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This is to certify that the
thesis entitled '

DEFEATED AND COLONIZED:
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PLANTER AND
EX—CONFEDERATE CLASS IN THE POSTWAR SOUTH

presented by

--—-‘--‘--.--.-.-.-.-.-.--‘—---—‘ — -‘ ‘ -‘ ‘

TODD WILLIAM WAHLSTROM

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

MA. degree in AMERICAN STUDIES

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‘3 I

Date

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6/01 cJClRCIDateDuopes-p. 15

DEFEATED AND COLONIZED:
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PLANTER AND
EX-CONFEDERATE CLASS IN THE POSTWAR SOUTH

BV’

'

Todd William Wahlstrom

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS

Department of American Studies

2003

ABSTRACT
DEFEATED AND COLONIZED:
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PLANTER AND
EX-CONFEDERATE CLASS IN THE POSTWAR SOUTH
By
Todd William Wahlstrom
The following Master’ 5 thesis is a study of the psychological reactions and
conditions of the planter and Cit-Confederate class after the Civil War. It investigates
how this group confronted defeat and a colonial economy during the Reconstruction and
New South periods. In particular, this study analyzes the psychology of withdrawal,
avoidance, and repetition compulsion behavior and it addresses the ways in which the
Lost Cause and New South movements interacted with this group and these conditions.

Overall, this study concerns the social and economic changes in the South during the

postwar era and draws conclusions about class restructuring and regional identity.

DEDICATION

To Meghan,
I am grateful for your presence in my life.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my great appreciation to my advisor Professor Robert
Bonner for all of his help with my Master’ 3 Thesis, my advancement as a scholar, and for
his advice in regard to doctoral programs in history. I would also like to thank the
Director of American Studies Professor Steven Rachman for providing the opportunity to
continue my education and develop my academic interests. In addition, Professors Mark
Kombluh and Victor Jew have been very helpful in terms of my intellectual development.

Above all, I would like to thank my Mom, Erik, Dad, Grammy, Meghan and

Roosevelt for their ongoing love and support.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1
SECTION ONE ....................................................................................... 5
Planter Anxiety and the Dimensions of Defeat .............................................. 5
Trauma, Avoidance, and Withdrawal ........................................................ 17
Bit-Confederate Commanders, Avoidance, and the Lost Cause .......................... 35
Culture of Defeat ............................................................................... 54
SECTION TWO .................................................................................... 60
The Colonial Region ........................................................................... 62
The Curse of King Cotton and the New South Movement ............................... 75
Daniel A. Tompkins, the Psychology of Colonization, and the Lost Cause ............ 85
The New South Movement and Anxiety .................................................... 97
SECTION THREE ................................................................................ 108
Home Rule ..................................................................................... 108
Defeat, Colonization, and Regional Identity .............................................. 113
NOTES: SECTION ONE ........................................................................ 125
NOTES: SECTION TWO ........................................................................ 132
NOTES: SECTION THREE ..................................................................... 137
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................. 139

INTRODUCTION
Sun. 18, 1871,.Iune

An intensely hot day. Between four and five o’clock from the city was visited by
a heavy thunder and rain storm. Presbyterian steeple was struck by lightning.

A sheet of electricity ascended from the earth enveloping the tall spire in a

circle of fire, and as it reached the hall, it was met by a streak of lightning

from the thunder clouds overhead descending in the shape of a spiral cord.

Two currents met and burst, scattering a thousand jets of molten metal,

which fell in great flakes upon the roof of the church.

Rain was pouring down in torrents.1 I

Rain poured down over the postwar South from many sources, not the least of

which was a social and cultural front that struck the region well before and long after this

 

1871 thunder and lightning storm in Savannah, Georgia. Particularly since it converged
over a house of God, this storm provides a useful analogy about the South and the ways
in which certain Southerners dealt with defeat in the aftermath of the Civil War. At a
time when masters became partially enslaved and the enslaved partially free, many of the
former erected a mental blockade to ward off the lire of defeat. The initial years after
Appomattox stamped many planter and ex-Confederate minds with despair and ruination
as it did the broken plantations upon which they lived. A strong reminder of yesterday’s
f aIlen fortress spread over mind and matter alike.

To most, defeat meant an inner psychological loss as well as an outer lost nation.
As a pervasive doom accompanied the shattered Confederacy, returning soldiers and war-
torn citizens reacted in ways that announced an imbalanced mentality. With 258,000
dead, a 43% decline in wealth in four years, two billion dollars lost in slave property, and
exponential destruction of land, an indelible trauma shook a populace that was already
long used to grief. Indeed, “the psychological trauma of the South’s defeat was

enormous.”2 In the immediate years after 1865, planters and Cit-Confederate commanders

(many one and the same) in particular displayed what can be described as psychological
conditions of defeat. As a group and class, they were the current that had risen to control
the South, but were now sent tumbling to the ground.

Both planters and Confederate commanders who had resided in the upper class in
antebellum times, upon return from the war, demonstrated notable reactions to their
altered world. As the following study reveals, this group tended to respond with denial
and avoidance behavior to their current predicament with some resorting to physical and I

mental withdrawal. Collectively, these psychological responses distinctively marked this

 

group with a mentality of defeat, and their thoughts and actions significantly influenced
the development of a larger Southern culture of defeat. As this class represented an
affected group of Southerners, they formed and advanced a collective means of avoiding
and coping with defeat — the Lost Cause movement. Not only did the individuals
discussed below significantly contribute to the Lost Cause as a memorial and
organizational movement that operated to preserve and honor Southern regional identity.
but they also largely directed it toward lessening the trauma of the postwar era.

As planters and former Confederate commanders lead collective community
efforts to commemorate the dead and the past, they created a mythic belief system to
form a protective layering around the source of their loss and anxiety. As this mythic
ideology strived to shoulder the burden of the present, they also employed it to cast aside
invasions to the top of the class pyramid. In particular, those planters and ex-
Confederates who attempted to avoid and/or withdraw from the present also constructed
barriers in an attempt to salvage what remained of their dissolving social and cultural

position. In addition, their avoidance of the present entailed a forgetting of slavery, race

I»)

relations, and causes of the war. Their behavior and Lost Cause ideology was meant to
barricade them and their class into an estranged, but secure mental region, safe from the
onslaughts of class restructuring and social change.

While this study examines some of the major psychological responses and
conditions of planters and former Confederates during the era of Reconstruction, it is also
concerned with examining the different aspects of defeat that are associated with them.
Likewise, while this study addresses the South overall from 1865 to the early 18808, it
concentrates on the states of Mississippi and South Carolina and the early 18708. In the
first section, the multiple dimensions of defeat are examined in relation to individual and
collective planter and err-Confederate psychology and behavior. In particular, this study
analyzes the threats to plantation society that began with defeat and the continuing impact
of trauma in connection with the Reconstruction period. It also evaluates the significance
of the Lost Cause movement in relation to these mental developments and the formation
of a culture of defeat.

In section two, the study proceeds to probe into the changes that occurred in
regard to planter and ex-Confcderate mentality from the 1870s to the 1880s (the
transition from the Reconstruction to New South periods). In regard to these changes, the
study considers the interaction and role of the New South movement. As this study is
also concerned with class restructuring, race relations, and Reconstruction and New
South economic, social and political issues, these areas are integrated into the discussion
throughout. Ultimately, in the third section, this study works toward a speculative
conclusion about implications of defeat and economic-social colonization upon regional

identity. This section is based upon the previous analysis of how the planter and ex-

Confederate class experienced a transformation from being characterized as a culture of
defeat to a colonized culture. As the following pages will reveal, the longevity of
economic prostration eventually surpassed the other dimensions of defeat to become the
most pressing concern. Thus, the fundamental cultural and societal challenge for this
group was the transition from a culture of defeat, where a colonial economy was one of
the contributing factors, to a colonized culture, where economic dependency became the
primary factor involved in understanding the mental and behavioral characteristics of the
planter and ex-Confederate class. In essence, this is a study of overlapping psychological
developments and the individual to collective responses to them during a moment of

transition.

SECTION ONE
3 t xiet an ' e '0 fe

The soul—eroding war had ended, but apprehension and anxiety continued
unabated, and planters still stared northward.3

As the Civil War has been described as “precisely the moment of transition from
the Old to the New South,” it has also been recognized as the “chasm dividing one South
from another.” Accordingly, this fissure has been an important subject of investigation,
particularly in regard to its effect “upon the fundamental beliefs and everyday behavior of
the Southern planter class.” James L. Roark examined the beliefs and behavior of this
class by analyzing over I60 families from it. Out of the roughly f orty-thrce thousand
Southerners who made up the master class just prior to the war, almost all were white and
90% were male. Since “their words and actions do illuminate their interior worlds,” this
analysis provides a gateway to studying the postwar psychology of planters.4

While Roark’s study determined that very few planters “consciously adopted the
role of defender of their region and class,” at least overtly in their letters and diaries, they
did express such defensive ideas through their social position. To establish the
connection between individual and collective planter psychology, it is important to
recognize that the growth and maturation of the slave system had established planters as
“a powerful and distinctive social class.” As such, they had also developed a self -
consciousness concerning their position in society and about being slaveholders. In
essence, they were “bound to each other and to slavery by their class position, racial
fears, and conservative social philosophy.”S This bond and mutuality through slavery and
class position also connected them after the war when their social and economic situation

became unstable.

Before the outbreak of the Civil War, the Mississippi planter—politician James
Lusk Alcom had foreshadowed what his class would face both physically and mentally
when he wrote: “when the northern soldier would tread her cotton fields, when the slave
should be made flee and the proud Southerner stricken to the dust in his presence.” His
comments foretold that the planter would have to confront the disruptive change of defeat
and emancipation. If the 1850-18605 had been an “age of anxiety,” where “men of
property and standing were disturbed by the disorder and instability of American

society,” the 1870s and 18803 would prove to be even more anxiety-filled for the planter

 

class. Likewise, “while anxiety was a national, not a sectional, malady” during the war I
and after it, “the anxiety of conservatives in the North was faint compared to that of the
traditionalist conservatives in the South.” As Southern conservatives, planters would
claim a unique form of anxiety during the Reconstruction era especially because: “No
one else was quite in their position. No other group had to defend a society constructed
upon the institution of slavery.” While anxiety during social change is not unusual,
“planter anxiety” was singular because it was based in a “social upheaval” that had
destroyed the central labor system upon which they depended for their wealth and class
position.6

After the war, when planter fears about labor, race, and class destabilization were
realized, they experienced a unique calamity. As a group, they came to think, “looking
backward offered the only hope of real progress.” Before Appomattox, most planters
conceptualized themselves and the South as distinct and exceptional. After it, they feared
for this regional identity that seemed to be sliding into the past. For most within the

planter class, the Civil War had been “the War for Southern Security.” Now that security

had vanished, they looked longingly back to the days before it to try to revitalize their
social position and way of life.7

At the heart of their besieged tradition was the plantation. This problem was
twofold in nature. In addition to attempting to control the former labor force of the
plantation, planters were faced with the loss and diminution of their land due to taxes and
the war. Planters had hoped to resolve their “labor problem” with the Black Codes. The
central tenet of these state laws was the stabilization of the black labor force by limiting E
other economic alternatives like autonomous farm ownership and keeping ex-slaves tied

to the plantation. States like Mississippi and South Carolina, in particular, “enacted the i

 

first and most severe Black Codes toward the end of 1865.” However, Mississippi
overturned the most restrictive measures while South Carolina suspended its entire code.
By the end of 1866, almost all Southern states had repealed the laws that applied only to
blacks. This course of action was a precedent to the changes that lay ahead during
Congressional or Radical Reconstruction. After the Reconstruction Act of 1867, the
Black Codes were completely dismantled. With Republicans securing an even greater
hold on politics from 1868 to 1870, it became increasingly clear that, “For the first time
in Southern history, planters found themselves unable to use public authority to bolster
their control of the black labor force.” In addition to this lack of control over labor,
planter inability to pay state taxes during Reconstruction caused “immense tracts” of it to
be forfeited. In Mississippi, for example, over six million acres or one—f if th of the area of
the state was lost in this manner.8

These dilemmas existed on top of the basic issue of plantation destruction. After

the war, planters had to confront the desecration of the previous four years. In

Mississippi, plantations were in ruins, “lying idle and deserted, the wild grasses taking
the place of rich former days, the houses tenantless, or if occupied, by some colored
family, living in a room or two, and all seemingly going rapidly into decay.” This
historical description matched what the chief fiction writer of the state described about
the plantation during Reconstruction. William Faulkner wrote in Light in August. “the
plantation is broken now by random Negro cabins and garden patches and dead fields
erosiongutted and choked with blackjack and sassafras and persimmon and brier.” In
addition to describing the physical disruption of the plantation, Faulkner also wrote about
the planter Thomas Sutpen returning from the war in 1866 in Absalom, Absalom! to find:
“his plantation ruined, fields fallow except for a fine stand of weeds, and taxes and levies
and penalties sowed by United States marshals and such and all his triggers gone where
the Yankees had attended to that.” Thus, the fictional Sutpen encountered the same
combined issues that real planters had confronted after the war.9

Even before the war was over it was evident that the planters had a considerable
struggle ahead of them. In 1864, for example, a Northern man had come down to take
over an abandoned plantation in Mississippi, but was “brought to his knees in a matter of
months.” As the production of staple crops was disrupted by the war, planter income
declined severely and plantations collapsed. James Heyward of South Carolina testified
to these developments by only “planting barely a tenth of his property” in 1864. By
1865, another planter from South Carolina, James Gregorie, “had trouble putting together
two small bales” of cotton. Accounts like these foreshadowed a trend toward planter
fears of displacement in the postwar era. As “shortages in food and clothing, of credit

and money, became common on most plantations,” the planter class lost the foundation

for its collective identity and were plagued with anxiety over it and the possibility of
intruders taking over their social position.lo

The most conspicuous intruder was the conqueror. After the war while planters
began to struggle with rebuilding, planters expressed their hatred of Yankees with new
intensity. As Northemers had long been associated with industry and commerce, they
now were scorned for being “vile money worshippers” and a “puritanical, deceitful race.”
This contempt was directed particulariy at the carpetbagger, “a member of the ‘Iowest

class’ of the Northern population.”" To planters, carpetbaggers were the lowest of the

 

low, and they despised what they considered to be exploitative pursuits of personal
advancement. This type of intrusion along with loss of land and control over labor began
to produce a compounded effect associated with def eat.

Lower class white Southerners were another potential intruder into the social
position of planters. “Of the many changes in the social landscape of the South, few were
more distressing to planters than the fragmentation of white solidarity.” As planters had
seen their region “divided along two axes — that of political loyalty and that of class
affiliation,” new cracks in that paradigm emerged and caused anxiety about class conflict.
Planters feared “the entire social order was about to become unhinged.” Pro-union
Southerners before and during the war had previously put the idea of white solidarity on
shaking ground. With the “cry that it was rich man’s war but a poor man’s fr ght,”
planters saw new threats rising from below. Slavery had also been an incentive for white
solidarity, as it had offered the insidious possibility of advancement to the ruling class.
Once that possibility disappeared, so did many other illusions about harmonious class

relations. Confronting planters then was a class-based anxiety where they “feared not

only that the lower class would rise up but that their own class would slip down.” As
they were “continually scanning the horizons for signs of class eruption, planters revealed
their own deep anxieties. ”‘2
Catherine Edmondston, a planter’s wife in North Carolina, had commented on
this particular source of anxiety: “You know the lower classes of the counties of that part
of Carolina have always been very degraded. They could always be bought, so they have
sold themselves to the Yankies. . . ” Not only did planter households think that the lower
classes were turning on them, they also thought that these Southern whites were aligning
themselves with the primary intruder. This made sense to the planter class since the

9”

North was a “‘lower-class nation, they were “natural allies for poor white
Southerners.”l3 Both Northemers and poor whites were seen as marauders who wished to
dismantle the planter class. Joining them to provoke further anxiety were the planter’s
former slaves.

The perception of the f recdmen as potential invaders had developed alongside the
myth of the faithful slave. As the latter image developed with postwar romanticism,
especially through literature, many planters “registered shock, hurt, disillusionment, and
rage” in reaction to “insubordinate blacks.” These emotions marked “the eariy stages of
a trend that would lead to disdain and hostility toward blacks during Reconstruction.” As
this trend developed, “instead of being sympathetic, disappointed, or angry, some
planters were simply terrified.”” Hence, blacks would eventually be viewed in terms of a
manufactured image from the past, as insubordinate workers, or as intruders to be feared.

Kate Stone, a planter’s wife from Louisiana, expressed the early manifestations of

the combined fears of plantation disruption, Yankee, lower class white, and freedan

IO

intrusion. On May 15, 1865 she wrote about defeat in her journal, “Conquered,
Submission, Subjugation.” Wondering about herself and her class she thought they
would be “slaves, yes slaves, of the Yankee Government.” Stone’s words reflected upon
a confluence of fears based upon military defeat, Yankee barbarity and her present
economic collapse. “In Kate Stone’s struggles to cope with the personal and collective
elements of defeat, we can see the beginnings of white Southern Civil War memory.”
Providing the thoughts of a planter family, we can also begin to see the effect of defeat
upon the mentality of the planter class‘s

Catherine Edmondston had also given testimony to the embittered feelings that
stemmed from defeat and the effect it was having upon her class. As she shared the
belief in the superiority of Southern society and culture, she also began to illustrate the
“path of disillusionment and estrangement” that many members of her class followed. As
she stated about secession and war. “Men & women looked the alternative stern in the
face and preferred death, extermination, anything to being conquered, subjugated, our
God given blessing of self improvement inf ringed or even tampered with...”16
Edmondston’s thoughts upon subjugation can certainly be attributed to the
socioeconomic changes that occurred after defeat. Moreover, her words also begin to
demonstrate another more intangible infliction behind the disillusionment that she and
others felt. Edmondston, the class she represented, and most Confederates had believed
that God had blessed them long ago with a destiny that included victory in a war against

the unblessed. When that victory did not come and subjugation did, a pronounced feeling

of being estranged from God developed.

ll

In “A Rebel’s Recollections,” George Cary Eggleston voiced the loss of or
estrangement from God that the South would experience in the immediate postwar years.
A serialized memoir that ran in Atlantic Monthly in 1865, “Recollections” foretold “the
spiritual and emotional sense of calamity shared by an entire defeated generation.” As
Eggleston stated, “We were convinced, beyond the possibility of doubt, of the absolute
righteousness of our cause.” In fact, he said it was “our religion to believe in the triumph
of our cause.” Hence, when this religion failed to deliver military victory, most
southemers felt that a terrible spiritual catastrophe had stricken the land. This calamity
produced by defeat caused the “Reconstruction generation” to experience a collective
“estrangement from their Creator. ”'7

In addition to “the abject poverty, the disruption of the old social order and racial
order,” estrangement from God was another dimension of defeat. Moreover,
estrangement developed from the psychological trauma of the war and would provide
substantial inspiration for the Lost Cause movement. In the midst of social upheaval and
disorder, “there was something far more difficult to reconcile.” Besides plantation
destruction and liberation of the slaves, the psychological disturbances of the immediate
postwar era for planters, ex-Confederates and the South in general also sprang from “the
awful prospect that God had turned His back upon the Confederacy.” For a deeply
religious region, this prospect severely accentuated the meaning of def eat.‘8

At least from the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the “Great Revival” of
1801, a deeper faith in organized religion had been instilled in the South. While this

religious revivalism rested largely on the Calvinist view of seeing man as “a doomed

sinner,” man was also “the prime agent of his own salvation,” and thus personal morality

was emphasized in the antebellum South. Likewise, “the southern concept of the Trinity
was not the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but God, man, and Satan.” Hence, as man was
“a battleground between good and evil,” he was responsible for his destiny. Accepting
God into the individual’s life was the path to salvation and the church served as the
means to finding it.‘9

Personal salvation through organized religion had a sense of hollowness then
when the holy crusade was vanquished. As beliefs about an intimate relationship with
God and divine intervention became destabilized, Southerners were left searching for
answers in a stonn of abandonment. Salvation seemed to be washed away, and a

9, u

“pervasive sense of alienation, an estrangement from God,” became a central aspect of
life. “Southerners were accustomed to finding the hand of God in all things, and some
wondered if the disastrous war was not divine retribution for the sin of slavery.” Others
that did not consider slavery a sin wondered if the South was being punished for not
practicing it according to the law of God.m

With these doubts an estranged relationship with God enveloped the region and
the South reached for and formed a branch of civil religion to strengthen their faith — the
Lost Cause. According to Charles Reagan Wilson, it was the influence of an
interdenominational alliance, particularly between the Baptists and Methodists, which
formed the heart of the Lost Cause movement. Seeking to support the defeated
Confederate nation, this cultural movement was composed of myth, history, and religion.
Since this “Southern public faith involved a nation —- a dead one,” it focused on providing

“confused and suffering Southerners a sense of meaning.” The Lost Cause “emerged

because the experience of defeat in the Civil War had created a spiritual and

psychological need for Southerners to reaffirm their identity.”21 Viewed in terms of a
civil religion, a blending of a religion and culture, this movement was meant to revive
regional, communal, and individual identity based upon a relationship with God.

Ministers like Father Abram Ryan performed this task by directly connecting the
Lost Cause with the church. From the war’s end until his own in 1886, the “Poet Priest
of the Lost Cause” edited the newspaper the Banner of the South while delivering
orations on how defeat would lead to a deeper faith. “The Conquered Banner,” his most
famous poem, sanctified both the Confederate flags and the nation for which they stood
with religious piety. Ryan and other ministers reinforced the association between the
Confederacy and faith and helped to solidify a strong relationship between the Lost
Cause and religion in the postwar era Increased evangelism and the f orrnation of the
Lost Cause were responses to an estrangement from God that had spread over the South.
As both sought a reassertion of “moral superiority,” interconnections between religion
and the Cause developed to jointly address this aspect of defeat. 22

Along with estrangement, however, a loss of honor played a major role in the
formation of the Lost Cause. As regional honor seemed to be conquered with the
outcome of the war, the South struggled to recover it. For white Southerners in general
and the planter/ex-Confederate class in particular, honor had supported “the other two
pillars of their society: white supremacy and Christian faith.” Thus, the Lost Cause was
not only directed at resurrecting faith and identity, but at supporting this trinity of beliefs.
Honor had to be restored in order for the foundations of Southern society to survive. To
many, “God had clearIy withdrawn divine favor and at the same time, the vulgar, godless

Yankees had tossed Confederate aspirations in the dust.” The combined effect of the loss

14

of God and honor left Southerners grappling with the ramifications of defeat. As Thomas
Sutpen’s son Henry had said in Absalom, Absalom!, “it wont be much longer now and
then we wont have anything left: honor nor pride nor God since God quit us four years
ago only He never thought it necessary to tell us.” Fundamentally, the Lost Cause was
created to restore regional identity, religious faith, and honor while providing a coping
mechanism for these (and other) dimensions of defeat. 23

For planters, an additional dimension was related to their peculiar form of anxiety.
Collectively, planters experienced anxiety about “unpredictable poor whites,”
“untrustworthy blacks,” despicable Yankees, and “about where to find food and how to
fend off destruction.” These dimensions of defeat became “the companion of every
planter.” Combined with a perceived estrangement from God and loss of honor, planters.
and ex—Confederates, developed a pronounced f orm of anxiety from their experiences in
the immediate postwar period. Yet, the roots of this anxiety derived from the experiences
of wartime trauma. Since “few families escaped the trauma of death,” grief, and anxiety
associated with the war, it provided the foundation for continued postwar anxiety. In
1864, for example, one planter described his inner condition as, “Day by day and hour by
hour does the deep seated enmity l have always had...for the accurscd Yankee nation
increase & burn higher. ”24 The trauma of death mixed with hatred for the enemy, and this
mixture would provide the psychological framework of many planters and ex-
Confederates in the Reconstruction era.

Ella Canton Thomas, a planter’s wife in Georgia, said in 1864, “I feel as if I did
not have energy to raise my head.” In 1865, she claimed, “My mind is sluggish and my

9925

will is weak and undecided. I lack energy...spiritually, intellectually, & physically.

 

This weakened state of mind offers an indication of what lied ahead for the planter/ex-
Confederate class into the next two decades. As plantation difficulties intensified the
psychological hardships of defeat, as a group planters and former Confederates would
feel the ramifications of war and postwar anxiety. That is, they would experience the
lasting mark of trauma that lay behind their anxiety. While class, racial, and Northern
intrusion, alongside estrangement and loss of honor, most notably provoked planter and
ex-Confederate anxiety, trauma lay behind all these factors as the major source of mental
affliction. The trauma of death, war, and the postwar environment more accurately
provides a description of the individual to collective psychology of this class. To
understand why, an analysis of trauma in relation to this group will be necessary. While
the above factors help explain the mentality, or the inner and emotional state of mind, of
the planter/ex-Confederate class in the postwar period, an analysis of trauma in relation to
them will more thoroughly reveal their collective psychology or their mental and

behavioral characteristics.

