Could the South Have Won?

The New York Review of Books
June 13, 2002

Review

Could the South Have Won?

By James M. McPherson

Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America

by William C. Davis

The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War

by William W. Freehling

Lee and His Army in Confederate History

by Gary W. Gallagher

The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia
by Brian Steel Wills

The field of Civil War history has produced more interpretative disputes than most historical events. Next to debates about the causes of the war, arguments about why the North won, or why the Confederacy lost (the difference in phraseology is significant), have generated some of the most heated but also most enlightening recent scholarship. The titles of four books reveal just some of the central themes of this argument: Why the North Won the Civil War (1960); How the North Won (1983); Why the South Lost the Civil War (1986); Why the Confederacy Lost (1992).

Answers to these why and how questions fall into two general categories: external and internal. Exter-nal interpretations usually phrase the question as Why did the North win? They focus on a comparison of Northern and Southern population, resources, economic capacity, leadership, or strategy, and conclude that Northern superiority in one or more of these explains Union victory. Internal explanations tend to ask, Why did the South lose? They focus mainly or entirely on the Confederacy and argue that internal divisions, dissensions, or inadequacies account for Confederate defeat.

The most durable interpretation is an external one. It was offered by General Robert E. Lee himself in a farewell address to his army after its surrender at Appomattox: "The Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources."^[1] This explanation enabled Southern whites to preserve their pride, to reconcile defeat with their sense of honor, even to maintain faith in the nobility of their cause while admitting that it had been lost. The Confederacy, in other words, was compelled to surrender not because its soldiers fought badly, or lacked courage, or suffered from poor leadership, or because its cause was wrong, but simply because the enemy had more men and guns. The South did not lose; Confederates wore themselves out whipping the Yankees and collapsed from glorious exhaustion. This interpretation became the mainstay of what has been called the Myth of the Lost Cause, which has sustained Southern pride in their Confederate forebears to this day. As one Virginian expressed it:

They never whipped us, Sir, unless they were four to one. If we had had anything like a fair chance, or less disparity of numbers, we should have won our cause and established our independence.^[2]

In one form or another, this explanation has won support from scholars of Northern as well as Southern birth. In 1960 the historian Richard Current provided a succinct version of it. After reviewing the statistics of the North's "overwhelming numbers and resources" two and a half times the South's population, three times its railroad capacity, nine times its industrial production, and so on Current concluded that "surely, in view of the disparity of resources, it would have taken a miracle...to enable the South to win. As usual, God was on the side of the heaviest battalions."^[3]

In 1990 Shelby Foote expressed this thesis in his inimitable fashion. Noting that many aspects of life in the North went on much as usual during the Civil War, Foote told Ken Burns on camera in the PBS documentary The Civil War that "the North fought that war with one hand behind its back." If necessary "the North simply would have brought that other arm out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that war."^[4]

At first glance, Current's and Foote's statements seem plausible. But upon reflection, a good many historians have questioned their explicit assertions that overwhelming numbers and resources made Northern victory inevitable. If that is true, the Confederate leaders who took their people to war in 1861 were guilty of criminal folly or colossal arrogance. They had read the census returns. They knew as much about the North's superiority in men, resources, and economic capacity as any modern historian. Yet they went to war confident of victory. Southern leaders were students of history. They could cite many examples of small nations that won or defended their independence against much more powerful enemies: Switzerland against the Hapsburg Empire; the Netherlands against Spain; Greece against the Ottomans. Their own ancestors had won independence from mighty Britain in 1783. The relative resources of the Confederacy vis-à-vis the Union in 1861 were greater than those of these other successful rebels.

The Confederacy waged a strategically defensive war to protect from conquest territory it already controlled and to preserve its armies from annihilation. To "win" that kind of war, the Confederacy did not need to invade and conquer the North or destroy its army and infrastructure; it needed only to hold out long enough to compel the North to the conclusion that the price of conquering the South and annihilating its armies was too great, as Britain had concluded with respect to the United States in 1781 or, for that matter, as the United States concluded with respect to Vietnam in 1972. Until 1865, cold-eyed military experts in Europe were almost unanimous in their conviction that Union armies could never conquer and subdue the 750,000 square miles of the Confederacy, as large as all of Western Europe. "No war of independence ever terminated unsuccessfully except where the disparity of force was far greater than it is in this case," pronounced the military analyst of the London Times in 1862. "Just as England during the revolution had to give up conquering the colonies so the North will have to give up conquering the South."^[5]

