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Ida, that Clyde Wilson article was posted here when it first came out. For a former history professor, Clyde isn't a credit to his profession.

Many Southern volunteers had fought in the North, but no soldier from north of Pennsylvania (except a few generals) had ever fought in the South!

First of all, it depends on what you mean by "the North". Very few Southerners made their way to New England in the first phase of the war when there was fighting there. To his credit, Washington did, but South Carolinians and Georgians were as rare in the Massachusetts and Vermont fighting as New Englanders were in South Carolina battles.

Secondly, if Clyde were right, it would be because the British controlled New York and Philadelphia and the sea off shore for much of the war, so it would have been hard for New Englanders to get to the South. Also, most of the British troops and most of the fighting in the middle phase of the war happened in the Middle States, so Northern troops and Southern troops would have been engaged there. Even after fighting in the South got more intense, the bulk of the British army was or was expected to be in the Middle States, so Northern troops would still have been sent there.

But of course Clyde isn't right. Look at Yorktown. What would the result of the battle have been without the New Yorkers and Rhode Islanders? When it was clear that the result of the war hinged on fighting in Virginia, Washington's army, with its many Northerners, was there.

And those generals Clyde refers to in his parenthesis (Nathanael Greene? Benjamin Lincoln?) started out as common soldiers and made a real contribution to the war in the South (as did despised foreigners like Pulaski, Steuben, and d'Estaing).

The War of 1812, the Second War of Independence, was decisive for the seemingly permanent discrediting of New England. The Yankee ruling class opposed the war even though it was begun by Southerners on behalf of oppressed American seamen, most of whom were New Englanders. Yankees did not care about their oppressed poorer citizens because they were making big bucks smuggling into wartime Europe. One New England congressman attacked young patriot John C. Calhoun as a backwoodsman who had never seen a sail and who was unqualified to deal with foreign policy.

I guess they taught baby Clydie that in the publik skools. Land hunger had a lot to do with the War of 1812. Paleocon icon John Randolph certainly thought so. So did the Canadians. Recent historians have suggested that the war had more to do with British support for Indian tribes in the Northwest Territories than with the conquest of Canada. In any event, the war wasn't all about British impressment of American sailors, let alone an altruistic effort by Southerners to save Yankee seamen.

In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson went to Germany to study.

So far as I've been able to find out, Emerson didn't go to Germany at all, let alone to study. I suppose Clyde could say he meant it metaphorically, but there would have been better ways to phrase the idea. Some documentation would also have been helpful. Emerson studies are a vast field and one can doubt whether Clyde dipped very deeply into the study of Emerson's influences.

New Englanders, who were selling their products in a market from which competition had been excluded by the tariff, proclaimed that the low price of cotton was due to the fact that Southerners lacked the drive and enterprise of virtuous Yankees! (When the South was actually the productive part of the U.S. economy.)

Cotton prices were quite high during much of the antebellum days. An unbiased observer probably wouldn't agree with Clyde's indictment. With tariffs in place it was possible for Northerners and Southerners to develop infant industries. Northerners did so.

Southerners were slower to get started. The dream of buying land and slaves and taking advantage of high cotton prices was too compelling for many to open up workshops or factories with free labor.

If this was a self-righteous Northern attack on the South, it was also the self-righteous opinion of many Southerners, who couldn't see dirtying their hands with industry. Southern propagandists said as much at the time, and it takes some nerve now to deny the contempt of many well-to-do Southerners with productive labor.

Was the antebellum South the productive part of the economy? Maybe in a colonial way, taking advantage of climate and soil to provide raw materials for European manufacturers. But that was a recipe for dependence and ultimately poverty. Northerners couldn't grow cotton because of the climate, but they weren't wrong in thinking that real independence required native industries. In any case, just who was doing the producing in the antebellum Southern economy?

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Clyde is doing his best to imitate a Southern propagandist of 1860 or 1890 (and not a very deep or scrupulous one either), focusing narrowly on his indictment and ignoring all contradictory information or evidence.

New England went into a long decline after the Civil War. Power shifted to New York and Chicago. New England didn't contribute much to Progressivism and the New Deal. The South did more to support Wilson and FDR than New England. To be sure the region did come back into prominence for a while in the 1960s and 1970s, when Kennedy was President and McCormack and O'Neill Speaker of the House (they weren't exactly Mayflower descendants, though), but Clyde is pulling one over on you.

He's making all of modernity Yankee, so that whatever happened in the North was part of an evil conspiracy of New Englanders. But it really doesn't fly. Progressives like LaFollette and Norris had little use for New England. Southerners like Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson made major contributions to American liberalism. But Clyde is so determined to oversimplify history into a battle between depraved Yankees and true sons of the South that he ignores the details.

You can't simply cut out the last 150 years, as though it were gangrene. Modernity and all the trends Clyde deplores are as much a part of life in Southern cities now as they are in any other part of the country. What he's complaining about didn't come from New England alone and wouldn't go away if we split into different countries.