Trauma, Avoidance and Withdrawal

Although “there is no firm definition for trauma, which has been given various
descriptions at various times and under different names,” a general definition describes
trauma as “an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the
response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of
hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.” Most commonly, trauma of this kind is
associated with the soldier’s experience with death and the reliving of these wartime
events. In this case, mentality is “understood in terms of the effects of post-traumatic
stress disorder.” Post-traumatic stress disorder is the name that the American Psychiatric
Association in 1980 attributed to “what had previously been called shell shock, combat
neurosis, or traumatic neurosis, among other names used at various times in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” This definition is in accordance with what Sigmund
Freud had described in his works on trauma, including what he termed “positive
symptoms,” flashbacks and hallucinations, and “negative symptoms,” numbing, amnesia,
and avoidance of “triggering stimuli.” It is this definition and description that provides
the basis for understanding trauma in relation to planter and ex-Confederate postwar
psychology, especially in regard to avoiding traumatic events and their triggering
associations.26

In addition, the planter/ex-Confederate class also experienced trauma in terms of

9, 6‘

“any experience that causes psychic pain or anxiety” to a degree which “overwhelms

the usual defensive measures which Freud described as a ‘protcctive shield against

9”

stimuli. By experiencing the trauma of the postwar era along with wartime trauma,

many of this group’s mental defenses were overwhelmed, causing a psychological

l7

 

reaction. In medical and psychiatric usage, and particularly in Sigmund Freud’s Beyond
the Pleasure Principle (1920), “the term trauma is understood as a wound inflicted not
upon the body but upon the mind.” Moreover, this “wound of the mind” is not “a simple
and healable event,” it is a complicated mental affliction that involves a “breach in the
mind’s experience of time, self, and the world?” For planters and former Confederates.
many experienced trauma in these deep and long-lasting terms. Reference then to a
specific theory and analysis of trauma will be very useful to further discussion of it in
relation to them.

In 1959, Thomas G. Stampfl had developed a psychological theory concerning
trauma based upon the “insistence that the neurotic’s symptoms, defense mechanisms,
and general maladaptive behavior” resulted from the “anticipation or expectation of some
catastrophe.” Stampfl then expanded upon this premise and “concluded that what was
feared involved the anticipation of abandonment, injury, annihilation, condemnation and
disapproval, humiliation, enslavement,” and “utter deprivation.” In prescribing treatment
for trauma that involved these fears of abandonment, annihilation and the like, Stampfl
borrowed from physics and called it “implosion” therapy, derived from “the inwardly
bursting (dynamic) energy process inherent in the release of affectively loaded memorial
cues encoded in the brain.” Hence, he postulated that anticipated emotional fears were
stored in memory and treatment resided in releasing them from mental storage. This
conceptualization of fear being stored in memory allows access to a fuller understanding
of the mental framework of many postwar planters and ex-Confederates.28

Contemporary psychologists like Donald J. Levis have applied Stampfl’s theory

to elicit the memories of a traumatic event in order to treat the “anxiety-arousing

18

associations.” In his use of this theory and technique, Levis was trying to confront
similar symptoms of planters and ex—Confederates. In particular, planters and former
Confederate commanders (as previously discussed and in the cases below) demonstrated
that a strong fear and anxiety had developed from the anticipation of abandonment or
estrangement from God, the annihilation of plantation life, and economic deprivation.
Moreover, they also experienced the compounding effects of trauma through the storage
of traumatic memory. The combination of post-traumatic stress disorder with postwar
anxiety implanted and propagated traumatic emotions stored and elicited in memory.

Instead of addressing their conditions through implosion therapy, however, Southerners

 

adopted “defense mechanisms” in response to these memorial—based traumas. In
particular, they responded with avoidance behavior.

Based in Freud’s conclusion from 1936 that humans attempt “to escape the
anxiety elicited by stimuli (“danger signals”) associated with previous traumatic
experiences,” avoidance behavior can be understood as “an attempt to ward of f the
occurrence of a catastrophic event.” As trauma associated with the Civil War and its
denouement was the original catastrophe, planters and former Confederate commanders
attempted to avoid it and the related traumas associated with defeat. In the cases
discussed below, they exemplified the “symptoms and maladaptive behaviors” of
avoidance through mental and corporeal withdrawal. Their withdrawal also
demonstrated the “two-f actor theory of avoidance” that Stampfl provided in his theory of
implosion treatment. 29

The “first factor of this two—process theory states that fear (emotional) learning is

governed by the laws of classical conditioning.” This conditioned fear possesses

19

“motivational or energizing properties” that “set the stage for the learning of the second
class of responses, referred to as avoidance behavior.” That is, instrumental (active)
learning governs avoidance behavior because it results in the reduction of the fear or
anxiety. In turn, this reduction “serves as the reinforcing mechanism for the learning of
avoidance behavior.”30 For the planter/ex-Confederate class, this meant that if mental or
physical avoidance of trauma resulted in the reduction of fear and anxiety, the behavior
was repeated. In addition, the repetition of thought and behavior is connected with the
next major condition discussed in this study — repetition compulsion. Particularly in
connection with the Lost Cause movement, planters and ex-Confederates would repeat
themselves in word and action in an attempt to avoid or remedy the sources of trauma.
Before the formation of the Lost Cause took hold over the region, however, the
initial avoidance response for ex-Confederates and planters was withdrawal. In the cases
discussed below, “overt symptomatic behaviors” associated with avoidance were

99“

displayed through “flight responses, phobic behavior,” and “passive avoidance
behavior” related to trauma This first section turns to specifically address withdrawal
and avoidance behavior and then proceeds to discuss repetition compulsion in relation to
the Lost Cause movement. While both conditions are connected with trauma and
anxiety, the key distinction between them is that while avoidance behavior is the willful
attempt to avoid “unpleasurable conflict,” repetition compulsion “can only be understood
as the absolute inability of the mind to avoid an unpleasurable event.” All of the
conditions discussed, however, entail “a network of cues” that motivates “a given

symptom.” These cues are “stored in memory” and are triggered from responses to that

memory. Hence, memories of wartime trauma are implicated in Reconstruction and New

 

South psychological conditions. Whether in reference to early postwar reactions or to
those in later years, “these memorial encoded cues are activated by a stimulus situation in
the patient’s current life that is similar on a generalization dimension to those cues
associated with previous traumatic conditioning events.” Thus, current and past trauma
stimuli are implicated in psychological responses. Moreover, traumatic memory cues
serve as the bridge between the psychological conditions of defeat and colonization.31

As this study argues in the second section, anxiety and fear became primarily
associated with colonial economic and social circumstances by the mid-18708. Once this
occurred, fear and anxiety were principally enacted through contemporary triggering
stimuli. Yet, these fears and anxieties were also elicited by memories of trauma
associated with the war and postwar dimensions of defeat. Likewise, the trauma
associated with the immediate postwar years called upon memories from the war. The
result in both situations was a compounded anxiety and fear. In essence, the colonized
stimulus summoned previous trauma cues while it produced fears concerning dependency
and prostration: the dimensions of defeat also elicited wartime memories while producing
its own anxieties. It is a process then that was directed by current circumstances and “a

complex set of cues that are encoded in long—term memory.”32

The Virginia planter Edmund Ruffin chose the ultimate form of avoidance
behavior over attempting to deal with the compounded effects of trauma. As an “ultimate
irreconcilable,” Ruffln’s “world was in shambles, and his beloved Southern nation was
lifeless.” Thus, he opted for the most extreme form of withdrawal. In the note he left
behind his suicide he said, “I here repeat and would willingly proclaim my unmitigated

hatred to Yankee rule.” Responding in this way indicated that he was not able to deal

21

 

with his changed world after defeat. “Unable to free the South, he chose to free himself. ”
While Ruffin exemplified the final form of avoidance behavior, other planters displayed
it through less severe means.33

Since “the psyche’s normal reaction to a traumatic experience is to withdraw from
the scene of injury,” many planters and ex-Confederates chose a course of action that
allowed them to escape the place of injury without taking their lives. As they battled
with the implications of defeat, “more than 10,000 Southerners went into exile after
1865.” The planters and former Confederates who mostly represented these exiles
elected to avoid the ramifications of defeat by leaving the region. By doing so, they
exemplified the “tendency to deal with threat by ignoring or denying the problem.”

99“

Moreover, “for every planter who actually packed his bags and left, there were several
others who longed to join him.” One Mobile, Alabama newspaper reported that many
who had returned from the war had become so withdrawn from society that they “lived
like hermits in a desert.” Hence, many who stayed in the South would try to avoid reality
through mental instead of bodily means. In both scenarios, many among the planter/ex-
Confederate class took refuge from an environment of continuing trauma through denial,
avoidance and withdrawal .34

As many “prominent citizens had deserted the South after Appomattox,” the list
of migrants included former generals, colonels, govemors, and judges. In regard to ex-
commander planters, they looked for areas that might enable them to revive their former
lifestyles based upon slavery, or something close to it. “Thousands had fled across the

Rio Grande to Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela” with this purpose in mind. Others had

gone to Europe, particularly England and France since they harbored “enduring pro-

’9’)

-.

Confederate sympathies.” But, Mexico and Brazil were the top two destinations because
of the amount of open land and the availability of slave or cheap labor, which provided
emigrating Southerners with the hope of restoring their former plantation society. At the
same time, these migrants were motivated by a fear of the implications of defeat. “That
so many planters actually left — ripping families from their homes and neighborhoods,
selling or giving away whatever had been saved from the war, risking a dangerous,
expensive journey, often to an unknown alien land — was dramatic evidence of the terror
of their visions of the postwar South.” This terror sprang from the trauma of the war and

was perpetuated by postwar conditions that continued to elicit severe fear and anxiety in

 

planter/ex-Confederates. To them, withdrawal became the only means available to cope
with their changed world. This response reflected upon a shared “mental picture of a
devastated, degraded, and uninhabitablc South.” As a woman from Virginia stated, she
was “nearly crazy to go to Europe,” and John Perkins purposely burned his Louisiana
plantation to the ground before going to Mexico.35

An estimated eight to ten thousand Southerners immigrated to Latin America and
most fled to Mexico. One of the most prominent was the ex-commander General Jo
Shelby, who crossed over the Rio Grande with several hundred former soldiers from his
Iron Cavalry Brigade. Shelby had been known as the “Jeb Stuart of the West” and “had
been one of the wealthiest slave and landowners in Lafayette County, Missouri.” Hence,
Mexico contained the possibility of resunectin g his wealth and estate if not his rank and
position. More pressing for him though was the prospect of defeat and what it would
entail for high-ranking ex-Confederates and members of the upper class. One of his

companions, the former regimental commander Brigadier General Alexander Watkins

Terrell expressed the emigrating group’s thoughts: “We all felt that an era of oppression
was before the people...and we sought a foreign country with feelings reckless of
consequences.” For Shelby, Terrell and the other ex-Confederates, Mexico provided the
only means for avoiding the trauma that trailed behind them.”

Like Mexico, Brazil contained the potential of avoiding this trauma and the
possibility of reawakening antebellum dreams. Brazil did not end slavery until 1888,
which contributed to soliciting between two to four thousand Southerners in the
immediate postwar years. “The romantic dream of Brazilian Dixielands — where ex-
Confederates could plant cotton, hold slaves, and treasure the memories of their Lost
Cause far removed from the Damnyankees” shaped their mental perceptions of
withdrawal. Brazil contained the possibility of reestablishing the worid of the Old South
and it actually materialized for a brief time in Sao Paulo and Santa Barbara. As at least
154 families, including six from South Carolina, went to Brazil between 1865 and 1875,
they testified to the hope of reestablishing the plantation order in places where slavery
still existed. Accordingly, the planter and ex-Confederate Ambrosio Jose Gonzales and
his family withdrew to another country where slavery-based plantation life still survived
- Cuba.”

Gonzales was a Cuban revolutionary exiled in the United States when he married
Harriett Rutledge Elliott in 1856. Two of their six children, Ambrosio Jose Jr. (1857-
1926) and Narciso Gener (1858—1903), supply a lens into the experiences of this once
again exiled family after the war. Before it, the Gonzaleses'had lived primarily in
Washington, DC, but they also spent a large amount of time in Beaufort and Adams

Run, South Carolina, where the Elliott family had been prominent cotton and rice

 

planters for over forty years and owned numerous plantations in the Beaufort and
Colleton districts. While Gonzales served in the Confederate army, his family stayed at
the Oak Lawn plantation near Adams Run. After the war in 1866, he bought the Social
Hall plantation in the Colleton district from the Elliotts, but in January 1869 decided to
move his family to Cuba. At this time, the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico still
contained more than 300,000 slaves. From 1851 to 1870, Cuba had imported over
150,000 slaves, and this labor system was still very important to colony and empire alike.
Since Spain had been the last European empire to abolish the slave trade in 1867, and
would not end slavery in Cuba until 1886, the island appeared to be a viable option for
reestablishing slave plantation life. Ex-Confederates and planters like Gonzales
recognized Cuba as place for restoring his family and avoiding war and postwar trauma.38
After Harriet Elliott Gonzales died of yellow fever in October of 1869, however,
Gonzales brought four of his six children back to the Oak Lawn plantation in South
Carolina. He left his sons Narciso and Alfonso in Matanzas, Cuba for another year
before also bringing them back. The correspondence between Narciso, or “an0,” and
his older brother Ambrosio, or Ambrose and “Brosie,” as well as other family members
during this time and after Nanno’s return at the end of 1870 allows access to the postwar
conditions and this families’ response to them. Whereas return to the South signaled the
end to an attempted but failed withdrawal response in reaction to war and defeat, the
continuing legacy of trauma continued. The actions of Ambrosio Jose Gonzales, Sr.
exemplify avoidance and withdrawal behavior, while his sons’ letters provide further
insight into the psychology behind this behavior and the social-economic factors within

planter and ex-Confederate lives.

 

The sibling letters reflect how the Gonzaleses “struggled to regain title to their
land and to make a living from their plantations” in the immediate postbellum years.
Their plantation and economic struggles correspond with the dimensions of defeat
previously discussed, namely the planter problems of retaining their land against
destruction, taxes, and intrusion. They also help to explain why Ambrosio and Narciso
eventually went to work as telegraphers and “then as correspondents for the Charleston
News and Courier to help support the family in the 1870s and 18803.” Together with
their brother William Elliott, they also established and published The State, a daily paper
in Columbia, SC. The difficulties of the postwar period eventually made other
employment options much more attractive and the Gonzales brothers abandoned
plantation life.”

Before this occupational and class transition occurred, however, Narciso had
written to Ambrosio, Jr. about life in Cuba. In the midst of turmoil over the gradual
abolition of slavery and epidemics of yellow fever, the situation was not very bright there
either. Narciso wrote about the commonness of fever in Cuba, the “Breakbone fever”
and “acclimating fever” that were common in 1870. After Nanno’s return, Ambrosio
began to comment about the economic conditions in Adams Run, South Carolina While
their family “had to struggle very hard,” elsewhere in the state and region conditions
were not any better. Brosie wrote, “I would not go to Charleston on any account.
Savannah might be better.” It seems that the possibility of fever might have been
equitable to struggling with economic and social declension. As Brosie averred, “I have
suffered more since I have been here from different causes & from trials...than I have

since I left Cuba?”O

 

Ambrosio’s words provide testimony to the hopes that resided in withdrawal from
the South. By withdrawing from the trials of the postwar South, many planters and ex-
Confederates wished to avoid the dimensions of defeat. While Cuba contained its own
blend of misery, the South offered social despair and depressed economics for the planter
and ex-Confederate class, resonating down to this sixteen-year old boy who shifted
between school and work. The postwar state also affected his Uncle Tom, whom t
Ambrose writes about: “I am sorry Uncle Tom has not been able to get Employment - he

has my deep sympathy.” It was certainly the worsened economic environment of the

 

immediate postwar era about which he expresses lament. “No ruling class of our history
ever found itself so completely stripped of its economic foundations as did that of the
South in this period.” Others in commerce and industry were also affected “in the
downfall of the old planter class,” yet planters seemed to experience a unique
combination of problems that were more specifically connected with defeat."l

At the same time that these letters express anxiety over social and economic
difficulties, they also reflect upon the residual effect of defeat or the lasting mark of
trauma. For example, in response to his Aunt and Narciso, Ambrose had written in 1873,
“and you still think we will lick those cursed Yankees yet! It’s quite refreshing & makes
me feel that there is life in the old land yet!”42 These sentiments resonate back to those
ex-Confederate and planter irreconcilables who had grasped on to their last hope of
overcoming the Yankees by withdrawing to places like Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba. The
fact that Brosie was attuned to these sentiments demonstrates that these viewpoints had
been passed down to him from his father, other family members, and elders of the

community. Statements such as preserving life in “the old land” and licking those

Yankees exemplify that even eight years after the war the trauma of defeat was still
reverberating through Southern minds and was a pressing psychological concern. Like
Brosie’s individual remarks, the collective movement of the Lost Cause also
demonstrated such an emotional mental state.

The Lost Cause had began as “a public memory, a cult of the fallen soldier,” and
represented “a righteous political cause defeated only by industrial might,” to eventually
become the primary form of support for planter and ex-Confederate individuals and
community alike.“3 Beginning as an effort to memorialize the dead and the Confederacy
for which they died, the Lost Cause offered solace to the region and this class. Yet, it
also sought to protect Southern identity from the onslaught of defeat. Hence, it was
concerned with the same matters that Ambrosio expressed in his letters - maintaining
faith in Southern heritage and warding off Northern intrusion.

Ambrose’s words also show that defeat and economic ruin were overtaking the
plantation and aspirations to remaining within the planter/ex-Confederate class. He
stated in March 1873, “I must say that all my former desires for a farm in Virginia have
vanished.” At the same time, planters had become dismayed about their son’s
continuation of a livelihood based upon the plantation. “It was in their consideration of
their son’s futures that Southern planters displayed their deepest misgivings about the
future of plantation agriculture.” Accordingly, many planters advised their sons to take
up careers in business and industry. As a planter from Ambrosio’s home state claimed.
“The day of the wealthy and independent planter is past and gone.” Anxiety over their
current predicament and the tremors of wartime defeat shook planter confidence about

themselves, their offspring, and the f uture.“

Ambrosio also wrote about the relocation of planter families that contributed to
this collective uncertainty. For example, he stated, “I suppose Hamilton has moved by
this time to the Tucker mansion.” As the compounding effects of defeat included
economic displacement, this statement alludes to such developments. With the loss of
land from taxes, many planters were not financially able to rebuild their plantations and
lost out to those who could. By 1870 in Louisiana, for example, sugar planters had lost
about one-half of their estates to Northern investors. These class—related changes would
contribute to eliciting and prolonging the trauma of defeat because it provided concrete
evidence that the planter/ex-Confederate position was unstable at best.45

Once back in South Carolina, Narciso also expressed similar concerns about the
economic difficulties connected to the pattern of trauma and anxiety. In another letter
from 1873, he commented on how he had been “shooting robins and potatoes. The latter
are being planted in front of John Gordon’s residence (now Luash’s).” “We intend to
have enough of them this year,” he wrote. His comments about planter life correspond
with William Faulkner’s character Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! A former
Confederate general and planter, Sutpen was reduced to “haggling tediously over niekels
and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could
have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary.” Both
history and fiction about the planters/ex-Confederates testify to a diminishment of the
planter class, sometimes to the point of bare minimum existence. While Narciso’s words
reflect upon a level of subsistence living, they also comment on occupational and class

restructuring.“

His unemployed uncle Tom “went and came from Savannah” where he was
“promised a place by Mr. Dawson on Rantowles to superintend phosphate works.” It
appears that his uncle had shifted to other employment due to the problematic nature of
plantation work in the postwar years. As for Nanno, he was looking into “opportunities
for keeping accounts on a small scale and by Sept could make enough to pay for one term
at school.” This shif t in occupations will result in an altered class structure (discussed in
section two) and keep the fire of trauma burning in the South.”

In South Carolina in particular, planter anxiety and trauma were sustained by their
clashes with poverty. “1 do not believe that the ruin of the French nobility at the first
Revolution was more complete than... that of the proud, rich, cultivated aristocracy of
the low country of South Carolina,” is what one Northern reporter wrote. Likewise, the
Charleston News and Courier reported how the state was bankrupt and that tremendous
amounts of savings and investment had been lost. “Although the owner of two of the
best and largest cotton plantations in . . . South Carolina,” former Governor Milledge
Luke Bonham stated in 1874, “my life has been absorbed in trying to keep my head
above water.” In comparison, the Jackson Weekly Clarion of Mississippi reported, “Our
people have lost their property, lost their government, lost their prestige, are aliens and
strangers in the land of their fathers.” The British journalist Robert Somers had also
written in such terms about the South in the Southern States Since the War, [870—]. He
commented on how countless landowners were ruined and how plantations throughout
the South were being rented out or broken up into small farms.“8

Back in Cuba, Narciso had written that there was “no news to tell except that

there has been another terrible hurricane here and another is expected day-after-

30

tomorrow.” Apparently, another kind of hurricane was storming through his homeland
with streaks of lightning “from the thunder clouds overhead.” Likewise, as he waited for
a “box of books” that were in Havana, it contained what Southemcrs at home also
awaited. As Nanno said, “The locket, pen paper + envelopes are in the little box but I’m
sorry to say that the Testament has not come.” It apparently had not arrived in the South
either. Many Southerners had “awaited ‘the vengeance of Heaven’ against the North for
its ‘perfidy’ to the South.” Yet, this retribution had not been delivered. Whether in exile
or at home, the planter/ex-Confedcrate class longed for ultimate redemption, but
estrangement from God, the hardship of penury, Yankee, black, and poor white
encroachment, and the other dimensions of defeat compounded their trauma instead, and
the failure of avoidance behavior was primarily what they experienced.49

As 1870 had been “a year which Cuba will long remember” for its “Hurricanes
and Cholera” that “killed thousands of people,” it was a year that most planters and ex-
Confederates wished to forget. Physical and psychological conditions were torn and
afflicted. While Narciso was among streets “blocked up with f allcn houses, dead people,
dead oxen, horses, cows, poultry, ect which made an intolerable stench,” the planter/ex-
Confederate class was blocked with mental, social, and economic burdens produced and
revived within a culture of defeat (discussed at the conclusion of the first section). In
both places perhaps, “Its worse than war.” The individual and collective response to the
situation in the South was avoidance.so

Where Gonzales had attempted physical withdrawal for himself and family to
avoid the anxiety and trauma of past and present, Sutpen’s response had been one of

denial and mental withdrawal. While planters like the Gonzales family returned to the

31

South and began “focusing their fear of the war’s and Reconstruction’s threats to their
way of life,” Sutpen serves as an example of a planter that “interiorize[d] and willfully
denieId] the threat” from the outset and chose mental instead of physical withdrawal. By
doing so, he also became a “mad impotent old man.” While both the Gonzales and
Sutpen family struggled with defeat and trauma, Sutpen’s response would become more
common as Reconstruction continued. Whether in actual or mental withdrawal, however,
denial and avoidance behavior characterized the psychological responses to defeat and
the legacy of trauma.

Narciso also voiced how this mental avoidance would manifest itself in the
coming years. He had written that “50’000 Spaniards + 10000 italians” had come to
support the French in the Prussian War, and “even Uncle Sam sends out volunteers.”
Most importantly, he declared, “Gen Beauregard has joined the French I hope he will
thrash the Prussians as he did the Yankees at Mannassas.” These sentiments again reflect
upon the state of mind that was passed along to future generations. Through the Lost
Cause movement in particular, ex-Confederatcs embarked upon a course to resurrect and
enthrone the honor and integrity of past heroes like P.G.T. Beauregard. Just as
reverently, Narciso proclaimed, “Is Gen Lee dead! They say he is. How sorry every
Southerner must be.” As Southerners began to revere their fallen heroes and the defeated
past, they also started to enshrine memories of both in the collective movement of the
Lost Cause. What Nanno’s thoughts express is that this movement by 1870, the time of
Robert E Lee’s death, had taken a substantial hold over the South.52

Lee’s death has been recognized as the turning point for the Lost Cause, and it

was through its efforts during Reconstruction that Lee attained godlike stature.

Subsequently, the Lost Cause would “mold Lee into the totally invincible leader of the
Confederacy.” By the 18803, Lee would become “the embodiment of the Confederate
cause.”S3 According to Lost Cause advocates, the leaders and the ideology of the
Confederacy were not vanquished and gone. To the contrary, they had become the
cornerstone of thought for the planter/ex-Confederate class and their children, especially
as a defense against their ongoing world of trauma.