Even after losing the war, many ex-Confederates stuck to this belief. General Joseph E. Johnston, one of the highest-ranking Confederate officers, insisted in 1874 that the Southern people had not been "guilty of the high crime of undertaking a war without the means of waging it successfully."^[6] A decade later General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, who ranked just below Johnston, made the same point: "No people ever warred for independence with more relative advantages than the Confederates."^[7]

If so, why did they lose the war? In thinly veiled terms, Johnston and Beauregard blamed the inept leadership of Jefferson Davis. That harried gentleman responded in kind; as far as he was concerned, the erratic and inadequate generalship of Beauregard and especially Johnston was responsible for Confederate defeat. In the eyes of many contemporaries and historians there was plenty of blame to go around. William C. Davis's Look Away! is the most recent "internal" study of the Confederacy that, by implication at least, attributes Confederate defeat to poor leadership at several levels, both military and civilian, as well as factionalism, dissension, and bickering between men with outsize egos and thin skins. In this version of Confederate history, only Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson remain unstained.

For any believer in the Myth of the Lost Cause, any admirer of heroic Confederate resistance to overwhelming odds, the story told by Davis (no relation to the Confederate president) makes depressing reading. It is a story of conflicts not on the battlefields of Manassas or Shiloh or Gettysburg or Chickamauga or the Wilderness they are here, but offstage, as it were but conflicts between state governors and the Confederate government in Richmond, between quarreling Cabinet officers, between Jefferson Davis and prominent generals or senators or newspaper editors and even his vice-president, Alexander Stephens. Davis chronicles different examples of internal breakdown under the stresses not only of enemy invasion but also of slave defections to the Yankees, of Unionist disloyalty in the upcountry, particularly in such states as Tennessee, of galloping inflation and the inability of an unbalanced agricultural society under siege to control it, of shortages and hunger and a growing bitterness and alienation among large elements of the population.

These problems seemed more than sufficient to ensure Confederate failure, but they were greatly exacerbated by the jealousies and rivalries of Confederate politicians, which remain Davis's principal focus. He does not explicitly address the question of why the Confederacy lost, but his implicit answer lies in the assertion that "the fundamental flaw in too many of the big men of the Confederacy... [was] 'big-man-me-ism.'"

There are, however, two problems with this interpretation. In two senses it is too "internal." First, by concentrating only on the Confederacy it tends to leave the reader with the impression that only the Confederacy suffered from these corrosive rivalries, jealousies, and dissensions. But a history of the North during the Civil War would reveal similar problems, mitigated only by Lincoln's skill in holding together a diverse coalition of Republicans and War Democrats, Yankees and border states, abolitionists and slaveholders which perhaps suggests that Lincoln was the principal reason for Union victory. In any event, Look Away! is also too "internal" because the author is too deeply dependent on his sources. It is the nature of newspaper editorials, private correspondence, congressional debates, partisan speeches, and the like to emphasize conflict, criticism, argument, complaint. It is the squeaky wheel that squeaks. The historian needs to step back and gain some perspective on these sources, to recognize that the well-greased wheel that turns smoothly also turns quietly, leaving less evidence of its existence available to the historian.

Look Away! falls within one tradition of internal explanations for Confederate defeat. More prevalent, especially in recent years, have been studies that emphasize divisions and conflicts of race, class, and even gender in the South. Two fifths of the Confederate population were slaves, and two thirds of the whites did not belong to slaveholding families. What stake did they have in an independent Confederate nation whose original raison d'être was the protection of slavery? Not much stake at all, according to many historians, especially for the slaves and, as the war took an increasing toll on non-slaveholding white families, very little stake for them either. Even among slaveholding families, the women who willingly subscribed to an ethic of sacrifice in the war's early years became disillusioned as the lengthening war robbed them of husbands, sons, lovers, and brothers. Many white women turned against the war and spread this disaffection among their menfolk in the army; in the end, according to Drew Gilpin Faust, "it may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War."^[8]

If all this is true if the slaves and some nonslaveholding whites opposed the Confederate war effort from the outset and others including women of slaveholding families eventually turned against it, one need look no further to explain Confederate defeat. In The South vs. the South, however, William W. Freehling does not go this far. He says almost nothing about women as a separate category, and he acknowledges that many nonslaveholding whites had a racial, cultural, and even economic stake in the preservation of slavery and remained loyal Confederates to the end. But he maintains that, properly defined, half of all Southerners opposed the Confederacy and that this fact provides a sufficient explanation for Confederate failure.

