifford University of Connecticut The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking. By Paul M. Gaston. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Pp. vi, 298. $7.95.) Given the appearance in recent years of a number of comprehensive studies of the post-Reconstruction South, one might well be inclined to view Professor Gaston's volume as redundant. This would not be entirely justified. The New South Creed admittedly owes much to C. Vann Woodward and something to Wilbur J. Cash and Paul H. Buck, but it differs from most other books on the New South in dealing entirely with the "creed" and almost totally ignoring the political, economic, and social developments of the era. It is, thus, deliberately based on the public writings of Henry W. Grady, Richard H. Edmonds, Walter Hines Page, William D. Keiley, Daniel A. Tompkins, Atticus G. Haygood, and Henry Watterson, with some slight attention to those of Booker T. Washington, book reviews181 John C. Calhoun Newton, and a dozen or so lesser lights. This circumstance is at once the excuse for the volume's existence and, probably, the source of its weaknesses—for it is disconcerting to find a supposedly causative force analyzed with so little reference to effect. Professor Gaston's organization of his material is relatively simple. After a brief comment on the mythic nature of the New South creed, he traces the emergence of the term, and some aspects of the creed, in the late 1860's and early 1870's. He next turns his attention to analyzing the elements of the New South rhetoric. Seizing upon Professor Woodward 's observations about the South's "unAmerican" experience with poverty, defeat, and guilt, Gaston entitles his next three chapters "The Opulent South," "The Triumphant South," and "The Innocent South." He here deals somewhat diffusely with the New South prophets' promise of regional prosperity, the reestablishment of southern influence in national councils, and the freeing of southerners from the guilt of slavery without undermining white supremacy. AU this was to be achieved through industrialization, urbanization, agricultural diversification, nationalization , and racial harmony through segregation. There follows a chapter in which Gaston examines the methods by which the New South propagandists attempted to resolve the conflict between the glorification of the antebellum South and the advocacy of their current programs...