While defeat had started this reaction, Reconstruction events and issues inspired
the dual process of collective memory-making and avoidance behavior that would come
to be expressed through the Lost Cause movement. Beyond defeat, as an Alabama
planter said in 1867, “military despotism” and “enfranchisement of the negroes” had
caused more planters “to abandon the country” and seek out other means of avoidance.
While defeat and emancipation were the source of trauma and anxiety, Reconstruction’s
political, economic, and military developments fueled already enflamed minds. Instead
of adapting, “scores of plantation families chose to leave the South,” “rather than suffer
its final destruction.” Although former Confederates and planters recognized that
Appomattox signaled political, social, and economic subjugation, many also responded to
these subordinating conditions through the Lost Cause.“

Most Southerners during this period saw this “Second American Revolution” in
terms of the French Revolution where the aristocracy was attacked with “plans for
massive redistribution of wealth and power.” The difference was that instead of a revolt
from below, “this was a revolution from above and from outside the region.” Enacted
through the expanding power of the Federal government and the Constitution, much of

this threat came from Radical plans to “reconstruct the South in the image of the North,

33

or its idealize self -image.” To the Radicals, the South had actually withdrawn from the
Union and it was their job to reintegrate it through “appropriate legislation.” At the heart
of their plan was the goal of transforming the southem economy, which included the
“wholesale destruction of the plantation system.” The prospect of this certainly weighed
heavily on planter and ex-Confederate minds. While secession and any idea of
independence might have been buried with defeat, the planter/former Confederate class
that did not physically withdraw, or had returned from it, had not laid to rest the ideas of
state sovereignty and white supremacy. They would press these two issues against
Radical Republican plans for reconstructing the South."5

As previously indicated, their struggle also included control over labor, most
pressingly that of the f reedmen. In conjunction with controlling the state, this contest
would be about citizenship, and social and political equality. For the planter/ex-
Confederate class, this meant trying to “utilize the power of the state to reestablish
planters’ control over their former slaves.” The Black Codes were designed for this
purpose, consisting of labor contracts, apprenticeship, and vagrancy laws, among other
stipulations. These codes were partly responsible for the Radical initiative and their
Reconstruction Act of 1867. After this legislation partitioned the South into military
zones, many white Southerners reacted with “massive resistance” to Republican state
governments that they thought were illegitimate. Many also reacted to the combined
dimensions of defeat by organizing into a movement bent on avoiding the present and the

turmoil it contained.56

34

-C eder te Commande Avoi cc and the st Cause

For reasons connected to war, defeat, Reconstruction, and trauma, ex-
Confederates continued to withdraw from society. William Nelson Pendleton, the former
chief of artillery for General Lee, left in mind if not body. “Given the bleak landscape of
Reconstruction Virginia, Pendleton gave himself up to prewar nostalgia.” As his
daughter said, he “grieved and his mind and heart seem carried out of the sad present.”57
This intense romanticism would prove to be a lasting response for the region overall.
Others still opted for physical withdrawal, but would return and resort to mental
avoidance.

For Confederate General J ubal A. Early, Mexico was the place where he could
“get out from the rule of infernal Yankees.” As Eady continued to write, “I cannot live
under the same government with our enemies. I go therefore a voluntary exile from the
home and graves of my ancestors to seek my fortunes anew in the world.” Thus, he
immigrated first to Havana, then to Mexico, and eventually to Canada. In Mexico during
the winter of 1865-66, he began to craft and defend the preliminary elements of the Lost
Cause. In articles exchanged through a newspaper with “his old foe” Philip H. Sheridan
of the Union army, Early provided a defense for the South’s defeat, “cast his own
performance in better light and sustained the honor of hopelessly outnumbered
Confederates.” Thus, as he attempted to avoid the ramifications of defeat through
withdrawal, he also began constructing other barriers for this purpose.58

Representatives of the planter/ex-Confederate class had attempted unsuccessfully

to recreate the Old South in the immediate postwar years in places like Mexico and

Brazil. The irreconcilable Early, along with minister Robert L. Dabney, even looked into

35

the “feasibility of establishing a colony of prominent southemers in New Zealand.” Yet,
as previously mentioned, those who did not actually leave the South behind dreamed of
it. “Countless southemers who never left the country filled letters and diaries with
discussion of emigration.” In them, many “swore that when they had the money they
would go,” or “if only they were younger or did not have a family.” However, most who
discussed it probably did not seriously consider it a possibility. Their discussions of
immigrating to Mexico or Brazil were much like that of one Georgia preacher who wrote

99 ‘6

about escaping to “some soft green island, far out in the Pacific, where no Yankee ever
had come or could come.” In such pensive writings, “emigration apparently offered a
means of psychological as well as physical escape from the consequences of war.” It was
psychological escape to which most ex—Confederates would turn as Reconstruction
continued.59

As withdrawal provided some with complete avoidance of defeat, for many others
it was necessary to find “a temporary, psychological one.” The psychological impact of
defeat also pushed many other ex-Confederates to withdraw into a world of alcohol and
drugs, into another “private world safe from the traumas of life in a conquered South.”
Other former Confederates like A. Dudley Mann, a Confederate commissioner in Europe
during the war, avoided the postwar changes by remaining as an expatriate in Paris.
From there, he “condemned developments in the South, damned citizens of the United
States” and clung to physical and psychological withdrawal. Lucius B. Northrop, former

commissary general, was in “isolated retreat in Minor Orcus, Virginia,” writing about

“his hatred for the United States and the paganism of the present era.” After physical

36

withdrawal receded as an option though, former Confederates sought out other forms of
avoidance.60

After some of the shock and disorder subsided, southemers sought to adjust to
defeat in various ways. The previous cases reflect upon those who looked “to escape to a
new land or to withdraw into a private world” away from the “very real trauma of defeat”
associated with the immediate postwar period. However, the ideology of the Lost Cause
also played a major role in dealing with defeat and provided another means of avoidance.
The myths and rituals that accompanied this ideological movement represented planter
and ex-Confederate responses to trauma and functioned as a device for mental
avoidance.61

Myth has been conceptualized in terms of “sacred ideas” that are “ritualized in
memory,” and by how it “puri fies” history, working to make history “innocent.” David
M. Blight defines myth as “the deeply encoded stories from history that acquire with time
a symbolic power in a culture.” These multiple definitions of myth reflect upon the
myths of the Lost Cause, particularly in regard to their unifying and ameliorative effects.
These myths were premised upon sacred ideas, purified history, and encoded stories that
provided the basis of regional memory. In many ways, myths served as “cultural
symbols,” conveying “a special meaning (thought and feeling) to a large number of those
who shared the culture.”62

Myth as a “vehicle for meaning” tends to “develop with special cogency among
people who have experienced situations of critical or tragic proportions.” As was the
case with postwar Southerners, “people turn to myth in a desire to become ‘at ease’ with

the world around them once again.” Whether in mental or corporeal withdrawal, myth

37

also provided a means to reenter the present world without fully facing its instability. At
its most fundamental level, the myths of the Lost Cause “helped Confederates deal with
defeat and its attendant anxieties” by serving as a coping mechanism.63

Anthropologists and psychologists alike have recognized myth and the use of
them as “an attempt to unify contradictory, ambiguous experience of a people.” In
particular, psychologists have stressed that myths function “as a form of ‘ego defense’
against threatening conditions.” As CG. Jung emphasized, “mythology is where the
psyche ‘was ’ before psychology made it an object of scientific investigation.””" In relation
to defeat and Reconstruction, the myths of the Lost Cause attempted to form a protective
defense around an unstable and threatened region. In the turbulent years of
Reconstruction when planters and ex-Confcderates displayed psychological reactions to
wartime and postwar trauma, they resorted to myth in order to establish some stability in
their lives.

Despite the major obstacles and anxiety that this group confronted, they
consistently adhered to ideas and principles that sprang from their f onner days of
unmitigated power. Their “basic ideas about slavery, blacks, agriculture, and Southern
civilization revealed a remarkable resistance to change.” While some chose to abandon
the present or deny its existence, others clung to a cultural ideology to protect them from
rapid change. This ideology largely provided the foundation for the Lost Cause since the
“nexus of related myths” associated with it were based within antebellum plantation
ideology.“ Those that returned from a withdrawn state also drew upon this ideology from
the past as a salve for the present. Accordingly, the Lost Cause became as much a

psychological brace as a memorial and organizational movement. The ideology of the

38

Lost Cause provided a mental fortress for planters and ex-Confederates and served as a
means to transition from one form of avoidance to another. Through an ideology based
in myth, the Lost Cause was a way to stay in this world and be detached from it.

In the postwar South because the myths of the Lost Cause developed out of a need
to restore regional identity, “temporarily lost in military defeat and Reconstruction
humiliation,” the power of it derived from its ability to reconsolidate a defeated and
colonized region while masking over aspects of the past that disturbed this process. In
particular, this meant basing the movement in ideas that were consistent with the
plantation ideal without the scars of slavery. Hence, the Lost Cause rested upon a mythic
history concerning a chivalrous, refined, and romantic plantation civilization. This
foundational myth placed the revered and vanquished Confederate nation, populated with
countrified Southern gentlemen, at its center. More bluntly, however, this myth was
directed at white supremacy, the distillation of memories of the war, and the purification
of slavery. Based in a “feeling for the past” that was driven by “deep human emotions,”
the Lost Cause became a mythical-historical movement directed at bringing the South out
from the grasp of defeat and Reconstruction.“

Thus, the Lost Cause was a “Southern reaction to military defeat, to the
interfering presence of United States troops for ten years on the soil of the f orrner
Confederate States” and “to a condition of poverty in the midst of a prosperous
America.” It functioned as mental device for dealing with the multiple dimensions of
defeat, or the collective elements involved in planter/ex-Confederate trauma, but it did so
in a way that avoided and denied past and present reality. Similar to how withdrawal

behavior actively rejected the present with its socioeconomic real ties, the Lost Cause

39

allowed for a passive avoidance of anything that tarnished a regional past in order to
speciously bolster a constructed regional identity. By committing to the mythic ideology
of the Lost Cause, Southerners were able to swim in a rose-colored sea and mentally drift
into a nostalgic past in order to deny what actually lay before them. Viewed in this way,
the Lost Cause was crucial to efforts directed at elevating Southerners out from the
Reconstruction period, and byl880, this era began to drift into memory while the Lost
Cause flourished.”

Edward Alfred Pollard has been credited with starting this process by moving the
phrase into widespread acceptance when he published The Lost Cause: A New Southern
History of the War of the Confederates in 1866. In antebellum times, the Lost Cause had
ref erred to Scottish independence in connection with Sir Walter Scott’s novels on the
subject. After the Civil War, Pollard vested the phrase with a meaning that pertained to
Southern cultural superiority. “It would be immeasurably the worst consequence of
defeat,” he wrote, “that the South should lose its moral and intellectual distinctiveness as
a people and cease to assert its well known superiority in civilization. . .over the people of
the North)”8 He set the tone for what would develop into a multi-faceted movement
based upon myth and ideology and directed at resurrecting a defeated region.

When Pollard had published his first volume, the Lost Cause began to form with
the dual ideas of preserving a superior heritage while honoring the dead. “The
Conquered Banner” was one of the most popular poems that initially developed this
second thematic. Father Abram Ryan, the “Poet Priest of the Lost Cause” and author of
this poem, wrote and spoke about defeat in a way that glorified the dead, both the

Confederacy and its soldiers. As “the talk of death offered a temporary psychological

escape not unlike that found in discussions of emigration,” words and poems by people
like Ryan soothed Southern minds."9 Just like mental withdrawal, many also wrote of
their longing to die but never acted upon it in a way that provided a temporary avoidance
of reality.

Memorial work also offered a way to alleviate the experience of loss and defeat.
Memorializing activities allowed for grief and mouming, and was a means to “assimilate
disruptive change.” In activities that became collectively associated with the Lost Cause,

grief during memorial services functioned to reconcile “a profound conflict between

 

contradictory impulses.” On one hand, Southemers wished to preserve the past; on the
other, they sought “to reestablish a meaningful pattern of relationships” premised upon
accepting the loss of it. Memorial activities established an intermediary pathway
between these impulses and enabled Southerners to protect the past while regaining some
hold on the present. The Lost Cause as a “revitalization movement” grew alongside this
impulse. It became a “conscious, deliberate organized effort on the part of some
members of society to create a more satisfying culture” by means of restoring “a golden
age.” Accordingly, honoring the dead, preserving regional identity, and dealing with the
present all entailed a looking backward to an idealized past While “the trauma and scars
of defeat” marked the postwar period, the Lost Cause enabled the mental restoration of a
glorious age comprised of the Confederacy and plantation.70

Lost Cause memorializing rituals served this purpose of mental restoration. Like
myths, rituals can act as “carriers of meaning” and “sen'e to bind people together through
the ceremonial restatement of their heritage.” Especially through the process of

repetition, rituals can “enable their participants to transcend time by attaching the present

41

to the past.” Rituals connect people through time and when repeated can act as an
attempt to retrieve the past, to relive it, honor it, or correct it. What came to be Memorial
Day or the unveilings of monuments could thus provide a way to restore the past and a
means for c0ping with the present. The Lost Cause from this ideological, mythical, and
ritualistic perspective sought to “symbolically overcome history” particularly through
“ritualistic repetition.” Likewise, followers of the “Lost Cause religion” who “recreated
the mythical time of their noble ancestors” through ritualized memorialization also
displayed a form of repetition compulsion."

Psychologist Carl G. Jung recognized compulsive behavior as “the great mystery
of human life.” He saw it as “an involuntary motive force in the psyche ranging all the
way from mild interest to possession by a diabolical spirit” The Lost Cause, its rituals
and myths, acquired this ran go of compulsive force particularly in the way that they
embraced melancholia and anxiety. As Sigmund Freud had explained, a melancholiac
would compulsively repeat “a scene of trauma or loss in order to gain at least a degree of
control.” As many Southerners in general struggled with the dilemma of cherishing the
past and confronting the present, many of the planter and ex-Confederate class in
particular were also caught in a “widespread, melancholic nostalgia for an idealized
prewar South.” According, they reacted with rituals and myths to try to gain some control
over their trauma and anxiety. Like the character Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom!,
many Southerners became “back-looking ghosts” who fantasized about a wistful past
compulsively through collective and individual means.72

Just as the “repeated exposure to traumatic activity” during Reconstruction

provoked avoidance behavior, it also facilitated this fantasy mental state. “Fantasying is

a dissociated state, which is neither imagination nor living in external reality, but a kind
of melancholic self —soothing compromise.” For many Southerners, avoidance came
through this fantasy state or mental withdrawal. Fantasying in this detached manner was
“a defensive use of the imagination in the service of anxiety avoidance.”73 Along with
collective ritual activities, individual mental escapism was connected with the lasting
effects of trauma.

Much of the success of the Lost Cause movement was due to this mental fantasy
state. “The triumph of the Lost Cause” was “in the realm of the imagination.”
Accordingly, from Appomattox through the 18805, literature substantially fueled this
effort. From writers like Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page to national
magazines like the Century Illustrated Monthly the South, “the glamorized South” of
Lost Cause legend, was pushed to the forefront of regional and national imagination.74 As
some of this literature sought reconciliation with the North through inoffensive, heroic
accounts of the war, it also supported the Cause and its cf forts to restore identity and
psychology in the South.

Joel Chandler Harris provided many stories directed at these goals and became
best known as the “Glamorizer of the ‘happy slaves on the old plantations.”’ In
particular, through his “Uncle Remus” and “Brer Rabbit” tales, he circulated an idealized
image of the antebellum South that corresponded with Lost Cause ideology and
avoidance fantasying. Harris had created his “Uncle Remus” tales in 1879 about “Mr.
Rabbit and Mr. Fox,” stories about “the triumph of agility over strength, of guile over
privilege, the trickster over the whole world of power.” This message corroborated Lost

Cause history about greatly outnumbered Confederates outfoxing the cumbersome

43

Yankee army. In the work “Free Joe and the Rest of the World,” published in the
Century in November 1884, Harris crafted the story of “poor Joe,” the free black, who
wandered “aimlessly about the neighborhood of Hillsborough, Georgia, in 1850” until he
“finally realized that ‘though he was free, he was more helpless than any slave.’” Placing
soothing images of docile blacks who wished they were still in bondage with idyllic
images of chivalric plantation life helped to solidify the Lost Cause movement through
imagination.7s

Thomas Nelson Page published his “Marse Chan — A tale of Old Virginia” in the
Century in April 1884 and also helped the Cause. It was composed in a “rich Negro
dialect,” and depicted a f onner slave in the year 1872 telling the tale of a Confederate or
“de captain” killed in the war while “leadin’ a charge and carryin’ dc flag.” The slave
had brought his master back to his sweetheart, and her death soon after delivered a
“romantic tribute to the Lost Cause and to the Virginia gentlemen who died for its glory.”
Through this kind of work, Page also helped to provide a world of mental withdrawal and
avoidance. He created “an altemative universe of gallant cavaliers and their trusted
servants,” along with a “prewar and wartime Virginia inhabited by the thoroughly stock
characters of Southern gentlemen (“Marse Chan”), gracious ladies (“Meh Lady” or the
“Mistis”),” and “the numerous Negro mammies and the unwaveringly loyal bondsmen
(“Sam”, “Unc’ Billy”).” In particular, his story “Marse Chan: A Tale of Old Virginia”
published on its own in 1887 took hold over the South and the nation. By this time, years
of accumulated myth had blended with history through the Lost Cause.76

The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine also “played a powerful part in the

development of the Lost Cause Legend” through its blend of myth and history. The

magazine was initially called Scribner ’s Monthly, which had issued “The Great South”
series from 1873—74. Renamed in 1881, it garnered a reputation for being the “interpreter
of the South to the nation,” as the Century promoted both the restoration of the union and
aided the elaboration of Lost Cause mythmaking. This came forth most evidently in its
series “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” which ran from November 1884 to Nov.
1887. Providing Northern and Southern perspectives on the war, the series “unwittingly”
provided a “significant piece of Lost Cause propaganda?”7

In particular this series stressed the importance of the “contemplation of sacrifice,
resourcefulness, and bravery” in regard to Confederate and Union forces. Wishing to
avoid political questions, the causes, and death of the war, the series emphasized “the
picturesque features of the battle,” and “special incidents of gallant conflict.” The series
revealed a pattern that supported Lost Cause orthodoxy: “Once again the less effective
generalshi p of the North fails to take advantage of superior numbers; once again the
small, gallant well—led Southern army arouses the admiration of the reader.” What this
pattern conveyed was significant to the Lost Cause movement. In the case of the Battle
of Gettysburg, for example, it was the Union’s victory, but what became glorified was a
Confederate memory, the “gallant Picket leading the flower of Southern chivalric
tradition into certain destruction.”78

Similarly, the series had depicted “the gala days of war” with “rallying” images of
the First Battle of Bull Run or Manassas, while supporting the image of Southern
“Feminine heroism.” Sending their men off and “bravely” listening for the battle, the

writer Constance Cary Harrison had explained in the series that “during the autumn of

‘61” she and her cousins were “intrusted” with “the making of the first three battle-flags

45

of the Confederacy.” Another article by Mary Bedinger Mitchell elaborated on this
mythic tale and wrote in a “Southern Woman’s Recollections of Antietam”: “The better
people kept some outward coolness, with perhaps a feeling of ‘noblesse oblige’; but the
poorer classes acted as if the town were already in a blaze”; and, “The negroes were the
worst, and with faces of a ghastly ash-color, and staring eyes, they swarmed into the
fields.” Here was “the spirit that made of Southern women the inspiration of Southern
men.” As the series and the Century overall contributed to the Lost Cause, it did so
specifically through the instrument of myth.”

Myths were deployed through stories and soldiers’ tales as “instruments” to make
the war more comprehensible. Robert Penn Warren said about myth that it “defines the
myth-maker’s world, his position in it, his destiny, and his appropriate attitude.” In Paul
M. Gaston’s words, myths “are not polite euphemisms for falsehoods, but are
combinations of images and symbols that reflect a people’s way of perceiving truth.”
Myths work by fusing “the real and the imaginary into a blend that becomes a reality

99

itself, a force in history. As myth can also serve as a “collective dream or fantasy,” Lost
Cause myths, this blend of truth and fiction, collective fantasy and defense, helped
organize traumatic experience. In addition to romantic plantations, war heroism, and
home front sacrifice, myth also worked through the veneration of Confederate heroes.80

During the postwar period in the South, prints of “Confederate civilian and
military heroes became popular in homes, schools, and veterans’ lodges.” Placed in
parlors throughout the region, lithographs and engravings worked to preserve

“Confederate immortals frozen forever in a mythically triumphant parade.” Of all the

heroes, it was General Robert E. Lee who obtained the most prominent position through

“the retrospective romanticism of the Lost Cause era” and the multifarious operations of
myth. Emerging as a popular pictorial subject only after Appomattox, Lee’s fame
increased after his death in 1870. Beyond his military accomplishments, Lee’s family
lineage gave him a regal and gentlemanly quality that was well suited for mythic prints.
His family ancestry was also bolstered by Lee’s renowned allegiance to honor. While his
real life was not as one-dimensional as images and writings would claim, he served the
mythical role well.81

If Confederate heroes like Lee in word and image were honorable and heroic, the
key term for “the black role in the Confederate myth was ‘loyal.”’ Like descriptions of
blacks in the works of Harris and Page, the myth of the faithful slave was a central aspect
of prints as well as stories based in Lost Cause mythology. The creation of this image
had occurred during the Reconstruction era in accordance with Lost Cause historical
memory, which portrayed slaves as loyal aids and cast race relations as amicable and
peaceful only in antebellum times. In the turmoil of Reconstruction, blacks had slid into
a “moral retrogression,” which resulted in the juxtaposition of “an ‘integrated’ plantation
pastoral against current racial conflict.” Prints and literature of the Lost Cause that
depicted the faithful slave were so important to this message because they placed “the
loyal ‘Old Negro’” against the contemporary “black beast rapist” as justification for
social control and segregation.82

Another myth of the Lost Cause expressed in story and image pertained to
Northern society. Lost Cause advocates invoked images of the “marauding Yankee” or
“Yankee monster” who “symbolized a chaotic, unrestrained Northern society that had

threatened the pristine, orderly, godly Southern civilization.” While the antebellum

47

South was elevated and enshrined, the North was cast as villainous in conquest.
Similarly, Confederate soldiers became exalted and Union soldiers were cast as wicked
and destructive. “Because Southerners continued throughout the postbellum years to fear
the materialistic, heterogeneous Northem civilization, for many people the Yankee
continued to be a monster symbolizing evil.” Hence, the form of the evil stayed constant
while the meaning behind the fear shifted. 5”

By the 18708, this collective mythic structure became integrated into the Lost
Cause movement through the efforts of “a group of ex-Confederate officers in Virginia
[who] had forged a coalition of memorial groups that quickly took over the creation of
the Lost Cause tradition.” In additional to memorial activities, they conducted their
campaign through writing and myth-making. In 1866, former general Daniel H. Hill
started the magazine The Land We Love, which was “devoted to demonstrating the skill
and prowess of Confederate armies against all odds.” Albert Taylor Bledsoe, former
undersecretary of war in the Confederacy, had also created the Southern Review in 1867.
which along with The Land We Love “kept up an intensive defense of the Confederate
legacy until the end of Reconstruction.” By 1876, these efforts included the Southern
Historical Society Papers under the leadership of the former Confederate chaplain John
William Jones. Under Jones’ direction this publication spread the vision of the Lost
Cause for fourteen years. Yet, “the driving ideological and emotional force behind the
SHS was the former Confederate general Jubal Early.” As the leader of Virginia veterans
in the 18708, Early began to offer “a heroic vision of the Confederacy as an antidote to
the changes they perceived in the postwar South,” especially through the SHS Papers.

As previously discussed, Early had initially withdrawn from his war-tom and

Reconstruction-ridden land. However, once he returned to his home in Lynchburg,
Virginia in 1869, he began his assault upon securing the history and memory of the
Confederacy.“

“The spirit of the Southern people would be redeemed, in Early’s View, through
the story of the irrepressible and heroic Confederate soldier.” Early advanced a filtered
and glorious version of the Confederacy and the South. In particular, he worked to
“exaggerate Lee’s military prowess” through articles, books, and speeches, and deflected
criticism away from Lee and himself about matters like Gettysburg. Early was the first
commander to publish a book about his memoirs in late 1866 and in it he sought to
protect the image of Lee, the Confederate army, and himself. “In lectures, writings, and
personal correspondence over the last twenty-five years of his life, Early sought to place
his impressions of the war on record.”82 Through these efforts, he not only substantially
influenced history and provided many of the psychological barriers associated with the
Lost Cause movement, but also displayed avoidance behavior of a different kind than
withdrawal.