Freehling defines the South as all fifteen slave states and Southerners as all people slave as well as free who lived in those states. This distinction between "the South" and the eleven slave states that formed the Confederacy is important but too often disregarded by those who casually conflate the South and the Confederacy. Admittedly, some 90,000 white men from the four Union slave states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware) fought for the Confederacy, but this number was offset by a similar number of whites from Confederate states (chiefly Tennessee and the part of Virginia that became West Virginia) who fought for the Union.

But Freehling's central thesis that "white Confederates were only half the Southerners" raises problems. This arithmetic works only if virtually all black Southerners are counted against the Confederacy. At times Freehling seems to argue that they should be so counted. At other times he is more cautious, maintaining that "the vast majority" of Southern blacks "either opposed the rebel cause or cared not whether it lived or died." Freehling does not make clear how important he considers that qualifying "or cared not." In any event, let us assume that all three million slaves who remained in the Confederacy (as well as the one million in the border states and in conquered Confederate regions) sympathized with the Union cause that would bring them freedom. Nevertheless, their unwilling labor as slaves was crucial to the Confederate economy and war effort, just as their unwilling labor and that of their forebears had been crucial to building the antebellum Southern economy. These Confederate slaves worked less efficiently than before the war because so many masters and overseers were absent at the front. Unwilling or not, however, they must be counted on the Confederate side of the equation, which significantly alters Freehling's 50/50 split of pro- and anti-Confederates in the South to something like 75/25.

Freehling draws on previous scholarship to offer a succinct narrative of the political and military course of the war, organized around Lincoln's slow but inexorable steps toward emancipation, "hard war," and the eventual mobilization of 300,000 black laborers and soldiers to work and fight for the Union. This narrative is marred by several errors, including the repeated confusion of General Charles F. Smith with General William F. "Baldy" Smith, the conflation of combat casualties with combat mortality, the mislabeling of a photograph of Confederate trenches at Fredericksburg as Petersburg, and the acceptance at face value of Alexander Stephens's absurd claim, made five years after Lincoln's death, that the Union president had urged him in 1865 to persuade Southern states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment "prospectively," thereby delaying the abolition of slavery five years. Nevertheless, Freehling has made a strong case for the vital contribution of the two million whites and one million blacks in the South who definitely did support the Union cause. Without them, "the North" could not have prevailed, as Lincoln readily acknowledged.

Freehling does not take a clear stand on the question of whether Union victory was inevitable. At times he seems to imply that it was, because the half of all Southerners whom he claims supported the Union (actively or passively) doomed the Confederacy. But at other times he suggests that this support was contingent on the outcome of military campaigns and political decisions. No such ambiguity characterizes the essays in Gary Gallagher's Lee and His Army in Confederate History. In this book and in his earlier The Confederate War, Gallagher has argued forcefully and convincingly that Confederate nationalism bound most Southern whites together in determined support for the Confederate cause, that the brilliant though costly victories of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia reinforced this determination, and that morale even in the face of defeat and the destruction of resources in 1864 1865 remained high until almost the end.

Gallagher does not slight the problems of slave defections to the Yankees, class tensions among whites, personal rivalries and jealousies among Confederate leaders, and other internal divisions that have occupied historians who see these problems as preordaining defeat. But he emphasizes the degree of white unity and strength of purpose despite these faultlines. Plenty of evidence exists to support this emphasis. A Union officer who was captured at the Battle of Atlanta on July 22, 1864, and spent the rest of the war in Southern prisons wrote in his diary on October 4 that from what he had seen in the South "the End of the War...is some time hence as the Idea of the Rebs giving up until they are completely subdued is all Moonshine they submit to privatations that would not be believed unless seen."^[9]

"Until they are completely subdued." That point came in April 1865, when the large and well-equipped Union armies finally brought the starving, barefoot, and decimated ranks of Confederates to bay. Gallagher revives the overwhelming numbers and resources explanation for Confederate defeat, shorn of its false aura of inevitability. Numbers and resources do not prevail in war without the will and skill to use them. The Northern will wavered several times, most notably in response to Lee's victories in the summer of 1862 and winter spring of 1863 and the success of Lee's resistance to Grant's offensives in the spring and summer of 1864. Yet Union leaders and armies were learning the skills needed to win, and each time the Confederacy seemed on the edge of triumph, Northern victories blunted the Southern momentum: at Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Perryville, Kentucky, in the fall of 1862; at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863; and at Atlanta and in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in September 1864. Better than any other historian of the Confederacy, Gallagher understands the importance of these contingent turning points that eventually made it possible for superior numbers and resources to prevail. He understands as well that the Confederate story cannot be written except in counterpoint with the Union story, and that because of the multiple contingencies in these stories, Northern victory was anything but inevitable.

