Hullo, 4CJ, good to see you again.
Yes, I concur. Although the U of H "distance education" course was mostly a litany of horribles....."they had to do this", "they had to do that", "they didn't have this/that/the other"........ that purported to describe the Southern academies in the antebellum era. The lecturer trotted through all these drawbacks (to modern eyes) before getting around to conceding the fact that, although Southern schools were outnumbered by Northern ones (and btw, he didn't break everything out on a per capita basis when comparing numbers of schools, numbers of instructors, etc.), in the last decade before the Civil War, when some serious cash was beginning to flow into the Southern economy, Southern education was growing faster than the Northern school establishment.
He also had a lot to say about Code Duello, overlooking Lincoln's affair but noting the Hamilton-Burr duel (two New Yorkers getting into a scrape); overall, though, he describes fighting as mostly a Southern preoccupation and bound up with backward and inadequate values, etc. etc......didn't mention Mike Fink's legendary sandbar duel, though, passing over yeomen's and white-trash fights as "brawls", as if they weren't important.
In short, the guy's a pretty good museum-piece 60's Northern liberal. I had a guy just like him for one of my American history courses at university, 38 years ago. I also had the female version for a couple of South American history courses. Fortunately, I'd been inoculated by a real Southerner during my high-school American History course a few years earlier. He actually brought a Klan banner to class one day -- his grandaddy's klavern's banner -- to talk about the Klan and how it used recondite symbolism and mystification as part of its terrifying aura. Talk about relevance. Nobody nodded off that day.
'[T]he State of Connecticut is a free sovereign and independent State; that the United States are a confederacy of States; that we are a confederated and not a consolidated Republic.'
And, 'Resolved, That this Assembly highly approve of the conduct of his Excellency the Governor ... his letter addressed to the Secretary for the Department of War, containing his refusal ... as an example to persons, who may hold places of distinguished trust, in this free and independent republic.'
Connecticut legislature, 1809.