Like fantasying, by subscribing to and advocating a purified version of the past,
Early attempted to avoid the present. His avoidance behavior consisted of repetitive
recapitulations of the war and the reasons for defeat with an elision of the causes.
Likewise, Early recognized blacks “only as time-warped, loyal antebellum slaves.” Early
represented many ex-Confederates and planters, the base of the Lost Cause movement,
who thought in the same manner. In effect, Early and his followers demonstrated

avoidance behavior through their need “to stay in the past, frozen in time.” The character

49

Reverend Gail Hightower from Light in August also presents such a state of mind and
provides a useful analogy for discussing the psychology of Early and his followers.86

In this Faulkner novel, Hi ghtower is caught in a moment in time, an episode of
glory, that he compulsively repeats. It is the moment of his grandfather’s death during
the Civil War, and he revisits it time and again because of his desire to remain within it.
He is fixated on the one moment in the past when his grandfather had triumphantly
ridden in Earl Van Dorn’s cavalry and burned Ulysses S. Grant’s supplies. The success
of the attack had resulted in the destruction of over two million dollars worth of Federal
supplies, the capture of 1,800 soldiers, 150 officers, and the withdraw of General Grant’s
army of 75,000 from Mississippi. Hi ghtower appears to everyone to be “born about
thirty years after the only day he seemed to have ever lived in — that day when his
grandfather was shot from the galloping horse.” Accordingly, Hi ghtower is repetitiously
enclosed in time and in a psychological framework where he is “doomed to relive in his
imagination every evening at twilight the entrance of his grandfather’s cavalry troop into
town,” with his mind “full of galloping cavalry and defeat and glory.” Thus, he is frozen
in time like Jubal Early, and is trapped within a cycle of anxiety and trauma, clinging to
this moment of glory in order to remain detached from the present.”7

What Early and other Lost Cause advocates attempted to do through their writing
was to regain these moments and establish the “correct” version of the Civil War.
Among the areas they pressed, the Longstreet-lost—it-at-Gettysburg excuse was an
appealing explanation for defeat. It was more attractive than the overwhelming numbers
explanation because it allowed for the belief that success had been possible. “To rewrite

Faulkner’s well—known phrase, for the Virginians it was always not yet dawn on 2 July,

Longstreet was not yet late, and it all hung in the balance?” Early and others claimed
that Longstreet had failed to carry out Lee’s alleged order for an early attack on the
second day at the Battle of Gettysburg. By clinging to when it all had “hung in the
balance” and the moment of time when victory seemed possible, Early mentally avoided
the war’s denouement and the travails of defeat while trying to salvage this moment in
time. Thus, while he displayed the condition of repetition compulsion through attempts
at avoiding the present by remaining in the past, he also demonstrated it through trying to
correct history.

This type of compulsive mental condition was expressed in the “obsessive
writings” of Lost Cause advocates, especially through the Southern Historical Society
Papers, where “the Virginians continually ref ought the war and obsessively battled the
Yankees.” These efforts have been compared to the Plains Indians Ghost Dance.

The Ghost Dancers preached that white culture would disappear if only the

Indians believed and danced. Similarly, the Virginians seemed to believe that if

they wrote their articles and kept southemers from deserting after the war, the

Yankees and all that had occurred after Appomattox would simply disappear.
What Early and other Lost Cause writers exemplified then was a focused anxiety
condition expressed predicated on repetition compulsion. That is, their repetitive
writings took “the phobic form of a narrowed focus on an external threat.” Early in
particular fixated on correcting the past by focusing on key elements of it. Hence, his
behavior is comparable to both Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom! and Gail Hightower
in Light in August. Like Coldfield, Early had attempted “to reduce the various
vicissitudes of history to a repetitive, even a single outrage,” and similar to Hi ghtower, he

was consumed with remaining in and correcting a turning point in the war because he

blames it for the resulting dimensions of defeat, anxiety, and trauma. Early’s thoughts

51

and actions can be viewed as part of a conscious and unconscious attempt to fix the past
in order to stabilize the present, or an attempt “to get even” on a personal and social-
collective level “for an insult or affront to the psychic apparatus.” However, due to the
irreversible nature of time, the action can never really get at the original source of anxiety
and trauma. Mental repetition thus acts in a vicious cycle against time events that can
never be resolved.89

Furthermore, what appears to be have been involved with this condition is
analogous to Faulkner’s conception of time as circular. That is, in many of his novels.
Faulkner employs the technique of temporal circularity, “the way in which the circle of
the self-enclosed repeats itself through time as a cycle.” This repetition in relation to
time and identity results in the “inability of successive generations to break out of the
cyclic repetition of self -cnclosure.” Individually and collectively, the cyclic repetition of
moments in time appears unavoidable and a sense of helplessness develops with the
continuation of trauma and anxiety. For ex-Confederates like Early, acts of trying to
redeem the past or exist within it work in this way and oscillate out into the surrounding
culture.90

Ultimately the Lost Cause attests to the role of trauma within nineteenth-century
Southern culture while its use of mythology provides a vital link to the “inner world of
trauma.” As with fantasying, Lost Cause myths were constructed as avoidance and
coping mechanisms, but they also reflect upon that which caused and perpetuated
individual and collective trauma. While mythic writings had attempted to both avoid and
correct the moments of time that produced the initial trauma, the repeated confrontations

with the dimensions of defeat perpetuated and renewed it. In effect, “the psyche seems to

perpetuate this trauma in unconscious fantasy,” by “flooding” the mind “with continued
anxiety, tension and dread.” Likewise, the “anxiety—ridden inner world of trauma is
recapitulated in outer life and the trauma victim is ‘compelled to repeat’ the self -
defeating behavior.” In the case of the ex-Confederate/planter class, the trauma victims
were expressing and perpetuating their anxiety by repeating the act of writing about the
war and defeat.91 Accordingly, the Lost Cause represents an essential connection between T
the inner world of trauma and the repetition of that trauma in the outer world. Whether

individually or collectively, the Lost Cause had revealed the psychology of defeat.

 

As trauma was perpetuated through repetitive thought and behavior, it became "
enmeshed in the lives of Southerners not only as a source of anxiety, but also as “an
enigma of survival.” For many, life became a maneuvering between two stories: “the
story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its
survival.” Freud had concluded in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that traumatic
repetition was responsible for shaping the lives of individuals caught within this dual
narrative. Hence, for those dealing with trauma, their lives were marked by “the peculiar
and perplexing experience of survival.” This was the experience that would provide the
foundation for a culture of defeat in the postwar era. As the Lost Cause purified memory
and crafted myth to provide a collective means of coping, it also established a heritage of
victimization. This heritage would prove to be the lasting salve for a region crossed-over
with defeat and would lead to the formation of “a collective identity as victims and
survivors.” For the postwar South and future generations, survival and victimization

would provide the basis for regional identity.”2

53

Culture 0 feat

For participants in a larger culture of defeat, “the act of survival, as the experience
of trauma, is the repeated confrontation with the necessity and impossibility of grasping
the threat to one’s own life.” This repetition of dealing with a threat to life and to way of
life is bound to the process of survival and trauma thereby becomes imbedded in
individual and community alike. For the postwar ex-Confederate and planter class who
lead this culture through the Lost Cause, “the survival of trauma [was] not the fortunate
passage beyond a violent event, a passage that is accidentally interrupted by reminders of
it, but rather the endless inherent necessity of repetition.”93 It was necessary for them to
repeat and relive trauma because their mental state became a matter of surviving with,
and not passing beyond, it. Moreover, as previously discussed, this group’s reactions to
trauma and anxiety were also perpetuated by new sources. Hence, they substantially
helped to form a collective culture of defeat that would have a lasting, even endless,
impact on the region.

This lasting mark of trauma that infiltrated mere survival can be recognized in
attempts to restore honor and confidence in manhood that had been threatened and
undermined. “When the Civil War came to its bloody end, the white people of the
Confederacy felt the shame of defeat, a sense of profound hopelessness, and a fear of the
future in full measure.” As anxieties over “the righteousness of the cause and the
preservation of honor,” continued to riddle the region, Southerners searched for a means
to reestablish a claim to dignity that had been disrupted by the trauma that ran through the

war and into their postwar lives. In this regard, the Lost Cause represented “southerners’

need to repeat their assertions of righteousness, honor, and manhood.” The movement
was a necessary confrontation with the threat to manhood and the wounds of the mind.”

The Lost Cause movement then was not just a place for memorialization and the
laments of irreconcilables; it was the home to a culture of defeat Whereas “the actualin
of surrender was not just a matter of temporary dejection over getting whipped, stacking
f irearrns, and leaving comrades to strike out for home,” the Lost Cause was the collective
attempt to deal with the implications of surrender that ran long and into the fiber of a
culture and region. From this perspective, defeat defined “the general tone of Southern
society for the next generation and even beyond,” while the Lost Cause attempted to
grapple with it. Defeat meant profound societal transformation in waves of threats and
shocks. First, there had been “the initial shock when confronting the hopelessness of
further action; second, the discovery of home conditions upon return; and third, the long-
terrn problems of readjustment.” The problems of readjustment registered into a dilemma
with survival based upon the issue of honor. In essence, “the concept [of honor] involved
more than its ordinary principles or corollaries — valor, courtesy, duty, loyalty, virtue. It
was, in fact, the very foundation of the slaveholding ethic.” As such, this foundation was
saturated with defeat and the latter became instilled into honor, producing a mixture that
Southerners embraced rather than re jected.95

As Southerners, and particularly ex-Confederates, attempted to locate and revive
their regional honor, they found and harnessed it where it had been “lost.” They
determined that their honor, and their ongoing survival, was based in that which had
placed it in jeopardy — defeat. Defeat became not a burden of shame that should be

avoided, but a badge of honor that should be cultivated. What had occuned in surrender

55

was beyond their control, with a higher power, and what mattered most was the honor
that resided in both wartime heroics and a lost crusade. “Former Confederates were
suddenly a ‘lost people.’ They were not to blame. Instead, like the Old Testament
Israelites, they deemed themselves to be victims of forces beyond their control.”
Likewise, the surrounding culture of defeat that they established fostered these ideas and
turned defeat into an ethic of honor. “Honor could not produce a meal or saddle a mount,
but it could salve the painful reality of defeat,” particularly if honor could be located
within defeat, and this was just what the Lost Cause had sought to accomplish. It looked
to provide a sense of honor to a region submerged in def eat.96

One such manifestation of a region finding honor in defeat took placed on
October 26, 1875, when thousands of Confederate veterans gathered in Richmond,
Virginia for the unveiling of the statue of Stonewall Jackson. This was the first major
monument to a Confederate general, and the crowd that reached nearly fifty thousand
provided “a mass statement” concerning “the meaning of Confederate defeat and
Southern revival.” Through this ceremony, Southerners testified to how much the Lost
Cause had enveloped the region and delivered a sense of honor. While the event signaled
that regional cohesion was being affected by the ideology and actions of the movement, it
also spoke to the longevity of defeat and its effect upon regional culture. Former General
DH. Hill, for example, who was still “deeply conscious of loss,” remarked about “battle-
tom” and “conquered” banners and stated that the latter was “wrapped around the dead
hero’s body in the dead hero’s grave?” Lost Cause gatherings worked both to bring the
community together under an umbrella of ceremony and ideas that were rooted in defeat.

These ceremonies demonstrated that the lasting effects of defeat would continue to grip

the minds of Southerners, especially those most enthralled with trauma, and that finding
honor within it would be central to regional survival.

Thus the Civil War, “with its enormous and almost permanent effect on the
Southern white psyche during and even long after that conflict,” became hallowed an
sacred ground for a culture that nourished defeat Defeat in war could be partially
accepted if it was coated with myth and honor. For planter/ex-Confederates like Samuel
French, defeat based in honor would serve as the anchor for redefining identity. After he
returned home to Mississippi, he had written: “Fences burned, bridges destroyed; the
plantation a forest of tall weeds.” For him, what had served as the basis for his identity
had been destroyed —- “all means of support for my family gone; all lost save honor.”98

As previously illustrated about planter psychology, their anxiety and trauma
“stemmed in pan from their own private struggle to retain a set of ideas in the face of the
destruction of the institution which had produced those ideas.” Likewise, it has been
argued that the continuation of anxiety and trauma was connected to the ongoing attack
upon this belief system. Physically and mentally, many planters had “sought to deny the
reality of the emerging, and still quite inconceivable, post-slavery world.” James Roark
explains their mindset through the work of anthropologist Anthony Wallace. Discussing
what he terms the “principle of conservation of cognitive structure,” Wallace discusses
the effects upon “thought systems when social systems become disrupted.” As he
describes, people (in this case planters), “will not abandon their particular world view.
even when faced with direct evidence of its current inutility, without having had an

opportunity to construct a new viewpoint.” The Lost Cause enabled planter ideology to

survive by sustaining honor in defeat and establishing a lifeline to the dead Confederacy
in order to survive along the trail of trauma.99

As avoidance and withdrawal behavior was supported by the Cause, it did so in
order to meet the challenge of trauma and provide a basis for survival. Likewise,
repetition compulsion was the expression of confrontations with trauma and anxiety.
This second psychological condition would extend into the late 18705 and 1880s and most
notably figure into psychological responses to the New South movement. However, this
form of repetition compulsion would be based more in responses to a colonized
economic-social order and the New South movement’s relationship with it. In other
words, the economic dimension of defeat would supersede the other factors to drive the
psychology of the planter/ex—Confederate class.

Most Southerners were “penniless” and “the business of beginning over from
scratch could be a cause of severe anxiety.” With ruined plantations and large debts,
planters like Thomas Dabney of Hinds County, Mississippi lost his land and house to
bankruptcy. “Years of penury followed,” and his daughters were relegated to performing
duties once done by domestic slaves. Not used to manual labor, “Dabney personally
sawed firewood for the household’s cooking and heating.” Likewise, the Palmer family
of South Santee, South Carolina fell victim to land taxes, labor shortages, and low prices,
which “reduced the clan to the yeomanry class in one generation.” Under these
conditions, the economics of survival took precedence in the minds of this class that
battled to retain its position.‘00

It was a “bitter cup of psychological ruin” that these white Southerners had to

drink. And, “the long-lasting consequences of the Confederate defeat were first and

58

foremost a crisis of confidence in the leadership ranks of the fallen South.” Since many
had lost their property (in land and labor), planters and former Confederates faced the
prospect of unemployment or low-level positions. Ex-Confederate planters like General
Pendleton “had to plow his Kentucky farm in clothes so threadbare that he was mistaken
for a hired man.” From the toil of battling with the dimensions of defeat and then
particularly with economic ruin, the Mississippi planter Henry Garrett claimed, “1 am
constantly stricken with fatigue.” Likewise, General George Pickett, who never did
“overcome his bitterness for the foolish charge at Gettysburg which Lee had ordered,”
came to live by “dreading the f uture.” In connection with his financial problems, his
wife’s failing health, and the death of his son, Pickett thought that the postwar world was
“a thousand times” more dangerous than wartime battles.""

The planter family of Reverend Charles Colcock Jones from Georgia underwent
an experience with defeat that lead his son to follow the path of the Lost Cause. “He
celebrated the Confederacy at every opportunity and wrote with deep nostalgia about the
Old South.” By 1882, he had regressed to a point where he mourned the entire landscape
around him. “The entire region is strangely changed. It is people only with the phantoms
of things that were, and present images are a mockery of the blessed idols once here
enshrined.”102 For Jones and many like him, the emblems and sanctuary of the Lost Cause

represented the remaining refuge from the present.

59

SECTION TWO

While the first section of this study has been concerned with the psychological
conditions associated with defeat, the second section deals with how these conditions were
altered when economic dependence became the most pressing concern in relation to the
other factors of defeat. As withdrawal, avoidance, and repetition compulsion
psychology/behavior characterized the South as a culture of defeat, this study turns next to
how the South transitioned to and became a colonized region and how many planters and
ex-Confederates responded to this development with a particular form of repetition
compulsion. During the postwar era, while the region became dependent upon Northern
capital and industry and the new middle—class managed to enact a more permanent
position within society, the New South movement advanced a program of industrial
expansion. Accordingly, the planter and err-Confederate class attempted to fend off these
changes through the Lost Cause movement, and their thoughts and behavior ultimately
reflect upon attempts at trying to get at the source of anxiety and trauma more than
denying and avoiding it. That is, their psychology was predicated upon the form of
repetition compulsion that seeks to “correct” the past in order to salvage the
present/future.

As repetitive behavior marked this class while it continued to adjust to postwar
social and economic changes, this second section also directs attention to the
psychological tensions experienced by Southern industrialists, or New South boosters.
While they advocated growth and expansion, and relied upon Lost Cause ideology to
support their stance, they also created a movement that can be viewed as an alternative

coping mechanism. Just as the Lost Cause was involved in coping with defeat. the New

South movement served an ideological mechanism directed at dealing with socioeconomic
dependency. Moreover, this movement was implicated in the development of a regional
identity that is addressed in the third section. In particular, as a region the South became
torn over the implications of the erosion of heritage and culture, especially since they were
caught in the middle of a colonial economic relationship. In the third and final section.
this study turns to a more thorough examination of identity in relation to the South as a
culture of defeat and a colonized society. Both sections also continue to discuss the class
confrontations that accompanied these psychological, social, economic, and cultural

changes,

61

e olo ° '0

Before the rupture of the war that has been credited with dividing the South into
new and old, antebellum Southerners had tended to think that “both the North and Europe
were economically dependent upon the South” and that “the South was dependent upon no
one.” Southern independence was supposed to have delivered a direct trade route with
Europe, “without the ‘fools and swindlers’ of ‘Wall Street as mediators.”" All of these
notions were displaced, however, when the war ended and the fools and swindlers came to
control the economy of the South.

If life for many Southerners had become “distinctly crude after the war,” it was
also marked by dependency. Like the South in general, planters became locked in a
colonial relationship with North industry and investment. James Gregorie of South
Carolina exemplified this relationship quite well. As a planter in “desperate circumstance
in 1867,” he sought out capital from the North. A New York financier responded and
offered a loan so that Gregorie could continue planting. However, when his crop failed,
he was not able to pay the interest, never mind the principal loan. So, he asked for more
funds and received them. This occurred for six seasons and each one resulted in
“economic destruction.” In 1873, “after thousands had been invested and not a penny
returned,” Rose’s accountant told Gregorie that he had to f oreclose.“

Similar developments transpired with fellow South Carolinian planter John
Jenkins. His tale also ended with foreclosure in 1881.3 While most planters had been
challenged by the implications of defeat, they seemed to encounter their most formidable

enemy in its economic dimension. After the immediate postwar period, the focal point of

their anxiety began to shif t. While other factors related to defeat would still be central to
understanding planter psychology, economic pressures began to take precedence.
Although many planters experienced the type of financial ruin that James Gregorie
had, the majority were able to escape complete disintegration. At the same time, “few
escaped hardship” and these hardships had significant implications in terms of
psychological stability. Planters became “as a general thing completely broke &worse
than all, entirely destitute of anything like a spirit of enterprise.” Many families resorted
to what Ella Canton Thomas of Georgia did and experienced similar thoughts. To meet
expenses in the 18708 she taught school and in the 1880s housed boarders. The debt that
still accumulated, however, made her “feel cramped, confined, pent up, unable to stand
erect and breathe the air of freedom.” These physical and mental symptoms stemmed
from a “loss of Faith, of confidence” and “the shame of being poor.” Economic hardship
not only reduced her class position, but also reduced her physiologically to where she was
“tired mind, body, and soul.”4
Tracing the effects of this regional economic situation during and after the
Reconstruction era reveals that planters became most concerned with their reduced and
dependent position. Privileging economics above politics in the lives of planters is
supported by the fact that: “Economic survival was his first priority.” “Although the
political aspects of Reconstruction have often dominated modern perceptions of that
period, politics did not f ill the life of the average Southern planter.” What drove their
lives and psychological wellbeing more intimately and daily was their economic plight.
Moreover, planters were not only less concerned with politics, but also for a time

disengaged from it. As financial concerns certainly compelled this political

63

disengagement, it also “stemmed from a profound alienation from the postbellum South.”
As previously discussed, an estrangement from God had distanced planters from their
community, region, and themselves. The changed sphere of economics also caused a
societal alienation and political apathy overtook this group. In turn, this “detachment of
planters from politics” contributed to their “sense of powerlessness?”

At the same time, gradually, planters began to recognize that politics was a means
to reestablishing their position. As in the cases of withdrawal and avoidance behavior,
most planters who abstained from political activity came back to it. More accurately, “the
battle to preserve plantation agriculture and planter power became a political as well as
economic affair.” As politics gained more attention however, the pressure of their
economic situation continued to intensify. Coinciding with this economic plight was the
general agreement among planters “that the caldron of Reconstruction politics threatened
to boil over with anarchy and ruin.” Radical Republicans and carpetbaggers alike were a
despised and threatening force that sought to ruin the planters through “free labor,
confiscation, and disfranchisement.” Moreover, class antagonism also came from the poor
white scalawags. “Apparently threatened with multiple dangers, both internally and
externally,” planters sought to strike back through any means necessary.6

Outside of the realm of planters, during and especially after the close of
Reconstruction, industry witnessed a remarkable growth, particularly manufacturing and
mining. In seven out of the eleven former Confederate States, the number of
manufacturing plants more than doubled between 1880 and 1900, and in nine states the

employment of such workers increased three timesf’ Yet, notwithstanding these positive

developments, the main story of the postwar South is that it became a colonized region,
subject to Northern capital and industry.

A new labor system had emerged in the South after the war from an alliance
between capitalism and the planter class. After the struggle over compulsory contracts,
Black Codes, and land redistribution plans, the sharecropping system took hold of the
land. It was the “result of a compromise between the laborers’ pursuit of independence
and higher incomes and the landlords’ desire to retain control and minimize risk.” The
resulting “revolution in the labor system” compelled farmers or sharecroppers to pledge
“an unplanted crop to pay for a loan of unstipulated amount at a rate of interest to be
determined by the creditor.” Correspondingly, this crop lien forced the reliance upon the
cotton crop in order to secure a loan and precipitated a revolving debt peonage. Hence
poverty was the primary problem that developed from this system, which ensued from a
dependence on one commodity. When too much cotton was sold, prices fell. If the crop
was poor, there was no return at all. Additional problems included the neglect of
subsistence crops and depletion of the land. The inefficient allocation of crops produced a
detrimental effect on soil quality while landlords did not invest in agricultural
improvement - drainage, fencing, farm machinery, and ways of maintaining soil fertility.
At the same time, laborers had no incentive to bear the costs of such improvements. The
sharecropping system, which eventually became detrimental to everyone, thus worked to
establish and perpetuate the South as an impoverished and dependent region.8

At the same time, a post-Civil War Northern industrial order developed with
railroads serving as the arteries of a North to South colonial relationship, extracting raw

materials or partially finished goods from the South while finished goods were sent back

65

or went overseas, as was the case with the Steel industry in Birmingham, Alabama. “The
greater part of the products from the South’s mines, farms, and forests continued to leave
the region in the form of raw or crudely processed materials to be fabricated at factories in
the North or abroad.” Concurrently, Southern tax policies favored railroads, utilities and
insurance as well as the new manufacturing capital that entered the South, which
oftentimes was tax exempt. In effect, by the 18808, “the reconstructed South came to be

’3 ‘6

regarded as a bulwark of, instead of a menace to, the new economic order.”
Consequently, “over the two generations after Appomattox the South became imperial
America’s first colony.”9

Industrial progress meant that railroads were pulling tobacco, textiles, coal, and
iron out of the region while population growths in towns and cities “were not so much
signs of urban opportunity as of rural sickness.” Moreover, the federal government,
Northern capitalists and Southern political leaders were behind its orchestration. Looking
“to promote the colonization and improvement of the South,” as the Richmond Dispatch
reported in 1894, “the penetration of the South by Northeastern capital continued at an
accelerated pace” into the new century. “The giants divided the Southern colony at their
leisure,” and as local merchants held “tenitorial monopolies” of their own through the
sharecropping system, “the Mellons, Rockefellers, Du Ponts, and other capitalists

’9,

monopolized ‘Southern monopolies. Likewise, Northern interests dominated the
expanding railroad system where J .P. Morgan’s lines controlled transportation in and out
of coal, iron, lumber, and cotton regions.10

In regard to the central crop, railroads lead the way in changing the pattern of

cotton shipments as they “altered the entire nature of the Southern trade.” Railroads

moved cotton inland away from the antebellum markets along the coast, as was the case
with Charleston 1870, while they gave “little return to the town itself” because they were
merely moving through on their way to other markets. The Southern railroad boom in the
18805 continued this process, Opening up more and more markets in the interior so that by
1875 it had become “general throughout the South.” Even by 1869, it was reported that
“Southern buyers from the ‘minor villages, the corners and cross roads,’ places ‘unknown
in Northern markets’ before the war, ‘now deal directly with the North.’” By the 18805, it
became evident that “an entirely new pattern had emerged in the cotton trade,” and in the
South’s economic infrastructure. ”

The combined effect of all these developments secured and perpetuated the
South’s colonial status, as the “missionary and political phase of the North’s Southern
policy that followed upon conquest was abandoned for a policy of economic
exploitation.”12 In turn, economic exploitation worked with the already entrenched
psychology of defeat to elicit anxiety and renew trauma in the pl anter/ex-Confederate
class. Moreover, whereas this group had previously considered economic hardship to be
primarily linked with outside invasion, they now recognized that local intruders also
substantially supported it. In particular, the cotton industry fostered the growth of both the
middle class and the new middleman, the furnishing merchant.