Much of the best scholarship on the Civil War during the past decade has concentrated on the local or regional impact of the war. A fine example is Brian Steel Wills's The War Hits Home, a fascinating account of the home front and battle front in southeastern Virginia, especially the town of Suffolk and its hinterland just inland from Norfolk. No great battles took place here, but there was plenty of skirmishing and raids by combatants on both sides. Confederates controlled this region until May 1862, when they were compelled to pull back their defenses to Richmond. Union forces occupied Suffolk for the next year, staving off a halfhearted Confederate effort to recapture it in the spring of 1863. The Yankees subsequently fell back to a more defensible line nearer Norfolk, leaving the Suffolk region a sort of no man's land subject to raids and plundering by the cavalry of both armies.

Through it all most white inhabitants remained committed Confederates, while many of the slaves who were not removed by their owners to safer territory absconded to the Yankees, adding their weight to the Union side of the scales in the balance of power discussed by Freehling. White men from this region fought in several of Lee's regiments, suffering casualties that left many a household bereft of sons, husbands, fathers. Yet their Confederate loyalties scarcely wavered.

Northern occupation forces at first tried a policy of conciliation, hoping to win the Southern whites back to the Union. When this failed, they moved toward a harsher policy here as they did elsewhere, confiscating the property and liberating the slaves of people they now perceived as enemies to be crushed rather than deluded victims of secession conspirators to be converted.

Wills does not make a big point of it, but his findings stand "in sharp rebuttal" to the arguments of historians who portray a weak or divided white commitment to the Confederate cause as the reason for defeat. "These people sought to secure victory until there was no victory left to win." In the end the North did have greater numbers and resources, wielded with a skill and determination that by 1864 1865 matched the Confederacy's skills and determination; and these explain why the North won the Civil War.

Notes

^[1] The Wartime Papers of R.E. Lee, edited by Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin (Little, Brown, 1961), p. 934.

^[2] Quoted in Why the North Won the Civil War, edited by David Donald (Louisiana State University Press, 1960), p. ix.

^[3] Richard N. Current, "God and the Strongest Battalions," in Why the North Won the Civil War, p. 22.

^[4] "Men at War: An Interview with Shelby Foote," in Geoffrey C. Ward with Ric Burns and Ken Burns, The Civil War (Knopf, 1990), p. 272.

^[5] London Times, August 29, 1862.

^[6] Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations (Appleton, 1874), p. 421.

^[7] Pierre G.T. Beauregard, "The First Battle of Bull Run," in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 volumes, edited by Robert U. Johnson and Clarence C. Buel (Century, 1887), Vol. 1, p. 222.

^[8] Drew Gilpin Faust, "Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War," The Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 4 (March 1990), p. 1228.

^[9] "The Civil War Diary of Colonel John Henry Smith," edited by David M. Smith, Iowa Journal of History, Vol. 47 (April 1949), p. 164.

A few detail points.....

I don't know about interstate migration, but the Germans and Irish shunned the South.

This will be news to the Germans who flocked to Texas after the Texas Revolution (signs advising people of San Antonio ordinances were posted on the bridges across the river, in Spanish, English, and German) and who continued to speak German until World War 2 (Chester Nimitz was one of them); or to the German Jews who populated the Katy Prairie west of Houston after the Civil War and gave the city many of its peculiar road names (Silber, Westheimer, Voss, Bingle, etc.). But if more of them migrated to the Northern States than to the Southern, I don't know about the Germans, but it would be so among the Irish because word passed back to the Old Sod pretty quickly when New Orleans Irish began to die like flies in yellowjack and cholera outbreaks.

Who would put up with the disrespect for physical labor and working people that slavery inspired....

Oh, you mean, like strikebreaking and unionbreaking? And using freed blacks and immigrants as scab labor, fortified by swarms of heavily armed Pinkertons, to accomplish the same?

The people who run things in the world today are more and more similar......But governors are almost always solid, conformist types.

Jerry Brown. Jesse Ventura. Edwin Edwards. Dixie Lee Ray. Evan Mecham. The recent governor of Montana whose name I can't recall. Billy Jeff Clinton. Yeah, I know what you mean.

Nations, states and cities are all in competition with each other for investment. Those who win are those who make the best appeal to bankers and CEOs, and the culture of bankers and CEOs today is very different from what it was fifty or a hundred years ago. It is much more of a "liberal," permissive culture. The media and technology also play a role here.

This is the discussion we had above, in which I quoted from James Q. Wilson's essay in The New Urban Politics (Ed. Douglas M. Fox, Goodyear Publishing, 1972) about the difference between "constituency" and "audience". This would seem to be a major area for reform, rather like the British reform of the "rotten borough" system, in order to bring the officeholders back to accountability to the constituents rather than to the audience who are sometimes called, euphemistically, "stakeholders" -- but who have no right, under the laws of a republic, to call the shots as they do, using as their tools the inducements, inevitably, of money and more money.

Your Bush example seems to support my point better than yours.

I was making the point that the Bush family, and their supporters in Texas politics going back two generations, have performed for a Yankee "audience", in the terms that James Q. Wilson used in The New Urban Politics.

But every ten years or so Time Magazine brings me the "Face of the New South," Carter, Clinton, now Edwards.

Yeah, the Northern press is killing off the South and introducing a "New South" that looks like the North every generation or so. The Eastern media are the most enthusiastic players, but the scalawag press in the South, led by the execrable, Southerner-hating, white-baiting Atlanta Constitution (which has the mendacious gall to call itself, on its masthead, "The South's Standard Newspaper": yeah, they're a "standard", all right -- a Yankee battle-flag, carried by one of those black regiments that burned Georgia), also likes to play at burying the South and pronouncing a "new South" every few years. The fact that they keep having to do it again every few years shows they're failing -- and that they're lying SOB's. But Southerners don't pay that stuff much mind, they've heard it all before.

But if you really are to be an independent and prosperous state, what political base is there for the Tillmans, or Watsons, or Wallaces?

The same one that elected Jesse Helms and Phil Gramm to multiple terms -- although Gramm isn't a good example, since he worked for the East Coast banks and the Fortune 500 and was therefore a scalawag, nevertheless the people voted for him because he came down to Texas to campaign as a populist fighting for "Dicky Flatt" (a real person, by the way, whom Gramm appropriated after Flatt, a small businessman, wrote him a letter about his regulatory woes).

But there are Southern congressmen aplenty out there -- the ones the Northern papers complain about as unlettered boobs (if they were lettered and knew anything, they'd read us and obey!) -- who do what the people want, more or less, and don't kowtow to Washington. Ron Paul is a good example in the Houston area, and there are others. And if there's another opening for a "Pitchfork" Tillman, well, hell, I might just apply for the job myself. Haven't anything better to do at the moment. ;^P

For a state to be sovereign, it has to have the ability to make treaties, declare war, regulate foreign commerce, etc. These (and other sovereign powers) were specifically withheld from the individual states.

They were not withheld from the States. Your persistently saying so stands Constitutional history on its head. Those powers belonged to the States, which otherwise would not have had any authority to delegate them to the United States of America under the Constitution.

Boy I will say this about you. You consistently do a contextual rail split with my words. So to explain to you in words of one syllable or less:
a). I have been talking of individual state soveriegnty (or the lack thereof) after ratification, not before.
b). Before ratification, each individual state was sovereign (subject to the limitations imposed by the Articles of Confederation). Afterwards, they were not.
c). The states did not delegate their sovereignty. On the contrary, they gave up their sovereignty to a constitutional republican form of government which then delegated powers to the federal government and reserved the rest for people and individual states.
d). By ratifying the constitution, a state was acknowledging it as the supreme law of the land.

Read the specific language of the first sentence of Articles I, II, and III: it speaks of Powers that shall be vested. But by whom? Look at Article VII (emphases mine): "The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same." Whoop! There it IS!! It is not a self-sourcing, self-originating, self-creating document, but a created Thing, which names its creators in that sentence. The clincher is the second clause of the same Article: "done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September ....."
Quod erat demonstrandum.