As the practices involved with selling cotton shifted trade to interior markets in the
postbellum era, it “spurred the development of small crossroads market towns” and rural
cotton centers became distributing centers for northern goods. Combined with “mill
villages, these market centers introduced a new town culture into the formerly rural,

isolated South.” What remained of plantation culture then became surrounded by and

67

sometimes absorbed into the spreading market culture. “In the new town environment,
shopkeepers, lawyers, physicians, small businessmen, and other professional people
became increasingly influential.” They constituted a “new middle class,” who “shared the
outlook of their big city cousins,” to whom they were connected with the increase in
railroad mileage. Hence, invasion continued with a new class culture flowing over the
former planter elite. Moreover, this new middle class also harbored a particular
occupational role that would be held responsible for invasion and dependency alike.l3

Historically speaking the rural furnishing merchant was the axis upon which tenant
farmers became entrapped within debt peonage and it was the role that received more of
the blame than the overall economic system. This critical outlook originated with the lack
of national and state bank involvement in agriculture and the corresponding rise of rural
banks in the South. Beginning with the National Banking Act enacted during Civil War,
national banks were discouraged from developing agricultural regions through the amount
of capital requirements and deposit restrictions required of farmers. Subsequently, only
20 of the 1,688 national banks organized during first three years after the war were
established in five Southern states; of these, five had already failed or closed by 1869.
Likewise, by 1868, only 14 state-chartered banks were in operation in five cotton states
and 10 of them were located in New Orleans while 2 were in Mobile, both large
commercial centers. There were no state banks at all at this time in South Carolina or
Georgia. From 1868 to 1880, the number of national banks grew in the South from 15 to
42 and state-chartered from 14 to 49. However, most were opened in urban areas.M

As the number of small towns (population fewer than 3,000) rose from 12 to 76

between 1868 and 1880, rural banks acted as intermediaries with city, state, and nation.

68

Mostly uncharted, private banks, they usually were an “adjunct to some other business,
most often a general store.” Whereas both national and state banks largely restricted their
financing to large landowners and merchants, rural banks provided the link to more
extensive financial services in the cities and also largely confined operations to large
landowners and merchants. In turn, the local furnishing merchant then extended credit to
smaller farmers.IS

Legally the furnishing merchant gained protection from the crop lien laws that
were passed by Southern legislatures in the years immediately following the Civil War.
And, the widespread acceptance of the crop-lien system enabled a financial network to
grow where the merchant was placed in the middle, combining “the consolidating role of
the planter with the intermediary role of the factor,” that is, the cotton factor or antebellum
middleman. With this postbellum role, the rural fiJrnishing merchant was able to develop
a “territorial monopoly,” where the farmer was forced to conduct all of his business at the
merchant’s store and was charged usurious interest rates on loans. Eventually, a uniform
economic system emerged in the South based upon these arrangements, placing the farmer
in a dependent and exploited position, or “locked in” to cotton production by the
merchant. At the same time, the South continued its dependence on the cotton crop,
which by 1880 made up fifty percent of the acreage in the Cotton South. As new lands
opened to cotton production, the fumishing merchant system spread to these areas.16

In The Hamlet, William Faulkner captures the role of furnishing merchant quite
effectively by writing:

He owned most of the good land in the country and held mortgages on most of the

rest. He owned the store and the cotton gin and the combined grist mill and
blacksmith shop in the village proper and it was considered, to put it mildly, bad

69

luck for a man of the neighborhood to do his trading or gin his cotton or grind his
meal or shoe his stock anywhere else.17

“As landlord, storekeeper, and creditor, the country merchant became the most
important economic power in the Southern countryside.” Hence, furnishing merchants
were blamed for creating a “‘moneyed tyranny’” and for reducing “‘its victims to a coarse
species of servile slavery,” especially since many thought they had become rich during
the war through cotton speculation and were able to dictate the terms of credit to suffering
farmers. However, the blame actually extended beyond them to Northern industry and
investment. Because “the rural merchant” was actually “linked to northern wholesalers
and cotton manufacturers,” the trail of dependency stretched beyond him. As cotton
factors before the war had been political and social allies of planters, postwar factors
shrugged off this relationship. “The postwar crop lien system gave the merchants
considerable independence from these local powers, for which they traded greater
dependence on northern manufacturers and wholesalers.” In order to compete with this
new middleman, planters had to form new alliances. Gradually, planters joined the ranks
of the furnishing merchant and vice versa. However, “while some planters were becoming
storekeepers, others were losing their lands to storekeepers,” which meant the planter
domain was giving way to the new landlord class composed of merchant-planters.18

The Hamlet also comments upon the ways in which the plantation hierarchy was
threatened by these developments. “The Hamlet begins by surveying the end of one order
and its displacement by another,” a displacement that is rooted in the immediate aftermath
of the war and which came to fruition during the 18705 and 18805. In The Hamlet a
struggle for domination occurs between rising poor whites and the embattled planter order,

and reveals the struggle of the planter-elites that occurred alongside the rise of the

70

merchants and the fusion of the planter with the merchant class. Through the Snopes
family, Faulkner presents “a class of poor whites rising to usurp the positions of the
peasantry and the old aristocracy and dominate the community.” Yet, he also shows that
this ascension was only possible through the alliance of particular classes.l9

As a comparative lens reveals, class fusions were an essential element of
industrial-colonial transformations that enabled the merchant class to gain power and the
planter class to maintain it. In England, for example, industrial development during the
Puritan Revolution in the seventeenth century brought about a fiision between the landed
upper classes and the bourgeoisie. Similar to the American South, an alliance formed
between parliament and the capitalistic tide where the “aristocratic order survived, but in a
new shape, for money more than birth was now its basis.” Similar developments also
occurred in France, China, and Japan where revolutions leading to modernization caused
the old order to retain social, economic, and political power through a merger with the
developing commercial class. In India where colonialism flourished from 1750 to 1850, a
system was formed on the basis that “the landlord and the moneylender took the economic
surplus away from the peasantry.” As in the US, British policy also supported and
advanced the landlord’s position, creating a “parasitic landlordism.” However in the
South, “the country merchant gave a local twist to the American situation” and its
landlordism. While other nations fused classes, in the Southern states of the US, “the
country merchant was often the larger planter,” and it was through this occupational and
class fusion that new merchants were able to gain power and that former planters managed

to retain it.20

71

As “the structural basis of their wealth and power had been altered,” planters
experienced the encroachment of merchants upon their class position. While “planter
persistence” varied, and in some states like Alabama, they appeared to have been able to
defeat the “merchant thrust for power,” in most of the region complete displacement was
only avoided through a merger with this new class of middleman. As “the crop lien
allowed the postwar merchants a source of additional profit that had previously been
reserved for the planters,” they wrestled income away from them. Moreover, their control
over labor through the lien forced planters to join their ranks in order to maintain a hold
over this power structure. The pressing issue then was a class restructuring that in many
ways might have resulted not in planter-merchants, but “the triumph of merchants over
planters, the destruction of the old planter elite, and their replacement in the agrarian
economy by the merchant c1 ass.”21

In The Hamlet, Will Vamer’s store is the site of this class conflict because the
store had displaced the plantation house as “the new center of economic power and
privilege.” Like the inhabitants of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Country, planters in the
South began to think that “a low, unprincipled class of traders, keepers of small shops”
had become the primary force behind the threat to their livelihood. In their minds. these
“shark storekeepers” became primary responsible for their underlying anxiety about class
instability.22

The Hamlet also illustrates how this anxiety was provoked through the character of
F lem Snopes. Snopes works to renegotiate his families’ sharecropper status with the
Varners and the social community by first gaining a clerk position at the store and then

continues to gain control and power throughout the story. As Flem assumes control of the

town, Faulkner demonstrates that he is a new kind of merchant in the South who is able to
monopolize the local area. While the “limited market of the southern general store
permitted the merchant to extend credit service to tenants farmers whom banks and other
financial institutions avoided,” they were thus enabled to create their territorial monopoly.
Through charging interest rates that averaged around 60% and combining the roles of
merchant and landlord, the “territorial monopoly of the merchant was made even more
secure.”23 Like Will Varner, Snopes also represents the class role implicated in producing
the mental conditions that are associated with a colonized state of mind.

This central role was connected to the colonized conditions of anxiety and trauma
because the furnishing merchant shifted power away from the planter class while it
operated under the dominion of Northern capital and industry. Snopes represents the
furnishing merchant that shouldered most of the blame for the re-shaped economic and
social environment. He becomes the focus of the town’s hatred, and like the historical
furnishing merchant, Flem is vilified as the corrupt element behind the inequities and
impoverishment of a colonial economy, instead of the sharecropping system and Northern
capitalism. To the villagers, F lem is the one who is “taking over the power and thus
responsibility and blame for the store and the entire spider’s web of economic
relationships it represents.”24

“Thus Flem comes to represent the mysteriously unlocalizable unknown in the
workings of their economy.” And, he becomes the anxiety focal point to which the
morbid fear of the displaced and disadvantaged community directs its colonized and
confused state of mind. The character Ratliff, for example, reflects this state of mind by

harboring a paranoid perspective that either underestimates the Snopeses “as no more than

73

unruly pawns or cogs securely contained within a system,” or he overestimates Flem as
“the untouchable mastermind who is in control of the whole weblike system.”25 Ratliff is
an extension of that colonized perspective that began with the displacement of the
plantation order, grasping furiously for explanations and instead finding confusion and
anxiety. However, Ratliff will eventually escape this confusing state of mind through his
humor and the fact that he is not economically impoverished. The poor farmer Arrnistid,
on the other hand, who is trapped in the colonial economy, is left at the end of the book in
a state of madness and desperation. Planters and ex-Confederates also struggled with
desperation, displayed an irregular mindset, and fought to ward off intrusion into their

mental and societal sphere.

74

he Curse ’ otton d the New South vemen

“The Prostrate South” took its name initially from defeat, but “the poverty and
lethargy that hung over the South in the years after the war” eventually invested the phrase
with its most germane meaning. Eventually economic prostration would become the most
pressing concern, but would always be underlined by the bitterness of defeat. Since part
of the drive behind secession had been “to invigorate economic growth and destroy
colonial dependence on the North,” the reassertion of this position with defeat was
painfully ironic. Not only did regional dependence seem inescapable, “but the smashing
victories of the Union troops seemed to symbolize the hopelessness of the venture in the
first place.” The years of Reconstruction would reinforce this message with an increased
prostration while the North continued to prosper.”

While “the structure of the postemancipation economy was established well within
the decade following the Civil War,” the effects of this structure became much more
conspicuous as the years ran past Reconstruction. From 1878-1880, for example, per
capita crop output was only 63.5 percent of the 1859 level. By 1&0, only 8.9% of the
cropland in the Cotton South was still on plantation farms; over 80% was now operated by
tenants with 72% sharecropped and the rest rented for cash. The region persisted in
concentrating upon cotton production after the war because the sharecropping system
blocked farmers from operating independently. “They were locked in to cotton
production.” Moreover, the problem was that “the South did not take control of the
production or of the marketing of its staple, either before or after the war.” This was left
to Northern industries. Therefore, the ultimate curse of King Cotton was the lack of

prosperity in the South.”

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At the same time, transportation and manufacturing sectors did experience a rapid
regeneration. By 1870, “the physical restoration and rehabilitation of southern railroads
was practically complete” and the manufacturing in five of the cotton states regained its
prewar level of activity.28 Southern industrialists clamored for more development of this
kind to reshape the economy and lift the region out of dependence. These advocates of a
“New South” thus began a movement to capitalize upon recent improvements.

In April 1870, Edwin DeLeon published the essay that might have given the
movements its name. His essay “The New South: What It is Doing, and What It Wants,”
appeared in Putnam ’5 Magazine of South Carolina and voiced approval of industry and
railroad expansion in the region as well as reconciliation with the North. He wrote that he
welcomed “utterly overtuming the old system,” and in 1874, he published a series of
articles about his tour of the South in magazines such as Harper’s and The Southern
Magazine. These articles were read widely and the term “New South” became attached to
the growing movement 29

The main advocates of the New South movement were born in the 18505. Not old
enough to fight in the war, “they passed through childhood and adolescence under its
influence and reached maturity during the Reconstruction era.” Hence, “their formative
years coincided with the period of their region’s greatest failure.” These years would have
a great influence upon them and the thoughts they expressed for reviving the South. As
they matured, the Reconstruction period did have “a sobering effect on them,” but they
were not like the generation before them, the “veterans of secession and defeat - they were
full of youthful optimism about the future.” From the New South perspective, that future

resided in industrial development.30

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One of the most prominent advocates of this industrial course was Henry Woodfin
Grady. From Athens, Georgia he was only age fifteen at the end of the war. His father
had been the co—owner of “a notable mercantile establishment,” and Grady’s youth was
“commercial in essence” with “none of the genteel leisure allegedly characteristic of the
planter class.” In the 18705 he began his journalist career with newspapers in Georgia and
in 1876 was hired by the Atlanta Constitution, “the joumal that he would mold into the
major organ of the New South movement.” Until his death in 1889, “he preached the
gospel of the New South in editorial columns and in frequent public addresses.”31

Industrial advocates like Grady looked upon the prostrate South in their formative
years and searched for ways to revive the region. As “the burgeoning wealth of the North
was incessantly thrust before them as evidence of their backwardness,” they came to the
conclusion that the region’s difficulties were not attributable to the war and def eat. Rather,
they thought they sprang from dependence on agriculture dating back to before the war
and the lack of movement toward industry in the postwar years. As another prominent
New South spokesman Daniel A. Tompkins stated, “long training as an agricultural people
has brought to us a certain abiding degree of prejudice against manufactures and
commerce.” Hence, the New South advocates argument for industrialization would focus
on severely criticizing the Old South and its institutions. For his part, Tompkins spoke of
the “estrangement” between the North and South because of slavery. He also thought that
the “paralysis of Southern society” was due to “slavery and to the shock of its sudden
disappearance.” The slave plantation economy had held the region back and the current
advocates of its surrogate replacement were doing the same. Tompkins and other New

South advocates thought that those who continued to hold on to Old South ideas were the

cause of prostration — they were “living in the dying conditions of ante-bellum life,” and
making the South die with it.32

Another outspoken critic of the Old South was William Darrah Kelley. “Pig Iron”
Kelley was a congressman and industrialist from Pennsylvania who “traveled widely in
the South, urging, scolding, and advising the region.” While not a native, and a radical
Republican, New South Southerners took heed of his advice and he “played a major role
in formulating the New South creed.” Kelley pressed against the planter class. He
thought that their “fatally vicious economic and agricultural theories” had not been
destroyed with the war. In the 18805, particularly in the Manufacturers’ Record, Kelley
voiced his critique of the Old South and its advocates. In order to promote his vision and
critique, certain cities would be selected as the “model city of the South.” Anniston,
Alabama, for example was presented in 1887 article as “Anniston: A Romance of the New
South.”33

In contrast Kelley also wrote in December 1886: “In 1867 the South was a land of
desolation, her fields were f enceless and uncultivated.” However, all that had changed he
claimed. Like the growing cities that he displayed, “the systems of railroad that now
traverse the South are as perfect in the construction of road-bed, track, and bridges, and in
passenger cars and the means provided for the transportation of freight, as those of the
North?”4 According to Kelley, by the 18805 the New South had risen out from the
languishing past and was now equal to the North.

To an audience in Montgomery, Alabama in 1867 he had said, particularly to the
planters, “In your devotion to your peculiar system of labor, you have forgotten that iron

and coal are the most potent agents of modern civilization.” In Kelley’s and other New

78

South advocates eyes, the destructive past and the continuation of an equally destructive
labor system had previously held the region back from modern life. The region needed to
concentrate on its mineral resources and growing industries to pull it into the future.
According to Kelley and others, “Iron is the muscle of modern civilization, and coal —
ignited coal - is the nervous force that animates it. ”35

Kelley had also claimed, “1 have said that prior to the war the South neither had,
nor could have, great cities.” However, this claim was no long accurate. For example, he
stated, “Nashville is a beautiful city,” one that “has become a manufacturing and
commercial centre.” In fact, “Nashville’s manufacturers increase in variety as rapidly as
they do in volume.” Likewise, he argued, “for so young a city,” Chattanooga’s “industries
are widely diversified.” While coal and iron were on the of top the list, he made it clear
that other industries like “its lumber trade, especially in white woods,” were growing and
“claimed to be second only to that of Chicago.”36

In comparison, after the war Birmingham, Alabama, “an interior town,” “was a
tenantless wilderness,” but had by the 18805 become “an industrial centre.” Writing about
Anniston again, also “an interior town of Alabama,” Kelley claimed that “a direct trade
with China” had been established, “at least to the extent of part of the productions of its
cotton-mill.” And, about Atlanta, Georgia he wrote: “In 18671 saw the ruins of what had
been the little city of Atlanta, which had prided itself upon the amount of cotton its
merchants handled annually. It was literally in ruins — I may say ashes; but as I looked
upon it now I saw that I had then looked upon the ashes from which a phoenix was to

rise.” The Atlanta of 1887 was a re-born phoenix leading the South out from despair and

ruination. The 1880 census, Kelley stated, reported a population of over 50,000. The city

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that Kelley now observed contained “great business houses” and “elegant residences of
Atlanta’s millionaires.’”7

Along with his promotion of these cities and towns, Kelley took particular issue
with the sharecropping South when he wrote about South Pittsburg, Tennessee in 1886. It
was the current system that continued to produce “old-time poor white cotton—growers,”
holding the South back with its “unremunerative employment in the service of King
Cotton.” Accordingly, Kelley spoke of a New South that will provide “a diversification of
employments,” and bring wealth to all classes. In particular, it was the “booming” towns
that would cast life into the South and cast the planter aside.38

With all this promotion, however, Kelley himself had to concede that “last year
[1886] we imported more than $43,000,000 worth of iron, which she [the South] could
have produced had her material resources been thoroughly developed, and her laboring
people been trained in manual dexterity and industrial art.” Development and training
would certainly have been beneficial to the region. However, the New South way of
bringing it about encouraged the ongoing colonial relationship that Kelley described. For
all his previous claims about the iron and coal of the South, these resources were still
being imported. Moreover, production was primarily directed at delivering raw materials
for completion in the North. Regardless of all his insistence on the rise of industry,
however impressive and accurate, the region was still very much dependent and
underdeveloped. For all his boosterism, as one respondent phrased it, “your assertion that
the South can ever make her own steel rails from native ores is mere swagger. ”39

However, Kelley had pinpointed one of the predominant factors for dependent

development in the South — “the artless and exhausting culture of cotton.” He stated that

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9”

many “agriculturists” “know nothing of ‘the art or science of cultivating the earth, and
did not “practise ‘husbandry with frugality and thrift.”’ Thus, he accurately criticized the
lack of crop diversification and improvement of the soil that accompanied the cycle of
cotton dependency. Moreover, he also admitted, “the same wretched poverty prevails
among the Southern people now, twenty—two years after the close of the war.” As the
result of “fatally vicious economic and agricultural theories,” whatever prosperity had
developed was “to be found only in the cities, and not all of them share it.” “Towns, also,
that are situated upon the new railroads” had also shared in some of this success. Yet,
“their growth has been largely at the expense of less fortunate towns that have either stood
still or have actually deteriorated.” That is, their growth is not so much a sign of progress,
but of “rural sickness?”O

The Secretary of the Interior L.Q.C. Lamar, from whom the previous assessment
was taken, also commented on the mistaken notions that could be concluded from this
disparity in progress. For someone visiting the South might have received “an erroneous
impression” upon seeing “the towns at the various stations apparently thriving, the centres
of new commercial enterprises, and he naturally concludes that the South is making very
rapid progress.” The traveler did not know that “the man who opened a new store at one
of these places has probably removed there from some town distant from the railroad
where he closed his former business, or the man who is building a new house is possibly a
farmer who has become discouraged in the vain effort to make a living planting cotton,
and has sold out and come to town hoping to do better.” As for the capital investment that

has flowed from the North — “I only say that the returns have not yet been realized.”

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Hence, wrongful impressions about prosperity more accurately described the region rather
than visions of affluence.“

Kelley concluded the letter by asking Lamar how to “account for the apparent
stagnation” in the South. “By the depression of the planting interest,” Lamar responded.
“They are dependent upon the agriculture of the country for their trade.” “But the crop to-
day is not proportionally as great as it was before the war. It must be remembered that the
population of the South increased nearly 50 per cent between 1860 and 1880. As
agriculture is almost our only industry, and as cotton is our principal product, if we only
held our own we ought in 1880 to have marketed 50 per cent more cotton than we did
before the war. But the truth is that the large crop of last year [1886] was only 25 per cent
greater than that of 1860.” Thus, these depressed economic conditions, “especially when
one goes away from the railroads,” announced a pattern of colonial dependency that
appeared to be entrenched in the region. While spokesman like Kelley promoted their
vision and denounced the King Cotton and the ways of the Old South, they clung to the
belief that industry would resolve this dependency. However, they needed to find a way
to lift the farmlands out from its deleterious cycle. They sought to reverse the situation
where: “Improvements are not kept up, and there is a general air of poverty, want of thrift,
and the allowing of things to go to decay?”

Since the South continued to be predominantly rural and agricultural in the 18805,
the New South program also needed to include it its plan. Farming to these advocates,
however, was to be made up of the small, independent kind. The movement wanted to
attract the small farmer who was “driven to ruin by his persistent dependence on cotton.”

Their plan for more diversification and division of the land looked to take on the

domination of cotton. New South advocates recognized that the tyranny of cotton under
the direction of Northern capital had “put the farmer at the mercy of a capricious
international market and tied him to a credit system that drove him deeper into debt each
year.” They also recognized that “profits from the cotton crop went out of the region,
never to return.” Industrial development with agricultural diversification was supposed to
break this cycle. Correspondingly, the “newly diversified farmer” would “replace the
large planter.” Thus, this movement was also directed at class restructuring by seeking to
displace the large landholding planter, or by this time, the planter-merchant."3

Beyond a threat to the ideological foundations of the planter class, the New South
movement represented a threat of displacement As planters had felt themselves to be
embattled already with Reconstruction’s class and racial turmoil, this movement continued
to harness the potential “disappearance of the planter and the ‘all-cotton plan’ which he
had created.” Both the emphasis on industry and agrarian reform pressed upon the planter
class and provoked class conflict. As New South advocates attacked slavery and
“lambasted planters as soft, self -indul gent snobs who were doomed to extinction in a
rawer, more competitive society,” they also continued to inflame their anxiety and trauma.
“The New South advocates proposed rural democracy and yeoman agriculture and
launched an assault on plantations, planter hegemony, and cotton.” At the same time, they
extended their hand to Northern investment, or to the primary intruder from
Reconstruction.“

Lacking capital and skilled labor to bring about these changes, “the New South
prophets launched a vigorous crusade for outside capital and immigration.” These

prophets sent out vast amounts of “industrial information” to solicit investment and “to tell

non—Southerners where they should come to make their fortunes.” Through articles,
brochures and the like, they promoted the South. Daniel A. Tompkins was among a
“group of New South publicists” that “conspicuously championed many of the changes”
associated with industry and outside investment. In particular, Tompkins passionately
promoted “the benefits of industrialization and the merits of commercial values.” He
seemed all for marching into a New South future. At the same time, the planter and ex-

Confederate class resisted this program of change."5

Daniel A. flfompkins, the Psychology of Colonization, and the Lost Cause

 

As a prominent industrial leader, Daniel Tompkins (1851-1914) would own three
cotton mills and run the Charlotte Daily Observer and the Greenville (South Carolina)
News. Originally from South Carolina, Tompkins went to his home state’s university
before going to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. With a civil
engineer’s degree earned in 1873, he worked first at Bessemer Iron Works in Troy and
then at Bethlehem Iron Company in Pennsylvania, where he spent ten years. He
eventually went to Charlotte, North Carolina in 1883 at age 32 and three years later
became involved in cottonseed oil mills. In all, Tompkins “built 500 cottonseed oil mills
and 200 cotton-spinning and —weaving mills in an area extending from Texas into
Virginia.” Needless to say, Tompkins had become established in industrial enterprise and
became a leading advocate of it. Before he gained controlling interest in the Charlotte
Chronicle in 1891, Tompkins was a well-known writer and speaker. In both activities he
unreservedly supported economic advancement of the South through industry. He was so
outspoken and successful in this area that President Mckinley appointed him to the US.
Industrial Commission in 1902.4”

Tompkins’ grandfather had been a first cousin of John C. Calhoun and Tompkins
“had roots in the plantation South.” His father had been a rich planter in South Carolina
with two thousand acres of land and forty slaves. However, born in 1851, Tompkins like
other New South advocates came of age during the Civil War and it appears that his
experience with it and its aftermath pushed him away from these roots. When he moved
to Charlotte, North Carolina in 1882, “he was to make his reputation as a promoter and

exemplar of the New South creed.” As an industrialist, he would become the president of

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three cotton mills and the director of eight more. He also became owner of three
newspapers with the Charlotte Observer being the most prominent and was a regular
contributor to manufacturing journals.47

As a young man, before his most notable accomplishments, Tompkins received
letters that probably influenced his motivation for industrial development and reveal the
instability of the early 18705, the transition years of the South. For example, Eliza R.
Mims, a friend from South Carolina, wrote in October of 1870: “I have had ‘the blues’ all
the week — was almost afraid to write to you for fear I would give them to you.” The letter
expresses a common enough mood. However, her remedy for it is particular to the South.
While Tompkins pursued his degree at Rensselaer, Mims sought to ameliorate her
situation in the South through “the Waverly Novels.” “I have read only one of them, ‘The
Bride of Lammermoore,’ and think I will like his (Scott’s) works very much.” That is, she
reached for Sir Walter Scott and his romantic influence upon the South to ease the years of
transition while Tompkins was pragmatically studying engineering to bring improvement
to the region.“8

Another letter from Mims on Halloween of the same year continued to express a
solemn mood. While she felt “as if buriedfialive,” “Mamie” had “found it so difficult of
late to write a letter,” and “that she thought she must be in her dotage.” Likewise, Mims
“concluded that I couldn’t be very far behind her.”"9 While these expressions may have
been hyperbole, including the reference to dotage, or a state of mental decay, they also
appear to be very aligned with the social and economic world around them. These

sentiments seem to be attuned to the milieu of defeat and colonization.