All you've succeeded in demonstrating is that the document was created by delegates of the states to a constitutional convention. Once the constitution was created by said delegations, the states had to ratify it. In so doing, they gave up certain sovereign rights that they had enjoyed prior to ratification. Note that they didn't delegate these powers to the federal government. They gave them up.

I repeat: If these sovereign powers had not inured to the States from the outset, the Constitution would not have enumerated them at all, since it would have been obvious to all observers that the States did not dispose of these powers to begin with.

I've never said that the states didn't originally have sovereignty. I merely said that they gave it up when they ratified the constitution. Do us both a favor and not impute words to me that aren't there.

Your interesting rewriting of the XIII is typical and totally FUD.

I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean by that. I merely attempted to state, as part "b", in additional clauses of the XIIIth, the unwritten but nevertheless operative changes which I believe Abraham Lincoln made to the Constitution by victoriously warring on the South. The English Constitution has been occasionally modified by acts rather than writs or laws over the centuries; and without passing on their way of amendment as distinct from ours, I wanted merely to point out that Lincoln had, in fact, effectuated such unwritten amendments to our own Constitution -- such as the implosion of the Tenth Amendment under cooperative assaults by Congress and the Courts asserting the Commerce Clause power in the teeth of the Tenth.

Firstly, write the amendment, then your opinion concerning the amendment, don't rewrite the amendment into a form that doesn't exist.

Secondly, accusing Lincoln of using the 13th to usurp powers is coming it a bit too strong, since he died in April of the year it was ratified, and the war was fought under reserved powers in Article I section 8 of the Constitution.

You seem to want to blame Lincoln for all your ills. However, the abuses of the commerce clause didn't really start until FDR. You will note that Article I gives the federal government explicit power to put down insurrections. And any way you put it, the secession of the southern states was still an insurrection against federal authority and the constitution.

Furthemore, I can't think of a single instance wherein Lincoln didn't have historical precedent. Adams, for example, is a major reason for the Bill of Rights. Jackson and Buchanon used hob-nailed boots on states which tried to assert sovereignty. Madison, himself, disputed John Calhoun's nullification and secession theories (BTW, if you want to look at a person who did extreme damage to the Union, you need look no further than Calhoun).

Because of the fact that slavery existed at the start of the Union, an amendment was needed to end it, because of the 10th amendment and the fact that slavery was one of those "reserved rights" that you are so proud of. You might note that the XIII was ratified with the help of the *real* legislatures of many of the southern states - unlike the [XIVth], which was only ratified after these same legislatures were removed by the federal government.

If the ex-Confederate state legislatures met and ratified the XIIIth Amendment, that is currently news to me (I can't swear I never heard of it), and of course raises questions of compulsion (1,000,000 troops). But I can see numbers of ex-Confederate legislators taking the conciliatory view Longstreet took, even though I believe that view was in the minority in the South

Considering that it was refusal by the southern states to ratify the XIVth (excuse me for getting my Roman Numerals mixed up earlier) that caused the north to throw out state legislatures, it is doubtful that compulsion forced the South's hand. Although they may have been bowing to the inevitable. BTW, I consider the XIVth to be a good amendment, but I am uncomfortable with the methods used to ratify it.

Of course the South did get many immigrants from Ireland and also from Germany before the Revolution. But I was thinking of the Catholic famine Irish, whose experience in New Orleans gave them reason to avoid the South, and of the German immigrants of the same period. Some Germans went South, but the greater number didn't, and were often counted by Confederate sympathizers as bitter enemies. Texas, while geographically South, couldn't entirely be considered slave territory at this time. You can use central Texas to make a point about the South, but not so much about Slave culture. After the war Italians went to New Orleans, but the city also gave other Italians reason to avoid it.

Was slave culture a turn-off for free working people? I'd have to look at the original sources. My own feeling is that if you were part of the "southern family" you took society, its rules and your place in it for granted. If you were an outsider from Germany or Ireland or the North the world the slaveholders made might be something you'd want to avoid. There can be no absolutely binding generalization. You will always be able to find Germans or Jews or Irish or Northerners who fought for the Confederacy and felt at home there. But there should be some way to acknowledge those who avoided the South because of slavery and to put them into our picture of the times.