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The following May, 1871, however, Eliza left nothing in doubt about the source of
her afflictions. She writes to Tompkins: “Our poor old State is indeed in a terrible
condition, everything grows worse and worse.” Her words resonated with many
Southerners as economic and social conditions appeared grim across the South. She also
captured a widespread response to these conditions — “Our only help is from a Higher
Power.”50 In Mims’ letter, one can recognize the feelings of prostration that were first
associated with defeat and then became attached to a dependent economy. Moreover, if
her letters expressed gloom, foreboding, and a general anxiety about the postwar South’s
economic situation, another friend of Tompkins, E. Keese focused his anxiety and anger at
a precise source.

Writing to “Gus,” as Mims also called Tompkins, in November 1873 from
Edgefield, South Carolina, Keese explicitly commented on the colonial economy and its
ramifications.

I do verily believe that this infernal confusion in business circles is the result of a

design - a cunning scheme to make the unfortunate planter pay his debts, satisfy

liens, with cotton as a sacrifice for the benefit of the heartless speculator.
As he pinpointed the plight of the planter, and farmer, Keese also clarified just who was
behind this speculation scheme. Referencing the “principles of Political Economy” he
wrote:

Where then is the cause for so much distrust, dismay, + suffering? The poor

planter belongs to his factor, the factor belongs to Wall Street, + Wall Street

belongs to I_._u_(;if___e_rl 5‘

While Mims had looked to a higher power for assistance, Keese blamed a lower

one for the decrepit economy and the related suffering in the South. As he held the

growing entrenchment of the sharecroppin g system and the role of the furnishing

responsible for economic prostration, Keese also focused on the supporting source —
Northern industry and finance. His sentiments describe the colonial relationship as it
evolved in the 18705 and 18805.

Collectively, these letters support the description of the South in economic and
social turmoil, and they might have provided Tompkins with some of his motivation for
advocating New South industrial development The same conditions that these letters
describe also prompted planters and ex-Confedcrates to embrace the Lost Cause
movement. With the rise of New South ideas and the continuation of economic
prostration, proponents of the Lost Cause also directed their ideology at these
developments. “Ironically, the plans for a New South were popularized in the same period
that saw the triumph of the myths of the Old South and the Lost Cause.” Accordingly, the
Lost Cause became a movement that attempted to prevent the advancement of the New
South. If a “central theme in planters’ early postwar lives was a sense of powerlessness,”
as the war years fell further into memory, they felt a sense of dependence.” At the end of
the 18705 and into the 18805, they also confronted the growing strength of the New South
movement, and together with other Lost Cause advocates attempted to diminish its
influence over the South.

By 1868, Daniel Harvey Hill, who had published his magazine The Land We Love
in 1866 in North Carolina, provided an indication of the position of Lost Cause advocates.
He came to “attack” “the grasping drive for material success” that the New South
movement represented. He was against the New South and its “new industrial oligarchy”
— “a hundred-fold less respectable and venerable, than the landed aristocracy which the

spirit of the age has swept away?” As the burgeoning New South movement promoted a

plan of industry, accepting defeat, and moving toward reconciliation with the North, many
like Hill rejected it and sought to stop its advance.

Edward A. Pollard, who had provided the name for the Lost Cause movement, had
also voiced concern about industry and materialism and its effect on the South. In 1866,
he had written of a “danger” from without and within based upon “material prosperity.”
He warned against bringing in “Northern capital and labour; to build mills and factories
and hotels and gilded caravansaries;” or making the South into “rivals in the clattering and
garish enterprise of the North.” Others like Albert Taylor Bledsoe followed Pollard’s
charge. He had become editor of the Southern Review in order to “damn Yankee
civilization.” Bledsoe had founded this publication in 1867 and served as editor until his
death in 1877. He had felt the “whole spirit of Christianity” was against Northern ideals.“

Thus, Dost Cause advocates “heaped abuse on what they considered to be the
brutal materialism of Northern civilization.” Their wrath also became directed at the New
South because of its solicitation of this materialism. As protectors of the “pure” and
revered traditions of the South, they attempted to stave off the imposition of the “god of
Yankee civilization in the shaken temple of the land of purity.” Even if the New South
movement did not consider themselves to be committing any such act of desecration, to
adherents of the Lost Cause, “the New South was premised upon the repudiation and
annihilation of the values of the Old South?”5

By the 18805 the New South movement was taking precedence within the region,
and to followers of the Lost Cause it represented “the greatest danger to traditional
values.” Correspondingly, their primary source of anxiety and fear shifted from defeat to

colonization because Southern “virtue” seemed most threatened by Northern industry and

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their Southern counterparts. Accordingly monument dedications, Confederate Memorial
Day, and veteran group meetings also embraced the “Lost Cause sermon, prophesying
Southern doom if virtue was not preserved.” Most prominently, Southern preachers
confronted the dangers of the New South, taking up the charge against New South
materialism through Lost Cause rhetoric?"

As the “danger of the South’s future degradation was readily embodied in the
North’s image,” preachers like Bishop J PB. Wilmer in Louisiana wamed against
succumbing to its pressure. He proclaimed in 1875, “in no age have men been so eager to
combine for purposes of worldly gain.” Three years earlier, the Presbyterian minister
Benjamin Morgan Palmer in Virginia spoke about “‘ the impending crisis’ of the social
effects of industrialization in the South.” In fact he contended, wfhe spirit of materialism
infused into all the transactions of business and common life, is the Angel of Pestilence
dropping the seeds of death from its black wing.” As this spirit “spread like a leprosy over
the land” during the 18705, the ministers voiced the strongest criticism of it, and their
efforts lead to even greater denouncement in the 18805. During this decade, the
Presbyterian minister Robert Lewis Dabney became “the most bitter advocate of the old
ways,” providing a voice for others who shared his disdain for the intrusion of
capitalism.57

However the target of his denunciation lay in the South as well. Dabney’s
sentiments attacked the New South movement as much as Northern materialism. By the
18805, the movement with its program of renewal had gained considerable attention. Its
growth caused concern and drew rebuke from those most concerned with the South’s

value system. However, as a new South seemed unavoidable, Dabney and the community

he represented did not outright reject the necessary turn towards industry. What he railed
against was the “accompanying byproduct, materialism.” He saw in the new too much of
the North, and warned Southerners not “to BECOME LIKE THE CONQUERERS.” The
means to preventing this lay in the values of Lost Cause values, which Dabney recognized
“as the only hope for preserving Southern virtue.” Like other Lost Cause advocates,
Dabney was “similarly depressed by a course of events which seemed to him to repudiate
the principles of the old regime.” He claimed that whoever made “selfish, material good
its god” was “doomed.”58

Reverend Dabney thought of himself as “the Cassandra of Yankeedom.” During
the postwar period when US. railroads expanded to 200,000 miles from 9,000, industrial
workers tripled, and gross national product expanded by 10 times over a half century.
Dabney remained a strong critic of this growing industrial society. However, his criticism
was not driven by “convulsive labor violence or the continuing plight of the urban poor”
like other reformers towards the latter part of the century. He was driven first by the
effects of defeat and then the related invasion of Northern industry. Like other planters
and ex-Confederates who aligned themselves with the Lost Cause, “Dabney held fast to
the obsolescent principles of an agrarian past and an outmoded civilization” at a time
when these ideas were being threatened from outside and inside the region.”

As “the son of a slaveowning planter, Dabney was a product of the Old South”; he
was “nurtured in an ideological cocoon” which viewed the proper South as “the apotheosis
of that agrarian, rural society which alone could produce and sustain a free people.” He

thought slavery was a “beneficent institution” that was supported by religion and he had

been aligned with the Confederacy from the Battle of First Bull Run, serving then as

91

chaplain and returning to the war’s end at Petersburg. After the war, Presbyterians saw
him “as one of their finest teachers of divinity and as the southern Church’s ablest
theologian.” Concurrently, he became known as “one of the most vitriolic and unrelenting
defenders of the Lost Cause.” The collapse of the Confederacy had devastated him
mentally and Reconstruction embittered his already intense outlook. With time many
even in the South came to see him as “a relic obsessed by incurable Yankee-phobia.” In
response, in 1883 he displayed some signs of withdrawal by removing himself to Texas
into “semi-exile.” Yet, he continued to embrace the principles of the Old South and the
rhetoric of the Lost Cause, and when he died in 1898, “Dabney was as defiantly
unreconstructed as ever.” ”0

In life he had aimed his criticism more specifically at corporations and the
concentration of economic wealth and power. He saw industrial “captains of industry”
like Andrew Carnegie as immoral and corrupting, part of the “slimy anaconda embrace of
the money oligarchy.” This anaconda, he claimed, also had a stranglehold on government
and was responsible for the rising social problems both nationally and regionally. Dabney
located the brunt of the problem in the predicament of farmers. Industrial monopolies
were keeping the prices of necessities high and charging excessive charges in shipping.
His analysis was congruent not only with the Farmer’s Alliances, social gospel preachers,
and Populists, but with many twentieth-century historians. Yet, there was a crucial
difference. Dabney was much more concerned with “unmasking the evils of the ‘Yankee
empire’ and defending the society it had crushed.”"l

While others vociferously addressed similar issues, he was unable to look beyond

the past and his antipathy that stemmed from it. Dabney “invariably returned to his

central themes: the superiority of southern ideals and institutions and the fearful
consequences of their destruction?”2 While he embraced Lost Cause ideology, he was not
capable of going beyond it. By repetitiously clinging to its tenets, he reflected a mental
state that was consumed by the past. Moreover, he demonstrated the continuing ways in
which the Lost Cause movement could be employed as a coping mechanism in connection
with the psychological condition of repetition compulsion. For Dabney and other stalwart
defenders of the Lost Cause, repetition compulsion became the primary psychological
force behind their actions. In ways that were analyzed in the first section of this study,
Dabney attempted to get at the source of affliction while at the same time wishing to avoid
it. He also demonstrated a borderline neurosis that other Lost Cause followers might have
shared.

Obsessive-compulsive disorders have been categorized with the neuroses of
neurasthenia and hysteria. All three are “linked to a particular kind of conflict between the
individual and society.” In the case of compulsive disorders, the locus of the conflict
resides in the wants of the individual in relation to the “moral imperatives” of society. For
Dabney and others from the planter/ex-Confederate class, their obsession after the
immediate postwar years became much more focused on the threat of a material society
and the degradation of morals. As “all neurotic disorders are perceived as conflicts whose
source lies in a mismatch between social expectations and norms and the individual’s
abilities to meet those norms,” obsession/repetition-compulsion was produced by the
mismatch between the changing values of the South and the minds of those clinging to the
past. As Dabney was obsessively caught in the past, he desperately held to the belief that:

“When Yankeedom destroyed itself, the Old South would achieve final, bitter

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vindication.” Since he was “confined by the orthodoxy of the Old South,” Dabney “could
offer little more than the slogans and shibboleths of the Old South.” His words and
reactions thus demonstrate a neurotic degree of repetition compulsion resting upon a
mismatch between the society of the Old and New South."3

As the former chaplain and chief of staff for Stonewall Jackson, Dabney became
“one of the most unreconcilable of the diehards.” He recognized the Lost Cause “as a
sacred trust that required theological devotion and a strong sense of denial.” Like other
planters and ex-Confederates, Dabney had also resorted to avoidance behavior because of
his intimate connection with the war and the trauma linked to it. As “Dabney was
obsessed with historical judgments about the war and Southern slaveholding,” he
defended the past while attempting to avoid the present. Particulariy in his A Defense of
Virginia and through Her of the South from 1867, he joined other Lost Cause writers in
displaying this trauma-induced behavior. However, his writings and behavior most
adamantly reflected upon the related condition of repetition compulsion. As he
transitioned with the South out of the most intense feelings for defeat, he directed his
obsession at the next major obstacle to a restored Confederacy - the New South
movement. “Until his death in 1894, Dabney was never at home in the world the war had
made. Almost as much as he hated Yankee rule, he eventually condemned the New South
movement for its materialism and anti-agrarianism.” Although not as extreme, other
evangelists of the Lost Cause also offered this type of obsessive condemnation.”4

The most fervent evangelist of the Lost Cause against the rising New South was
Reverend J. William Jones. Beyond preaching, he became secretary-treasurer of the

Southern Historical Society in 1875, which he held until 1887. He was responsible for the

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publication of the Southern Historical Society Papers in 1876, and by the late 18705 and
18805 it became the central outlet for Lost Cause. Jones used his position to direct much
of its content. Still concerned with defeat, he dedicated seven issues of the Papers to the
battle of Gettysburg. He concentrated more, however, on the “real evangelical religion
and devout piety” of the Army of Northern Virginia. Together with reverence for war
heroes like Stonewall Jackson, Jones pushed his Lost Cause message into the New South.
Recognized “as the single most important link between Southern religion and the Lost
Cause,” Jones used his position to ward off materialism and preserve a regional identity
based in virtue. Jones was also heavily involved in the activities of Confederate veterans,
especially the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia and the United Confederate
Veterans. Through these organizations, he attempted to form a blockade around the South
that preserved the past and thwarted a New South f uture.‘55

Charles Jones Jr., struggling with the bleak years of Reconstruction, had
established the Confederate Survivor’s Association of Augusta in 1879 for similar
reasons. Ultimately recognized as an “ambivalent irreconcilable,” Jones was forced to
mix “his unreconstructed zeal for Confederate memory with a pragmatic embrace of life
as it was.” While he seemed to partially deal with the trauma of defeat, however, the
advance of industry and capitalism continued to provoke anxiety. Jones was unable to
completely reconcile himself to the industrial and commercial ways of the New South. As
the catastrophe of defeat might have subsided, Jones still struggled with the effects of
materialism upon the region."6

As Robert Dabney’s said, “That people which makes selfish, material good its

God, is doomed.” Instead, the leaders of the Lost Cause thought the region needed to

95

focus on the “spirit of heroic self -sacrifice.”"7 While legions followed this path, guarding
their regional identity against the wrought of materialism, many others traveled along a
markedly ambivalent course. With the coinciding rise of Old and New South ideology,
many Southerners confronted a breach in thought. Although many were able to balance
this conflict of interests, some within the middle of this divide confronted a significant
obstacle. Accordingly, the conflict between myth-driven values and the rhetoric of

prosperity also created anxiety for those Southerners undecided about the debate.

 

96

The New South Movement and Anxiety

While not as severe as withdrawal, avoidance or repetition compulsion behavior,
anxiety related to the conflict between a mythic past and an industrial present/future was a
major factor in the South. At issue, even for those supporting the New South movement,
were “commercial values, obsession with personal profit, worship of money, and unequal
distribution of wealth.” The tension between a loyalty to regional distinctiveness and
what appeared to be tearing away that distinction resulted in a “vaguely defined anxiety”
that became associated with as well as experienced by the rising middle class. As “the
plantation aristocracy lost its political ascendancy to a new elite — a business elite of
industrialists, large merchants, and railroad officials,” they also appeared to be losing the
top position in terms of social and cultural identity. While planters and ex—Confederates
gave ground to industrialists like Tompkins and merchants like Flem Snopes, they
experienced anxiety over the ways in which this latter group began to define not only the
political terms of the region, but its value system. At the same time, this middle class
experienced anxiety over these developments and in the South during the 18705 and
18805."8

“Although perhaps the most universal of all human emotions, anxiety has been
difficult for theorists to define.” One definition of anxiety is: “a cognitive-af f ective
structure comprised of high negative affect, a sense of uncontrollability, and an attentional
shift to self-preoccupation.” In essence, “the anxious individual experiences a sense of
uncontrollability and is focused on a possible future threat or danger.” Moreover, the
condition of “anxious apprehension” indicates “anxiety is a f uture-oriented mood state in

which one is preparing to manage upcoming negative events.” As discussed, planters

 

acquired a sense of uncontrollability and self -preoccupation because of their unique
circumstances in the postwar environment. Likewise, planters and ex-Confederates that
adhered to Lost Cause principles experienced anxiety in their struggle to deal with the
present and the upcoming future that appeared to be slipping from their control. In a
different manner, the new middle class also sensed a threat or danger with the coming
future because of their ambivalent position in relation to it."9 fit-
Whereas repetition compulsion behavior was a unique and particular response to

the disturbing events related to defeat and colonization, middle class anxiety reflected a

 

more widespread response to such developments. As most southemers “did not identify
completely with either side” of the new and old debate, “they worried that the social
changes they only dimly perceived but apparently feared they could not avoid would
somehow undermine southern character.” Hence, “they focused most intently on
‘commercialism,’ a vaguely defined anxiety that the new order entailed.” While Lost
Cause advocates struggled to fend off the pursuit of economic advantage over honor and
integrity, the middle class experienced also anxiety over this dilemma.70

As the New South movement helped cause this dilemma, it also attempted to
assuage the fears of Old South adherents and middle class Southerners alike. While
planter, Lost Cause, and middle class anxiety contained their own distinctions, they shared
one common factor - economic dependency. The New South movement sought to
address this factor primarily through industrial development. It also sought to provide an
alternative means of coping with the anxiety of the present and coming future.

Civil War defeat and Reconstruction humiliation had created “an atmosphere for

the growth of two images of the South that, on the surface at least, appeared to have little

in common.” Beneath this surface, however, both the Lost Cause and New South
movements looked to aid a suffering region and restore its collective psychology and
identity. For one movement, “defeat and despondency called forth a collection of
romantic pictures of the Old South and a cult of the Lost Cause that fused in the
Southerner’ s imagination to give him an uncommonly pleasing conception of his region’s
past.” This uncommon conception based in the ideas of a past plantation civilization
infiltrated the minds of those trapped with confronting the realism of defeat and the
hardship of dependency. However, since “this noble order had been assaulted and
humiliated by the North,” besides providing a pleasing escape, it was also “a source of
poignancy and bitterness.” The New South movement looked to pull the South out from
this bitterness through other means than those employed by the Lost Cause. Since “no

,9 ‘6

amount of nostalgia could gainsay the fact that the South in the generation after
Appomattox was desperately poor, alternately despised, ridiculed, or pitied, and saddled
with many unwelcome burdens,” the New South movement sought to cast the nostalgic
past aside. It was a movement that did not want to swim in the rose-colored past.
Essentially, it spoke to those Southerners who were either ready to embrace the future or
undecided about it."

“During the first half —decade after the war Southerners responded in a variety of
ways to the crushing defeat they had sustained and to the revolutionary consequences of
emancipation.” Many among the planter/ex-Confederate class “hoped to restore the old
order” as near as possible and refused “to abandon their agrarian economic and social

order.” As previously discussed, some even resorted to withdrawal and many more

avoided the present through the Lost Cause. For most Southerners, however, “total

resistance to change or flight from their country were unsatisfactory solutions.” Many
wanted to put defeat behind them and confront the challenges presently before them. The
New South movement wished to aid this process. It built its program on being prepared
for the future and meeting the anxiety that accompanied it."2

If anxiety describes a particular state of mind that anticipates danger and attempts
to prepare for it, many anxiety-prone Southerners sought to prepare for the danger
associated with the socioeconomic changes within the region. Hence, the New South
movement formed in order to be prepared for the dangers of continued poverty and
subsistence living. Hence, coinciding “anxiety or a preparedness for danger”
accompanied this movement because those inside and outside of it worried about its
success and the future of the South. In contrast, the Lost Cause demonstrated a failure to
adequately prepare for these dangers. That is, “the evidence for lack of preparedness —
repetition,” marked the Lost Cause, and its “compulsion to repeat must be regarded as
leading from unpreparedness.” This unpreparedness stemmed from the trauma of defeat
and Reconstruction. The New South movement, on the other hand, took a pro-active
approach to confronting the psychological and physical dangers ahead. Moreover, while
its advocates focused on releasing the past instead of harnessing it, their means of dealing
with anxiety and trauma was to purge the memory of its marks.73

“Freud (1959) was the first major theorist to recognize the therapeutic importance
of both reactivating these memories and discharging them through repetition.” Instead of
a repetition psychology that attempts to get at the source of the anxiety and fear, the New
South movement sought to elicit memories in order to release them. New South advocacy

can be viewed in terms of trying to overcome the inability of the psyche to get at the true

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source of trauma by instead discharging thoughts of it. “It has been well established that
the human brain regularly attempts through a variety of cognitive mechanisms to avoid or
inhibit unpleasant emotion-eliciting thoughts and experiences.” As discussed, the Lost
Cause functioned according to this avoidance and inhibiting paradigm. Since it has also
been established that the brain also tries to “discharge the affective component” to return
the mind to a balanced state, the New South movement can be seen as operating upon this
premise. It seemed to work according to a cyclic process that took into consideration the
need to expel traumatic memories. The movement appeared to recognize, “the more ,

intense the emotional experience, the greater the need for discharge.” What occurred . .,

 

through it then was a release of some of “the emotional component of the avoided -
memory.” Hence memory could be released instead of repetitiously contained."

On a societal level, this study proposes that both the Lost Cause and New South
movements worked with selective memory and both operated as psychological coping
mechanisms. As attempts at correcting the past, these movements crossed over each other
as dissimilar but associated means at trying to remedy the situation of the South. The
primary difference was that the Lost Cause focused on reviving the past, purified and
without conflict as it also tried to correct it, but the New South attempted to purge the past
in effort to relinquish it and build an industrial South, or claim that one had already been
in existence. Accordingly, as planters and ex-Confederates looked to the Lost Cause in
order to deal with defeat and a colonial relationship, New South advocates offered middle
class and other Southerners an alternative means of coping with the changing South. Just
as the Lost Cause had served as an alternative avoidance technique for the planter/ex-

Confederate class, the New South movement was an alternative to this altemative.

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However, the New South movement recognized that “the mind of the South clung
tenaciously to its past — its past seen through a rose-tinted haze,” or, at least a substantial
portion of its societal mind did. New South advocates did seek to elevate the region
through appeals to the present and future, but it also had to elicit support by paying
homage to the Old South. “For those who needed it, the Lost Cause became a tonic
against fear of social change, a preventive ideological medicine for the sick souls of the E
Gilded A ge.”7S The New South movement tried to serve another tonic, albeit flavored with

industrial progress. Yet, it also paid respect to the past and, like the host Cause, relied

 

Upon myth to do so. i I

The primary difference between history and myth during this time period was that
the latter worked to remedy the postwar psychological difficulties that Southerners
confronted. “Pride and hope were destroyed by defeat, and humiliation was added by the
Reconstruction,” and both the Lost Cause and New South movements sought to provide
myths that “gave back those very things which the Yankee had tried to take away — the
knowledge of a proud past and a noble heritage.” Henry W. Grady for one had talked
“hopefully of a new scheme of things that would enrich the region,” a scheme of industry
and scientific agriculture. The “optimistic orator from Georgia,” editor of the Atlanta
Constitution, and “the first and foremost New South spokesman,” also knew that this
social and economic message would need to be clothed in mythic terms to appeal to a
broader audience .7"

Hence, a “mythic view of the past” still operated in the 18805. The New South
movement, “bom to inspire a program of action,” also worked to meet the challenges of

the region through a mythic past. As the Old South myth had been wrapped in the

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ideology of the Lost Cause, the New South one offered another means to relief and
rejuvenation. As they advanced into the future industrialism, New South advocates still
had to “supply a salve for the bitter wounds of defeat. ”77 If defeat had become eclipsed by
economics, it still echoed loudly with many in the South and particularly with those that
most forcefully opposed their efforts — the Lost Cause adherents. For the creation of their
alternate coping mechanism, they would also need to rely upon myth. 5'
New South myths emphasized the “Southemness” of the plans for reviving the

region while advocates reshaped the past in a way that was “congenial to the New South

 

mentality; that is, they discovered in their history a heritage of nationalism and U :
industrialism.” This version of history included the idea that before slavery completely
gripped the South, the region had been “well on the way to a bright industrial future.” It
was the “peculiar institution” that interrupted this progress. In their eyes, the South was
now returning to its true course that the domination of slavery had disrupted. In this way,
the New South movement was not a repudiation of the past, just the time period that went
astray. Advocates worked to construct the past to their liking just as the Lost Cause did.
At the same time, they paid tribute to and honored the Old South.78

The New South movement was supposed to correct the “defeat, grinding poverty,
and oppression” that Southerners had known by delivering to them their “true” history.
“No one was more zealous in this mission than Henry Grady.” He commenced upon a
crusade to convince North and South alike of the New South program. He spoke about
removing the tensions between the regions as well as providing an “authentic Southern
heritage.” Grady paid homage to the “exquisite culture” of the Old South and even said,

“the civilization of the old slave regime in the South has not been surpassed, and perhaps

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will not be equaled, among men.” Yet, the movement that advocates like Grady advanced
was meant to be “substantial enough to replace the creed of the Old South.” In effect,
“they preached a new set of values as a primary requisite to both collective and individual
success.” Their value system confirmed the integrity of industrial and commercial
pursuits, and validated it by drawing upon a mythic past. As an “appeal derived from its
philosophy of progress, brash confidence, and sense of boundless optimism,” it was g}
supposed to infuse Southerners with that which “had been strikingly wanting in the

Southern mentality of the early postbellum years.” It was a mental mechanism that

 

allowed younger Southerners to “rationalize the failure of their fathers and point the way i
to a future of unlimited glory.” Hence, it was focused on the future and not the past.79

Positioned opposite of postwar suffering, this ideology emphasized the
hopefulness of the future through present action. By 1880, the South they advocated “was
ready to be no longer negative, but affirmative; not just the passive resultant of its past,
but the conscious builder of its future.” Instead of being consumed by the past, “their
purpose was to rectify the errors of the past.” New South advocates were intent on
“correcting” what had gone wrong and hence their movement offered an alternate
ideology and coping mechanism. Likewise, it also contained a compulsion to address the
“backwardness” of the region.”0

In 1875, Benjamin Harvey Hill, who was also an ex-Confederate general, indicated
the root impulse behind the movement He claimed that the South had to “correct the real
cause” of failure, a “failure in the past” through New South measures. In essence, the New
South means of correction was still concerned with dealing with the past. In contrast to

Lost Cause ideology that was rooted in preserving and defending the past, or many times

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attempting to relive it, however, the New South message was directed at erasing the
mistakes of the past through present and future efforts. In this way, the New South
movement can also be viewed in terms of the psychology behind repetition compulsion.
The repetitive path of the movement was concerned with getting at the past, much like the
Lost Cause had been, but the primary difference was in the ultimate goal in regard to it.
As Hill explained in a speech at the University of Georgia, the South could “live neither in
nor by the defeated past.” The New South focus instead was upon the economics of the
present and its advocates were concerned with the ways in which dependency had
replaced defeat as the region’s most pressing concern. It represented a change from the
past controlling the psyche to colonialism pressing upon it, and the New South movement
looked to correct the past through present endeavors. They said, “The past is behind us;
we are one with the North in business and national ambition?”l

J.D.B. DeBow’s magazine in New Orleans, DeBow’s Review, had begun to issue
this corrective call back in 1866. In its “After the War” series, Southerners were told
about the necessity of industrialization, diversification, immigration, and reconciliation
since concern for the present economic conditions were the first priority. As DeBow
stated in 1867, “We have got to go to manufacturing to save ourselves.” In addition, he
continued to say that capital would “flow here to erect, equip and start every
manufacturing establishment as fast as it can profitably be run.” Attracting capital was a
major part of DeBow’s vision and the New South movement’s plan for erasing the past
and bringing national reunification.82

Francis W. Dawson, editor of the Charleston News and Courier, took up this

charge after DeBow. As the main promoter of development in South Carolina, he coined

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”J

 

 

the phrase “Bring the Cotton Mills to the Cotton.” Northern journalists traveling in the
South began to press for capital and reconciliation, or reconciliation through industrial
development, too. In the early 18705, Scribner’s Monthly launched its “The Great South”
series. Robert Somers had also published his book The Southern States Since the War in
1870 and Charles Nordhof f issued The Cotton States in the Spring and Summer of 1875 in
1876. All of these accounts presented a case for waning hostility and the coming of
reconciliation. Moreover, “these journalistic outpourings were highly optimistic in
reporting the abundant resources of the region and in designating the South as the section
of the country in which great economic advances of the future were to be made.” In
promoting the coming future, however, these efforts also helped promote the next phase of
Southern anxiety and trauma These New South outpourings “invited an invasion of
Northern men and capital into the region on terms that seemed to be unusually
advantageous to the invaders.” The conclusion of “alien Reconstruction” then “included
the ironic invitation to a new kind of Northern invasion.” What would replace defeat in
psychological primacy was this invasion. Likewise, Lost Cause advocates would direct
their mental energies at both this advance and its internal promotion. They recognized
that the New South movement could “bring them to a point of subjugation quite as serious
as the one they were trying to escape.” New South advocates, on the other hand, defended
their plans for business and national integration.83

Within their plan for nationalism, these advocates sought to elevate the region, but
the South continued to exist as “a colonial, dependent stepchild.” The national integration
that New South advocates promoted was meant to bring prosperity and prominence to the

region. Even as they solicited Northern capital, the New South advocates “resented any

106

 

 

suggestion that the South they were creating was a product of foreign or outside
elements.” As Henry Grady stated, “southern brains, and southern enterprise, and
southern energy and courage” were responsible for lifting the South out from
Reconstruction and into a brighter future. Yet, that future seemed to be elusive.“
Overall, the New South movement was a carefully balanced orchestration of
interests, loyalties, and psychologies. It needed to direct the South toward a prosperous
future while providing continued alleviation of the embittered past. They “were aware of
the swollen meaning that now inflated the Southern past as a result of defeat.” They had
to take on the “theme of doubt and despair that was already two decades old.” At the
same time, the Lost Cause criticized “the mammonism of the New Order” and the culture
of defeat that it had helped create and focused on discrediting it as it had Yankee victory.
“One of the ironies of Southern history lies in the simultaneous rise during the 1880’s of
both the New South creed and the mythic image of the Old South.” Both were movements
directed at elevating the South out of its defeated and dependent position. Both were

collective psychological mechanisms aimed at restoring Southern identity-2""

I ()7

SECTION THREE
HomeRuJe

The most significant development for regional identity was the regaining of
“home rule” or the “redemption” of state governments that concluded the Reconstruction
era. The gradual overturning of Republican Reconstruction by Southern Democrats
within their respective states culminated with the federal overthrow in 1877. Throughout
the previous period, South Carolina was the only state where blacks had dominated the
state legislature, comprising a majority of the House throughout it and a majority of the
Senate by 1874. However, since over 600 blacks had served as legislators in the South
overall, to the planters/ex-Confederate class they had been a significant force of
“intrusion” into white politics and social position. “The spectacle of former slaves
representing the lowcountry rice kingdom or the domain of Natchez cotton nabobs
epitomized the political revolution wrought by Reconstruction.” In addition, by 1869 in
places like Mississippi, black and white Republicans controlled thirty-six senate seats to
seven held by the Democrats; in the House it was eighty-two to twenty-five. Planters and
ex-Confederates sought to oust these intruders from their home soil.1

After Reconstruction, the Charleston News and Courier reported that since “the
redemption and regeneration of the State, in 1877, the growth of manufactures has been
astonishing in its rapidity and volume.” It reported that in 1880 the value of South
Carolina cotton mill products was only $2.9 million, while three years later it increased
170%. The newspaper credited “the worst period of African and Carpet-bag dominion”
for the previously diminished state of manufacturing and the economy at large. The

Courier was also one of the voices that had championed the overthrow of this regime and

108

it now celebrated that the South had regained its territory. Former Confederate senator
Benjamin H. Hill also provided the rhetoric used to effect this change. He had spoken of
the South in terms of being ruled by a “foreign power” and “negro rule” that was bent on
dishonoring and completely vanquishing the South. He battled against Reconstruction
politics by insisting upon white supremacy and a heritage of victimization. The terms of
a culture of defeat thus aided the overthrow of the Reconstruction period and helped
restore some degree of ex-Confederate and planter control over the postwar region.2

In particular, the 1875 elections in Mississippi had ended six years of Radical
Republican rule in the state and restored the political power of white Democrats. As
elsewhere in the South, the “Redeemers” in Mississippi were white social conservatives
who persistently held on to the past and fought against social, political, and economic
change. Among their ranks were the irreconcilables who “never forgave and never
forgot.” They would not only long—remember the war and its legacy of defeat, but would
not forgot carpetbaggers like General Adelbert Ames, who had removed conservatives
from office while appointing Republicans.3

As home rule alleviated some of the major obstacles of the postwar period,
however, it was not able to erase the region’s economic predicament. At the close of the
Reconstruction era, most planters were trapped into the production of the cotton and, just
like tenant farmers, enmeshed in a destructive system of credit. While all of the New
South ideology was focused upon becoming independent from the North, the South
nonetheless “remained the poorest and economically least progressive section of the
nation.” Even with the steam of the New South movement, “the region found itself in the

uncomfortable, if familiar, role of a colonial dependent.” If it had managed to throw off

109

 

 

most of the burden of defeat and then Reconstruction, the South, planters, and ex-
Confederates were still deeply entrenched in a colonized relationship. If the New South
movement had been fueled by myth from the start, in response to this continued
economic lethargy, it extended “a bewildering mixture of fact and fantasy, wish and
reality” toward the late 18805 in an effort to proclaim an apocryphal victory over it.
Based in bombastic oratory and “endless statistics,” the New South movement claimed
that sectional reconciliation as well as “economic interdependence” had been achieved.4

To the contrary, C. Vann Woodward has demonstrated that in 1880, when the
movement was becoming most formidable, the per capita wealth of the South was $376
while the national average was $870, or 56.8% below it By 1900 the South had climbed
to $509, but was still 56.3% below the nation at $1,165- Other figures from 1880 showed
that per capita income was only $88 while the national average was $175; by 1900 it was
$ 102 compared with $203. The continuation of poverty and a subsistence economy then
marked the region and in essence, “the South remained saddled with the burdens of a
colonial economy.”5

While an over-reliance on natural resources and lack of skilled labor rank among
the reasons for this situation, the hold of the Lost Cause was also an important factor. As
a strong loyalty to the past and its value system pulled at the region, Lost Cause
irreconcilables attempted to push the region back into the past. While the 18805 saw
many irreconcilables fall to the wayside, the South could not dismiss its moans of
discontent about the economic predicament of the region. Lawyer William H. Payne still
heard the cry against the new order even while he tried to embrace it. He bewailed the

fact that the South continued “flinging herself into the arms of the North, weeping upon

110

 

 

that icy bosom, and indifferent to the kicks and disgust with which her fawning is
repelled.”" He cried over the continued colonial state of the region.

In the 18805, crops like sugar did regain antebellum production levels, but as with
cotton, increased production did not necessarily result in prosperity for planters or region.
Concurrently, industrial progress also meant social instability. In 1883 to 1884, for
example, industrial workers at the Birmingham steel factories went on strike, and fears of
labor rebellion threatened the South alongside agricultural poverty. Journalist James
Wood Davidson of South Carolina associated this kind of “unrest” with “the pri nciplcs of
northern society.” As the South industrialized, witnessed the growth of town culture, and
began to be integrated back into the national framework, class confrontations appeared
just as formidable as the days of Reconstruction.7

The United Confederate Veterans (UCV) formed out of the social tensions of the
18805 and 18905 just as much as it did from feelings of reconciliation. While the UCV
has been characterized by its “celebration” of the Confederacy and the past, moving the
Lost Cause away from dealing with defeat, it still functioned as a salve for Southerners
who were caught in the changing tide associated with industry, town culture, and national
reintegration. Many struggled with a feeling of losing their sense of community and the
connected implications for regional identity. Likewise, even as the UCV drew much of
leadership from the middle class that was supposed to be aiding and abetting this change
in community, values, and Southern life overall, it expressed genuine concern over these
changes?

This phase of the Lost Cause movement was not so vociferous about matters

related to defeat but with the leading economic dimension that had ori ginated from it.

111

 

Leaders of the UC V did not entrap themselves in repetition over issues like the
overwhelmed—by—numbers argument. They instead focused on celebrating the heroism of
South and North, and tried to retain only the glorious past while leaving the traumatic one
behind. All the same, they could not escape the realities of the present and the Lost
Cause lament about the encroachment of the modern world did not die. To the contrary,
the deep scourges of defeat and colonization would live on in the South, effecting mind,

matter, and region into the twentieth century.9

 

 

e ea Colo ' ti and e '0 de t'

The essence of the modern Lost Cause is not the South of 1861, but the

Confederacy of 1865. It is an awareness of defeat, alienation from the national

experience, and a sense of separatism from American ideals.10

As the first objective of this study has been to explore the mental and behavior
responses of planters and ex-Confederates to defeat and colonization, a related topic is
the effect of these psychological conditions upon individual, group, and regional identity.
As a woman from Alabama claimed in the immediate postwar era, “1 am almost tempted
to doubt my self sometimes and ask if this is really I, to doubt my own identity.”ll Her
thoughts reflected upon the effects of defeat upon the stability of identity in the South.
As the years passed, however, the economic realities of the present forced most planters
and ex-Confederate households to put the war and what they could of its memory behind
them. Hence, their individual and group identities came to be impacted the most by
economic factors. Yet, many also could not relinquish defeat and repudiated the new
rising South. Some Southerners like Jubal Early, who came to be recognized as
“unreconstructed rebels,” adopted an identity based upon denial, avoidance, and a
longing for the past. In either situation, however, the trauma of defeat would continue
through and beyond the fluctuating years of Reconstruction, leaving the planter/ex-
Confederate class searching for an anchoring regional identity.

As an era of transition, Reconstruction left many Southerners searching for a new
identity or flailing to preserve an old one. To many, “the period could be considered
either a brief hesitation before final collapse or an interval of only temporary chaos

before better days.” With the closing of this era, the region was still grasping for

economic independence and “remained agricultural, rural, illiterate, racially divided, and

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sectionally oriented.” In 1887, William D. Kelley had reported in the Manufacturers’
Record what he had seen in his visit to Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. He gave
readers “but faint intimations of the resources of the South, of the impulses that now
animate her, and of the rapid strides with which the spirit of the nineteenth century is
changing not only the aspect of the country but the purposes and aspirations of her
people.” Alongside these modern aspirations, however, trailed the legacy of defeat and
the grip of colonization. Both of these areas had significant implications for how the
region was to be defined and the ways in which particular groups like ex-Confederates
and planters conceptualized it and themselves.12

“One mechanism by which an ethnic or national group awakens to a
consciousness of identity is the perception of a threat to the group by a force external to
it.” First confronting the threat of defeat and then the overlapping threat of regional
dependence, planters and ex-Confederates had come to conceptualize the South in terms
of these external forces. In response, the Lost Cause and the New South movements had
emerged. Such social-cultural movements, which are directed at preserving and
defending group, national, or regional identity, “typically engender articulate, vociferous
and charismatic leaders capable of mobilizing masses of people to organized action.” As
both movements contained this type of leadership, they also drew upon literary and
religious figures. Likewise, through their efforts, “economic and power interests of the
dominant strata of the group could thus get camouflaged, submerged in, or blended with
passions of identity of the group as a whole.” That is, the leading forces behind such
movements as the Lost Cause or New South could submerge their interests into the

regional passions they were drawing on for their support. “In such contexts whatever

114

‘facts’ are known of the past are intermingled with myth and fantasy, and a new
perception is created of a past that is glorious, pure and exclusive.” In specific
comparison to the Sinhalese and Tamil group movements in Sri Lanka, the Lost Cause
and New South movements of the postwar South manipulated the past to create the
perceptions they desired. All four groups aimed their blend of myth, fantasy, and history
at restoring a version of the past in order to create “images of the past based on their
respective contemporary predicaments.”l3
Beginning with “the ancient chronicle Mahavamsa,” which “defines the world-
historical role of Sri Lanka as the stronghold of Buddhism and Buddhist Civilization,” a
useful comparison can be drawn between Sri Lanka and the South, including the latter as
a stronghold of Christianity. Traced back to the sixth century AD, the Mahavamsa was

99

based in the “mythic and legendary. From the “Mahavamsa view,” Sri Lanka and its
people were “placed under divine protection” in order to be in charge of guarding and
protecting Buddhism. This premise provided the basis for an ideology that recognized
the “task of kingship” “as no more than the protection and support of Buddhism.”
Likewise, stalwart Lost Cause advocates had framed their views according to protecting a
Christian region from Northern materialism.l4

In regard to relations with India, the Mahavamsa outlines the history of Sri Lanka
in a way that presents relations with North India as “good — such as the original settlers,
Buddhism, and kingship coming from North India.” On the other hand, it presents all
relations with South India as “bad — for example South Indians were adventurers,

plunderers, and usurpers.” This kind of history is similar to Lost Cause perspectives on

Yankee marauders and the clear-cut division of morality between the North and South.

115

 

In addition, whereas the expansion and contraction of “petty chief doms” would more
accurately described Sri Lankan history, the Mahavamsa “speaks of political unification”
when “in fact no such integrated political order existed.” The creation of an integrated
past was also integral to both Lost Cause and New South ideology, and this kind of myth-
making was central to insulating both mentality and identity in both the South and Sri
Lanka.ls

Particularly in regard to the Tamil group in the late twentieth century, myth
worked to revitalize ethnic identity through “an idealized past.” For them, Sri Lanka
became “painted, the essence of which was a purity and a beauty which remained in
principle unextinguished despite the degrading Brahminic ‘Aryan’ invasions.” Sinhalese
Buddhists also looked to the past and the ways in which Sri Lanka had “evolved through
centuries of political conflict with South India.” Like the South with the North, both the
ideological leaders of the Tamil and Sinhalese groups sought to preserve a mythical-
historical-religious way of life. Lost Cause ideologists sought to preserve the plantation
ideal, the cavalier South, and Southern Protestantism.16

During the nineteenth and twentieth century, a nationalist movement in Sri Lanka
also employed myth to protect national identity. Like the planter and ex-Confederate
class, “an economically successful elite” battled against materialism and a culture
imported from British rule. They “invented a code of behavior described as traditional”
and sought to reject a “colonial culture.” Also, as in the South, literature supported this
movement’s efforts. Novels by Piyadasa Sirisena “presented as historical reality a

glorious, pure and noble past,” and plays by John de Silva dealt “primarily with the hero

116

kings of the past.” These combined efforts solidified the movement and “reinforced the
sentiments of ancient glory and nationalist exclusivity” while building cultural identity.”

What a comparison with Sri Lanka reveals then is that similar movements had
occurred in the South. Seeking preservation of the past, or at least control over it, the
South had also resisted “the process of absorption.” Moreover, this comparison reveals
the ways in which “cultural items are selected from the past, woven into the present in
ways unknown in the past” to support a regional and/or national identity. It is how the
past was reshaped by the present in Sri Lanka that reflects upon both the Lost Cause and
the New South movements. In the South, these American movements were concerned
with the fate of regional identity in connection with the overall nation.”

Historically the South has been viewed from both a “one culture” and “two
culture” perspective, where it has been recognized as being basically similar or dissimilar
to the “national character” of America Since the 19605, especially through the work of
Eugene Genovese, the South was credited with an image that was divergent from the
American norm. Rooted in antebellum plantation society, which had “generated a
distinctively conservative social order pervaded by patriarchal social relations,” the South
was not apart of the American national character composed of capitalist and liberal
principles. Likewise, the South’s inability to bridge this societal and ideological gap after
the Civil War confirmed that the region was essentially un-American. By the 19705 and
19805, the non-American South became an analytical tool “for understanding not only the
antebellum South but also the postemancipation South and even the contemporary
South.” From this perspective, the slave society values had continuing onward, carrying

“fundamentally conservative, patriarchal, and antimodem views into the postbellum

117

 

years” and beyond. In particular, Barrington Moore’s work confirmed this type of
analysis and testified that traditional elites had only “modernized” themselves in order to
maintain social and political control. In combination with members of the middle class,
the South had become a repressive region that perpetuated “poverty, deprivation, and
powerlessness upon the bulk of its inhabitants.”

While debt peonage, employer paternalism, and political conservatism have not
been solely unique to the South, these ideas have become imbedded in the
characterization of the region during the post-Reconstruction era. At the same, the
opposition of the South to America has been constructed with the assumption of a stable
“classically liberal” America. The nation could probably be better understood as “an
unstable compound of liberal and conservative, individualistic and communal, optimistic
and pessimistic” characteristics and ideologies. Yet, in terms of a unique psychological
regional history, the South holds a singular position. Likewise, the North would have its
own peculiar story to relay. It is the composite total that formulates the American
narrative.20

In regard to the economic and social forces that shaped the postbellum South,
however, what makes the South’s story unique is the way in which it “became
simultaneously integrated into the new [national] culture and in important respects
isolated from it.” Through an analysis of the colonial relationship that developed with
Northern business and industry, it becomes apparent that this process has left as much of
a defining mark upon the South as Civil War defeat. As the “latecomer to modern

economic development,” the region “found itself now not only poor but incorporated into

an economy that, like the railroads, was ananged along a northeast-northwest axis.”

118

Hence, even as the South moved towards industry and became in some respects
metropolitan, “the southern urban middle class remained provincial, comfortable in its
prejudices, resentful of outside domination.” Even for the new middle class then in many
ways the region’s identity was still defined by terms like “backwater” and “folkish.”"u

The focus upon and the decline in agricultural production primarily contributed to
the continuation of this backwoods image. With sharecropping, the work effort of both
black and white tenant farmers declined, which was accompanied by a diminution in the
demand for cotton. As sharecropping provided “few incentives to work hard” since the
return was marginal at best for increased labor, sharecroppers had even less incentive to
invest in land or technology since they were not owners. Compounding these difficulties
(and some would argue that these causes took precedence) was the lack of capital in the
South and the vast unskilled labor market that stultified economic growth. The region
struggled with these difficulties during and after Reconstruction. In comparative terms,
the South did not benefit from a Marshall Plan like West Germany after World War II.
Reconstruction efforts certainly helped with matters like education and the
enfranchisement of blacks, but the economic focus of the plan did not succeed in
establishing a profitable, or even subsistence-level, f rec-market economy. The South
succumbed to a compromise between independent farming and gang labor systems. It
also primarily received aid only in the form of colonial investment Thus, what made the
postbellum South fundamentally unique were the economic circumstances it had to
endure.22

While an inordinate psychological shock had registered with defeat, the economic

repercussions from it extended into and past the Reconstruction era. Moreover, if

119

 

“Reconstruction and carpetbagging were traumas from the point of view of many persons
in the South,” the role of trauma in the South has also had a lasting impact on its identity.
In the late nineteenth-century, the South operated as the “counterpart” to the North and
was still the anti-modem region even while it slowly accepted some of the tenets of
capitalism. If the “New South was the path of cultural assimilation,” this path had not
been taken, and both Northemers and Southerners recognized the region as being socially
and culturally distinct. In turn, this distinctness can be traced back to the trauma of the
war and its continuation during Reconstruction since it was the social, economic, and
psychological effects of defeat and dependency that most f ormidably hindered the South.
Likewise, while this enduring legacy of trauma can be recognized in the behavior of ex-
Confederates and planters, their collective response to it has also left an imprint on
Southern regional identity.”