Does "Northern Liberalism" always win? I'd say that capitalism and technology have been the winners for centuries. They bring some libertarianism and liberalism with them, but I don't think one can say that it's the liberals or Democrats who win in the end. If you look at all the ideologies swirling around in the first half of the 20th century, it's clear that capitalism has been the winner. It's had to make compromises and adapt to local situations and settle for less than absolute victory, but more collectivist or traditionalist or egalitarian or centralizing ideologies have clearly lost out. The next question is what kind of capitalism won out. The answer is a libertarian-egalitarian capitalism, informal with sneakers and sportsware rather than top hats or frock coats or even suits and ties much nowadays. It's a consumerist capitalism with an appeal that isn't so much based on bayonets or principles as on appealing to human desires, satisfying them, and encouraging them anew.

So can you combine this with a more conservative political order? Maybe. Maybe locally. Cutting back on public education and private broadcasting might help. But there will always be the draw of mass culture and consumerism on young people -- and on many older people. Do you deny this? Perhaps a catastrophe will destroy the system and reduce us to poverty. Undoubtedly some people will withdraw and try to live different sorts of life. But barring catastrophe, will people really abandon the "fun society" in order to "live ancient lives" of virtue, piety and dignity?

It's not like I'm happy about the result. But you'd have to show me some place where what you have in mind worked for more than a generation to convince me that it was really possible. Otherwise it's more wishful thinking than anything else.

So many Southern nationalist types go on and on about the virtues of the South as compared to the North -- loyalty, honor, fidelity, tradition, etc. The North wasn't devoid of this virtues, and had others as well. But "in comparison with" is the important thing here. Southernists milk the comparison with the North to hide how much we have in common.

I can't prove this. But look around to other countries, peoples or regions that have won their independence. There's a great hunger for "authentic national culture" in the beginning. Then, when people realize that they are a nation among nations governing themselves, "authentic national culture" becomes less important, and may even be thought oppressive. Nationalism is driven by the ambitious, who expect that once they attain power people will naturally fit into a given political and cultural order. The problem is that once independence is attained ambition and the ambitious don't stop. Some of the ambitious will follow the founders and try to succeed them. Others will join the opposition and try to remake society. Most of the ambitious will get to work in the economy. They end up by remaking the economy and society. They won't care so much about political philosophy or cultural values. You may very well get good, decent, hard working people who care for their families. You won't get people who are very preoccupied with politics or even with national identity.

The presumption people have is "let's stop looking outward and turn inward to build our own culture." But it's a mistake. In the modern world, looking outward at the enemy, the adversary, the opponent, or the foe strengthens the sense of nationhood, cultural uniqueness, and tradition. "Turning inward" means earning a living, learning how to use technology, taking care of a family, enjoying one's spare time, not reciting the tales of great battles and heroes -- or not so much outside hobbyist circles.

There are exceptions. What's happening in Arab countries and in India now, for example. They certainly are concerned with traditions, nationhood, and salvation. But that's because they have enemies to focus their attentions on.

I shouldn't be so certain of my predictions, but it does seem to me that what sustains so much of this Southern nationalism is opposition to the North and wounded pride. But if the South does become independent there would be no sense in making the constant comparison to Yankeeland. You would have to make your own way without always having that opposition to fall back on. You might well have an identity crisis -- as might we. Those who built their self-image on the North-South opposition may find that self slipping away with political questions that are no longer current. Or you might heal that wounded pride by focusing on the future, rather than the past. That means letting go. Most likely you'll find nationalist sentiments fading after you gain independence. If you don't there might be trouble here, as in India or the Middle East.

Caldwell's article ist the sort of thing 90% of Republicans and all conservatives would take objection to. Only a few in Manhattan or Cambridge or Georgetown who never win elections would try to ditch the South. On the other hand, there are many in both "zones" who would establish greater distance between the GOP and Fallwell or Robertson. That's already been done.

What made the Southern agrarianism of the 1930s so appealing to many was the contrast between the agrarian South and the industrial North at a time when industrial capitalism was in trouble. A rural, agricultural society is always socially or culturally conservative, even when it elects or is led by radicals, liberals or socialists. The ties of family and religion are too strong to be denied.

The idea of the heartless North and the warm South with its strong emotional ties may have appeal as a general rule, but it also has a lot of problems. How much more personalized and non-instrumental were relations in North Carolina textile factory towns than in New England mill towns? Was Birmingham really less economically driven than Pittsburgh? If the argument is that Birmingham was always an anomaly in the South, one has to deal with sharecropping, convict labor and other conditions of the day. The post-bellum may have been more open to the ties of community and extended families than the North at the same time. But it was not less exploitative. Rural Vermont or Iowa may have been more Yankee, but were they really more profit-driven or materialistic than rural Mississippi or Arkansas?