In particular, the cultural heritage of conservatism that the Lost Cause promoted
has substantially influenced the region. It has been argued that conservatism has
provided “the fundamental values of southern culture.” Within the Lost Cause and
outside of it, regional conservatism grounded in religion had “established the South as the
legitimate heir of Europe’s Christian civilization.” Since the antebellum period, white
Southerners had recognized Christianity as “the moral foundation of their social system”
and the “idea of southern society as a Christian community” continued, even after periods
of seeming abandonment, into the postwar period. While “interdenominational
cooperation” served to link the South together, Lost Cause advocacy of conservative

ideology provided regional direction. For a region battling with despondency and

120

 

trauma, the conservative message of the Lost Cause was considerably appealing because
it offered stabilization by way of traditions rooted in the past.“

Likewise, the ideal of the Southern plantation gentlemen that accompanied this
ideology and value system would offer a comforting image and continue to be influence
into the region’s identity. As the planter sociologist Daniel R. Hundley had written in
1860, the planter class lived “a plain, unostentatious mode of life,” and the Southern
gentleman could be described as “less an idler and dreamer than he was in the old days.”
In effect, Hundley asserted that the romanticized planter of old who had descended from
“English Cavaliers” was also morally grounded and govemed by a consistent lifestyle.
John William De Forest, a Northerner traveling in South Carolina soon after the Civil
War, attested to this type of Southern gentlemen by writing that they were “more
provincial, more antique, more picturesque; they have fewer of the virtues of modern
society, and more of the primitive, the natural virtues.” As the postwar gentleman still
cared “more for individual character and reputation of honor,” aristocratic images
blended with descriptions of a more practical, working gentleman. It was under these
premises that the myth of the Southern gentleman would survive and continue to
influence the South.25

At the same time, for many, the New South movement with its social reordering
and its “spirit of enterprise” conflicted with Old South ideals and its code of chivalry and
honor. The emphasis placed on making money (however necessary) revolving around
industry, crashed up against the myth of the Southern gentleman. Accordingly, many
within the region clung to the mirage of the Lost Cause and the Old South even while it

seemed to drift “down among the dead men,” while the New South sat “in the seat of the

 

 

dethroned king.” Retention of the Old South myth provided support against uncertainty
and instability. The sudden changes of Reconstruction left many grasping for a mythic
past founded upon a “benefieent plantation tradition.” The notions of a society govemed
by the “very gallant and generous, regulating themselves by ‘codes of honor’ ” struggled
with messages of a new economic and social order. As the grim push toward industry
extended a relegated and controlled lifestyle, the romanticized ideas about plantation life
offered an attractive and wistful alternative. Placed in a dilemma about how to deal with
the past and the present, most Southemers “could not bear either to abandon the patterns
of the Old South or to forego the material gains of modem America.” Accordingly, the
region became concerned with resolving this tension between an allegiance to the past
and the necessities of the present/future. It was this discordance that produced “the
disjointed mind of the South: its inability to involve the spent dreams of the past with the
pale realities of the present.” And, it has been this underlying conflict between past and
present that has placed the region in between impoverishment and prosperity, trauma and
stabilization, continuity and change.“

In The Mind of the South, WJ. Cash stresses the continuity of the Southern
culture and claims that the regional mind of the South “is continuous with the past.” “So
far from being modernized,” he claimed about the region in 1941, “it has actually always
marched away, as to this day it continues to do, from the present toward the past.”
According to Cash, the South had marched to the beat of the past and was bound to it and
not the modem world. On the other hand, scholars like Paul M. Gaston have cautioned
that the “Old South-New South dichotomy which he [Cash] minimizes is in fact a crucial

one.” From this perspective, change more than continuity has characterized the South

122

after the Civil War. Yet, what might substantially describe the South and its identity in
the postwar era is not continuity or divergence, but the conflict between them and the past
and present, which has resulted in a disjointed mentality within the region.27

Modern Southern writers, in particular William Faulkner, have examined this
struggle between past and present, stability and change, the inescapability of the past, and
the dislocation of the present It is the “consciousness of the past in the present” or the

9”

“theme of ‘historical consciousness that concerns writers like Faulkner and Allen Tate.
As Faulkner stated in interviews and in Intruder in the Dust, “The past is never dead, it’s
not even past.” To him the past was not only living in the present, but in the minds of
many white Southerners past, present, and future operated simultaneously. Asked to
explain his conception of time, Faulkner replied, “There is only the present moment. in
which I include both the past and the future, and that is etemity.” It is this conflated
conception of time that contributes to understanding key aspects of the psychology and
identity of the region.28

Conceptualized in this way, time is a distinctive mental experience that attributes
to the uniqueness of the region. In studying the collective historical experience of
planters and ex-Confederates, trauma, anxiety, and memory appear to have concurrently
infiltrated the past, climbed into the present, and poured out into the future. Whereas the
enduring “memory of defeat - the essence of the Lost Cause - remains central to the
white southern mind,” for white Southerners like err—Confederates and planters, war,
defeat, and colonization pressed upon their minds, and in turn, they imprinted the region

with a unique time-driven and disjointed mentality. Like the “scarcity and want” that

have marked the South with “enduring cultural distinctiveness,” the conflicted

123

 

1.}

 

psychology of planters, err-Confederates, and the Lost Cause movement have
substantially influenced the regional identity of the South. Attempting to confront the un-
American experience of defeat and colonization, many from this class reached for and

tried to provide a means of avoidance, salvation, correction, and hope.29

124

 

NOTES: SECTION ONE

1. Edward C. Anderson Journal, June 18, 1871, EC. Anderson Papers,
Manuscripts Department, Southem Historical Collection, University of North
Carolina.

2. EB. Long with Barbara Long, The Civil War, Day By Day, An Almanac
1861-1865, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 71 1; James L. Roark, Masters
Without Slaves, Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction, (New
York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977), 77, decline in wealth excludes the value of
slaves; Thomas L. Connelly, The Marble Man, Robert E. lee and His Image in
American Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1977), 91, slave property
statistic and quote. Bertram Wyatt-Brown in The Shaping of Southern Culture;
Honor, Grace, and War, I 7603-18805 states that the value of lost slave property
was three billion dollars, p. 179.

3. Roark, 182.

4. Ibid., ix, viii.
5. Ibid., viii, x.
6. Ibid., 3, 15.

7. Ibid., 21, 22, 31—32.

8. Eric Foner, Rer onstruction, America' 3 Unfinished Revolution, 18631877
(New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988), 199, 209, 372, 376. While Foner
also explains that 95% of the forfeited acreage “eventually found its way back to
the owner,” forfeited land can still be regarded as a major cause of anxiety and
class disruption.

9. William C. Harris, The Day of the Carpetbagger (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1979), 373; William Faulkner, Light in August, (1932;
reprint, New York: Vintage Intemational, 1990), 425; Faulkner, Absalom,
Absalom! (1936; reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1990), 146.

10. Roark, 45, 50.

11. Ibid., 53; Foner 294.

12.1bid., 55, 58, 61, 62.

13. Ibid., 64, 65.

14. Ibid., 84.

I25

 

 

15. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion, The Civil War in American Memory
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2001), 40, from Brokenburn: The Journal of
Kate Stone. 1861-1868.

16. Roark, 54, 53.

17. Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows, God and General
Longstreet, The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind (Baton Rouge and London:
Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 15, 14, 16.

18. Connelly and Bellows, 15, I6.

19. Ibid., 17-18; Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate
Nationalism, Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 29. The three main regional churches by
the 18505 were Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian.

20. Connelly and Bellows, 20, 21; Roark 90; Faust 76—77.

21. Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood, The Religion of the Lost
Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1980), 13, 36.

22. Connelly and Bellows, 19, 21, 22.

23. Bertram Wyatt—Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture; Honor, Grace,
and War, 17605—18805 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North

Carolina Press, 2001), xi, xiv-xv; Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom.’, 283.
24. Roark, 86, last quote from Henry Graves to cousin, Oct. 10, 1864.
25. Ibid., 87, from journal dated June 28, 1864 and March 29, 1865.

26. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, Trauma, Narrative, and History
(Baltiimore and London: The Johns Hopkjns University Press, 1996), 117, II,
130. Bertram Wyatt-Brown indicates that wartime and postwar trauma received a
significant amount of scientific attention especially after World War II, p. 203.

27. Donald E. Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma, Archetypal Defenses of
the Personal Spirit (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 1; Caruth, 3, 4.

The Greek word trauma, or “wound,” originally referred to “an injury inflicted on
the body.”

28. Donald J. Levis, “Decoding Traumatic Memory: Implosive Theory of

Psychopathology,” in Theories of Behavior Therapy, Exploring Behavior Change.
eds. William O’ Donohue & Leonard Krasner (Washington: American

126

 

Psychological Association, 1995), 170-192, 174-175. Stampfl formulated many of
his conclusions based upon the work of AH. Maslow and B. Mittleman.

29. Levis, 177.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., 177, 183; Caruth, 59.
32. Ibid., 184.

33. Roark, 120, 121. Bertram Wyatt-Brown states that Edmund Ruf f in, who
was “among the very first to advocate secession,” also “put his mark on the
ending of the conflict when he killed himself.” He left a note that attested to his
“unmiti gated hatred to...the malignant and vile Yankee race,” p. 188.

34. Kalsched, 12; Wilson, 63; Douglas T. Kenrick, Steven L. Neuberg and
Robert B. Cialdini, Social Psychology, Unraveling the Mystery (Boston: Allyn
and Bacon, 2002), 172; Roark, 121, in regard to the number of Southerners
migrating from the region, he states, “thousands, perhaps as many as ten
thousand, quite literally turned their backs on the catastrophe and left the South”;
Wyatt-Brown, 243.

35. Connelly, The Marble Man, 92; Roark, 125, 122; Andrew F. Rolle, The
Lost Cause: The Confederate Exodus to Mexico (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1965), 8.

36. Rolle, 9, 3, 1 1, 49, last quote from Terrell’s own publication entitled From
Texas to Mexico and the Court of Maximilian in 1865.

37. Cyrus B. Dawsey and James M. Dawsey, “Leaving, The Context of the
Southern Emigration to Brazil,” in The Confederados, Old South Immigrants in
Brazil, eds. Dawsey and Dawsey (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of
Alabama Press, 1995), 11-23, 17-19; Rollin G. Osterweis, The Myth of the Lost
Cause, [865-1900 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973), 120.

38. Elliott and Gonzales Family Papers, Manuscripts Department, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Southern Historical Collection, Inventory;
Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, Spain, Cuba, and Puerto
Rico, 1833-1874 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 1-4. Since
1820 Cuba had imported 260,000 slaves, 28.

39. Elliott and Gonzales Family Papers, Inventory, 4. The Gonzales brothers
appear to have started The State in order to “lead the opposition to Benjamin R.
Tillman after Tillman was elected govemor in 1890.” Tillman had attacked the
South Carolinian aristocracy with partial Farmer’s Alliance politics. As he

127

 

provoked class conflict, the Gonzales attempted to meet his charge. The paper
“took outspoken positions against lynching, for child-labor laws, for better
education, and for other social and political reforms, but the anti-Tillman
campaign overshadowed all other issues.”

40. Letter from Narcisso Gener Gonzales to Ambrosio Jose Gonzales, Jr. in
Adams Run, South Carolina, Aug. 26, 1870; Ambrosio to Grandmother, March 9,
1873, Elliott and Gonzales Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection.
According to Schmidt-Nowara in Empire and Antislavery, “By 1878, Cuba had
lived through ten years of war and slave emancipation in the eastern provinces,
and eight years of gradual slave emancipation throughout the island,” 26.

41. Letter from Ambrosio, Mar. 9, 1873, Family Papers, SHC; C. Vann
Woodward, The Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1951, 1971, 1999), 29.

42. Ambrosio to Aunt and Narciso, March 2, 1873.

43. Blight, 38.

44. Ambrosio to Aunt, March 22, 1873; Roark, 150-151; Foner, 400, last
quote from John W. Kirk Family Papers, June 28, 1868.

45. Ambrosio to Narciso, February 1, 1873; Foner, 399.

46. Narciso to Ambrosio at school, Feb. 4, 1873; Faulkner, Absalom.
Absalom.’, 149.

47. Ibid.

48. Foner, 399, 400; Harris, 573, from the Jackson Weekly Clarion, Jan. 11.
1872; Robert Somers, The Southern States Since the War, 1 870-], (London and
New York: Macmillon and Co., 1871), 142- 143.

49. Narcisso to Grandmother, Oct. 22, 1870; Edward C. Anderson Journal,
June 18, 1871; Foster, 71-72, quote from A. Dudley Mann.

50. Narciso to Ambrosio, Oct. 29, I870.

51. Richard C. Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism, Rereading and Rewriting
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 87; Faulkner, Absalom,
Absalom.’, 147.

52. Letter from Narciso, Oct. 31, 1870.

I28

 

 

53. Osterweis establishes the death of Lee as a key turning point for the Lost
Cause and other scholars tend to agree; Connell y, 16, 25.

54. Roark, 123, 124, 131.

55. Don H. Doyle, “Slavery, Secession, and Reconstruction as American
Problems,” in The South as an American Problem, eds. Larry J. Griffin and Don
H. Doyle (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), 102-125,
114, 115, 117.

56.lbid.,118-119,121. F
57. Wilson, 63.

58. Gary W. Gallagher, “Jubal A. Early, the Lost Cause, and Civil War ,
History; A Persistent Legacy,” in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War ,:
History, eds. Gar)l W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan (Bloomington and I
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 35-59, 37. The first two quotes are
from a letter to John Goode, June 8, 1866.

 

59. Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, Defeat, the Lost Cause, and
the Emergence of the New South (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987), 16, 17.

60. Ibid., 17, 18, 71, 72.

61. Ibid., 20; Lloyd A. Hunter, “The Immortal Confederacy, Another Look at
Lost Cause Religion,” in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, 185-
218, 187.

62. Blight 435—436, 190, Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth
of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800—1890 (1985), Roland Barthes,
Mythologies (1957); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, Technology and the
Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 4. Merriam-
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1999) defines myth as “a usu. traditional story
of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a
people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon.”

63. Hunter, 189.

64. Wilson, 38; Kalsched, 6.

65. Roark, 100, 95; Osterweis, ix.

66. Osterweis, x, 5, 7, last quote from Ernst Cassirer on “one of the most

essential elements of Myth.”

129

67. Ibid., 19, 10.
68.1bid..11.12.
69. Wilson, 59.

70. Foster, 45, 56, from social theorist Peter Marris and anthropologist
Anthony F.C. Wallace.

71. Hunter, 189; Wilson, 36.

72. Kalsched 28, first quote Jung’s words, 1955; Moreland, 28, 29; Faulkner,
Absalom, Absalom.’, 75.

73. Ibid., 35.

74. Osterweis, 24, 29.

75. I bid., 46, 53; Blight, 227.

76. Ibid., 50; Blight, 222, 223.

77. Ibid., 40, 45.

78. Foster, 69, information and quote from the Century; Osterweis, 79, 83.

79. The Century War Book, The Famous History of the Civil War by the
People Who Actually Fought It (1894; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1978), 23,
31, 154.

80. Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed, A Study in Southern Mythmaking
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 1970), 8, 9; Wilson 38. Gaston also
distinguishes between creed and myth, “the former is a conscious statement
concerned primarily with how things out to be, while the latter is more a
generalized, unconsciously held belief in how things actually are or were.”

81. Mark E. Neely, J r., Harold Holzer, and Gabor S. Boritt, The Confederate
Image, Prints of the lost Cause (Chapel Hill and London: University of North
Carolina Press, 1987), 99, 102, 55; Connelly, 4-5. While tracing his roots back to
the ties with William the Conqueror, Lee’s father Henry “Li ght-Horse Harry” Lee
had been a Revolutionary War hero.

82. Wilson, 104, 106; Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness, The Culture

of Segregation in the South, [890-1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 54,
73.

130

 

 

83. Ibid., 40, 57.

84. Blight, 78, 261; Foster, 57.

85. Connelly, 51, 56; Gallagher, 39, 40.

86. Blight, 79.

87. Based on events that occurred in Holly Springs, Mississippi on Dec. 20,

1862. US. Civil War Center, Louisiana State University, \\ “we“ clsucdu;
Faulkner, Light in August, 62, 63.

 

88. Foster, 58.

89. Foster, 60; Moreland, 28, 30; John T. Irwin, Doubling and
Incest/Repetition and Revenge, A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 3.

90. Irwin, 59.

91. Kalsched, 6, 16, 25.

92. Blight, 38; Caruth, 58, 7, 59, 60.

93. Caruth, 62-63.

94. Wyatt-Brown, 230; Foster, 33.

95. Ibid., 233, 208.

96. Ibid., xv, 236.

97. Blight 80, 81.

98. Wyatt-Brown, xvi, 236.

99. Roark, 95, 226, Anthony Wallace, Culture and Personality.

100. Wyatt-Brown, 252, 257.

101. Ibid., 256, 257.

102. Blight 42, from Charles C. Jones letter to Eva Jones, January 2, I882.

131

NOTES: SECTION TWO
1. James L. Roark, Masters Without Slaves, 30.

2. Ibid., 175-176, from a series of exchanges between James Gregorie and
Charles Rose.

3. Ibid., 242.

4. Ibid., 176, 177, from a Georgia planter in 1867 and thejournal of Ella
Gertrude Thomas. 1

5. Ibid., 180-181, 188.

6. Ibid., 181, 189-190.

 

7. Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 79. r “i
8. Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, The

Economic Consequences of Emancipation (1977; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001), 94, 101-102, 103; C. Vann Woodward, Origins ofthe

New South, [877-1913, 178,180.

9. Woodward, 311, 50; Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern
History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 13.

10. Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, Life After
Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 63; Woodward
291 , 292, 294, 304. “Territorial monopoly” is from Roger L Ransom and Richard
Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, The Economic Consequences of Emancipation.

11. Somers, Southern States Since the War, [870-] , 45; Harold D. Woodman,
King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the
South, 1800-1925 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 275,
281, 288, 313.

12. Woodward, 1 14.

13. Ransom and Sutch, 1 16; Foster, 80.

14. Ibid., 110, 111.

15.Ibid., 114,115.

16. Ibid., 125, 157; Woodman, 313.

132

17. William Faulkner, The Hamlet (1940; reprint, New York: Vintage
International, 1991), 6.

18. Woodman, 296, 305, 312; Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New
South, Alabama, 1860-1885 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State
University Press, 1978), 77, 80.

19. Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism, 132; Williamson, 313.

20. Bani n gton Moore, J r., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.
Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press,
1966), 19, 344, 147.

21. Weiner, 77, 84, 80.

22. Moreland, 137; Weiner, 86, from the Mobile Daily Register, Feb. 26,
1871, 88.

23. Ransom and Sutch, 122, 130, 146.

24. Moreland, 145.

25. Ibid., 145, 147.

26. Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed, 46, 47.
27. Ransom and Sutch, 12, 9, 88, 162, 191.
28.1bid., 41, 42.

29. Gaston, 32, 33-34.

30. Ibid., 48, 252-253.

31. Ibid., 48, 49.

[J

3 . Ibid., 54, 55, 57, 60, from Tompkins’ Fourth of July Address at Gastonia,
MC, 1902, Manufactures, 1900 and “Southern Prosperity” in Manufacturers’
Record, June 4, 1887.

33. Ibid., 55, 56, 74.
34. William Darrah Kelley, The Old South and the New, A Series of Letters by
the Honorable William D. Kelly (New York, London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The

Knickerbocker Press, 1888), Letter 1, “The South in 1867 - Nashville, Cowan,
South Pittsburg, Chattanooga, Birmingham, Anniston, and Atlanta in 1887,” 1, 4.

133

 

 

 

35. Kelley, Letter I, 3.

36. Ibid., 4, 5.

37.1bid., 7, 11, 13, 14.

38. Kelley, Letter IV, “South Pittsburg - The Entrepot for the Sequachee and
Tributary Valleys,” 80; Letter V, “The Mineral Resources of the South - The
Relation of Her Iron Industry to that of the Country at Large,” 92.

39. Letter V, 106.

40. Letter VI, “Cotton-Growing and Agriculture Contrasted,” 115, 121, 122,
all quotes after “fatally vicious...” are from L.Q.C. Lamar, Secretary of the
Interior, restated by Kelley from the Hartford Times.

41. Ibid., 122, 123, L.Q.C. Lamar.

42. Ibid., 124.

43. Gaston, 65, 66.

44. Ibid., 67; Roark, 180.

45. Ibid., 71, 73; Foster, 80.

46. Daniel A. Tompkins Papers, Manuscripts Department, Library of the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Southern Historical Collection,
Inventory.

47. Gaston, 49, 50.

48. Letter from HR. Mims to Tompkins, October 14, 1870, from
“Ridgewood,” S.C., Daniel A. Tompkins Papers, SHC.

49. Mims to Tompkins, Oct. 31, 1870.
50. Mims to Tompkins, May 8, 1871.
51. E. Keese to Tompkins, Nov. 10, 1873.

5

IO

. Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 84; Roark, 155.

53. Gaston 31, last quote Hill’s, from “Industrial Combinations,” The Land
We love, May 1868.

134

 

 

54. Ibid., 155, 156, 157, 268.

55. Ibid., 157, 158.

56. Wilson, 79, 81, 82.

57.1bid., 81, 83, 84, 85.

58. Ibid., 84-85, 86; Gaston, 157.

59. David H. Overy, “When the Wicked Beareth Rule: A Southern Critique of
Industrial America,” Journal of Presbyterian History, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Lancaster
and Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society, Summer 1970), 130-142, 130,
132, 133.

60. Overy, 133, 134.

61. Ibid., 136-137, Dabney’s words, 140.

62.1bid., 140.

63. Vieda Skultans, “A Historical Disorder: Neurasthenia and the Testimony
of Lives in Latvia,” in Colonialism and Psychiatry, eds. Dinesh Bhugra and
Roland Littlewood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 244-264, 247-248;
Overy, 140, 142.

64. Blight, Race and Reunion, 263.

65. Wilson, 123, 125, 127, 136, 132. Jones served almost nineteen years as
chaplain-general for the United Confederate Veterans.

66. Blight, 42.
67. Wilson, 86.
68. Foster, 84, 85; Wilson, 91.

69. Michele M. Carter and David H. Barlow, “Learned Alarms: The Origins
of Panic,” in Theories of Behavior Therapy, 218, from D.H. Barlow (1991).

70. Foster, 85.
71. Gaston, 6, 7.

72. Ibid., 19.

135

 

 

73. Max M. Stern, Repetition and Trauma, Toward a Teleonomic Theory of
Psychoanalysis (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1988), 98, 100, 101. Based
upon Freud’s distinctions between “anxiety” and “fright.”

74. Levis, 190, 195.

75. Osterweis, 130; Blight, 266.

76. Wilson, 159; Gaston, 186, 7, 17.

77. Gaston, 7, 92.

78.1bid., 160, 162.

79. Ibid., 84, 86, 91,173,174,100,107,114.

80.1bid., 114, 115, 153.

 

81. Ibid., 34, 91, last quote from Charles Dudley Warner in Harper’s, March
1887.

82. Ibid., 25, from “Manufactures, the South’s True Remedy,” Feb. 1867.
83. Ibid., 38, 39—40.
84. Ibid., 93, 98, Grady quote from the Atlanta Constitution, June 19, 1887.

85. Ibid., 153, 155, 167.

136

NOTES: SECTION THREE

1. Foner, 354, 355; James Wilford Garner, Reconstruction in Mississippi
(1901; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1968), 246.

2. Charleston News and Courier, “South Carolina in 1884: A View of
Industrial Life of the State: A Brilliant Showing, 1880-84,” Michigan State
University Library; Blight, 102.

3. Albert D. Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks (1951; reprint, Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 3; Hanis, The Day of the Carpetbagger,
255.

4. Roark, 164, 174; Gaston 189, 190, 192, 195, 197.

5. Woodward 111, 318; Gaston 202, 203, 204.

6. Foster, 72, Payne to M.J. Wright, August 27, 1886.

7. Roark, 174; Foster, 86-87.

8. Foster, 113-114.

9. Ibid., 119.

10. Connelly and Bellows, 137.

1 1. Roark, 132, from the Diary of Octavia Otey, Dec. 25, 1865.

12. Ibid., 158; Wilson, 85; Kelley, Letter 1, 14.

13. H.L. Seneviratne, “Identity and the Conflation of Past and Present,” in
Identity, Consciousness and the Past, Forging of Caste and Community in India
and Sri Ian/(a, ed. H.L Seneviratne (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3-22.
5.

I4. Seneviratne, 6, 7, 10, 8, 9.

15.1bid.,11,10.

16.Ibid.,14,15

17.1bid., 12, 13.

18. Ibid., 17,19.

137

19. David L. Carlton, “How American Is the American South?” in The South
as an American Problem, eds. Larry J. Griffin and Don H. Doyle (Athens and
London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), 33-56, 35, 34, 37, 36, 38, 39, 40.

20. Carlton, 43.
21. Ibid., 46, 48, 49, 50.

22. Robert A. Margo, “The South as an Economic Problem: Fact or Fiction?”
in The South as an American Problem, 164—180, 168, 169, 171.

23. Immanuel Wallerstein, “What Can One Mean by Southern Culture?” in
The Evolution of Soutltern Culture, ed. Numan V. Bartley (Athens and London:
The University of Georgia Press, 1988), 1-13, 11, 6—7.

24. Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The Religious Ideals
of Southern Slave Society,” in The Evolution of Southern Culture, 14-27, 14, 15,
16, 19, 22, .3.

25. Clement Eaton, The Waning of the Old South Civilization (Athens:
University of Georgia, 1968), 27,30.

26. Gaston, 15, words of Edwin DeLeon, 6, 8, from David M. Potter, “On
Understanding the South: A Review Article,” Journal of Southern History, XXX
(November 1964); Eaton, 46; Eric J. Sundquist, Faulkner, The House Divided
(Baltimore and London: John Hopkins Press, 1983), 7.

27. W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; reprint, New York: Alfred A
Knopf, 1965), x, x-xi; Gaston, 12. Woodward’s Origins of the New South also
stresses conflict and change over continuity.

28. Woodward, “The Historical Dimension,” in The Burden of Southern
History (1960, reprint, Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University
Press, 1993), 27-39, 35, first quote derived from Allen Tate; James B. Meriwether
and Michael Mill gate, eds., Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William
Faulkner, 1926-1962 (New York: Random House, 1968), 70.

29. Connelly and Bellows, 119; Woodward, “The Search for Southern
Identity,” in The Burden of Southern History, 2-25, 17, 18.

138

 

 

 

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143