And what does this have to do with the "post-industrial" America of today? Does that old industrial-agricultural parallel still exist? Pittsburgh is no longer what it once was. "Detroit" is as likely to be in Tennessee today as in Michigan. Were such "Blue Zone" centers as San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, ever given over to "dark, satanic mills?" The characteristic of the deep blue zone is an indifference to smokestack industries and industrial regimentation. Today, Vermont and Maine, Iowa and Wisconsin may be more reliably Democrat in presidential campaigns than West Virginia, Pennsylvania, or even Michigan.

If a rural society cannot help but be culturally conservative, even under a radical rulership, a post-industrial society, driven by information, sensation and design, tends towards cultural radicalism, even under conservative political overlordship. The sophisticated urban types are likely to be much the same wherever you go, in Houston or Atlanta as much as New York or Los Angeles.

Of course they would only be a small part of any Southern nation, but their numbers would increase. Rural areas look to industry and commerce to provide work for those who can't support themselves on agriculture. As basic industries become less profitable in the developed world the temptation is to turn to high-tech, style-driven enterprises. That temptation is to embrace innovation, rather than stability or rootedness.

The trauma of many countries has been whether to accept this trend or try to avoid it by adopting or preserving socialist or centralized or social managerial economies. Such collectivist alternatives have generally failed and been rejected. One can't imagine they'd be very popular with those who think secession is about liberty. So the acceptance and enthusiasm for the innovation- and sensation-driven post-industrial economy continues and grows and with it, a movement away from traditional social and cultural norms.

Oppositions between South and North, Cavalier and Yankee will always endure. But what's made of them isn't constant, no more than oppositions between Quebec and English Canada or England and Ireland or Fleming and Walloon. In defense of their interests Quebec went from being collectivist under Trudeau to free market under Mulroney to whatever they are now. Flemish speaking Belgians went from being the poor exploited victims of rich French-speaking Walloons to being the richer, post-industrial adversaries of the Walloons who were still chained to coal, iron, textiles and steel. Protestant Ulster looked down on backward, priest-ridden Ireland. Today, swinging Dublin and even provincial Irish cities pity tired Belfast with its eternal war, decaying shipyards and unemployed.

Traditionalist, obscurantist Eire embraced modernity two or three generations after independence. They still are Irish, but "Irish" doesn't mean the same thing. Stodgy, snobbish, stagnant Ontario went all out for modernism, progressivism and multiculturalism. Clericalist, traditionalist Quebec also rushed into consumerism and individualism. Toronto or Ottawa still isn't New York or Detroit. Montreal and Quebec still aren't Toronto or Vancouver, but the differences and the cities and the cultures they represent aren't what they used to be.

My point is 1) you can't assume that the South will remain true to its rural roots -- it could embrace affluence and modernism or post-modernism with a vengeance -- and 2) one can't expect "Southernism" to be something fixed eternally and immutably. It only looks that way because of the North-South political opposition within a united country.

One can imagine southern "caring" and "familialism" and "traditionalism" being given a collectivist tinge once the Yankee is banished. Look at the change in the US over the last seventy years. The Democratic South and West which supported Roosevelt and the New Deal and their public works projects became the most Republican regions of the country. The Yankee individualist and high capitalist Northeast is now the most Democratic region. What is to prevent another reversal of polarities from happening?

The "it's ours" argument that applied to slavery and segregation may be applied to a more comprehensive welfare system than the cold North provides. If the country does break up, the Northern fragments will likely beat the South to single-payer health care, but you can never tell.

I think you are right about a secession of "Aztlan" acting as a trigger to future secessions. It's hard to see what else could play this role. If one region goes, others may follow. It should be noted that the same might happen in Mexico. The proposed "Republica del Norte" has little use for the Aztec South. So it's a question of what Chicano nationalism is really about.

But if the United States break up, it's a major blow to the "American" model on such things as abortion, capital punishment, gun control, homosexual marriage, national health care and other issues. The pressure to adopt European standards becomes much greater when there's no longer a superpower standing up to it. But it does stand to reason that after we topple the Saudis the next step is to undo our own country.

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