[In the following excerpt, Alexander discusses political continuity and historical change that occurred over the Civil War period.]

… It does not take one long to discover that not only is consensus lacking about the essence of Southernism but that one line of argument denies the existence of anything uniquely Southern and concedes only that Southern traits were exceptional, if at all, in being slight exaggerations of American traits. As for the impact of war on the course of history, it seems that almost every interpreter with an ideological ax to grind has seized upon the Civil War as a cardinal example of—needless to say—all kinds of incompatible effects. Postwar developments are treated as falling anywhere between one extreme of being dictated absolutely by war consequences to the other extreme of being perfectly predictable trends along a secular-change current that was hardly rippled by the war. Elaborate efforts to define the Old South continue to appear, and David Potter made a characteristically rapier-thrust comment in a review essay of Simkins' The Everlasting South and the symposium, edited by Frank Vandiver, The Idea of the South: Pursuit of a Central Theme. Potter suggested that some are more concerned with telling us where to go to find Southern identity than with telling us what it is. He concluded that 1964 essay with his prediction that the quest for a central theme would continue, for, as he wrote, “the South remains as challenging as it is baffling, which is about as challenging as a subject can be.”¹

I have been led into considerable previously unplanned reading since last spring and have been recalling with increasing clarity one of Thor's experiences according to Teutonic legend. In the castle of a king of magic, Thor humiliatingly failed one test after another of his legendary strength. The final test was merely to pick up a cat sitting nearby, but the best he could do was to get one of the cat's paws off the floor momentarily. The following morning Thor's host took pity enough to explain to him that all the failures had been brought about by magic. The cat, for instance, was actually a segment of the serpent of Midgard, whose coils surround the earth itself, and when Thor had lifted even one paw, earthquakes had shaken the world.

The Old South in the Crucible of War may have seemed manageable enough, but its coils encompass the whole of Southern history. I respectfully request to be excused from trying to pick up that cat; but as a guest of such gracious hosts it would be rude of me not to at least rub its ears a bit and try to evoke a purr or two. I shall not entirely shirk the invitation to summarize some portion of the continuity debate and to make a few modest suggestions about promising directions to look for further insights. First, however, I propose to comment on several studies that share a common theme: the perceptions of many of the Southern elite during the first few years after the Civil War about the extent of change and continuity. It is not necessarily the case that their perceptions were valid, or if valid more than superficial. But since we are still trying to get the real South to materialize so that all can see, it should do no harm to observe the actors in the postwar drama. Much, though not all, of this line of investigation falls generally within the purview of political history, and that seems to call for a caveat.

Political history has fallen into disrepute in recent years. In an ambitious symposium on “The New History: The 1980s and Beyond,” a symposium almost filling the most recent two issues of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, one of the contributors comments on some current outright rejection of politics as ineffective and irrelevant. Such rejectionists argue that “Whatever statesmen do or say … turbulent upheavals, even revolutions, lead to false illusions: they, too, end up perpetuating continuities.” “Socioeconomic structures endure, in this view, and common people fashion strategies for survival and self-protection in recognition of this simple principle. It is on this humble level that one can glimpse the dignity of struggle, and it is here, in daily tests of endurance, that we can best observe the drama of humanity's predicament.”² This phrasing by Peter H. Smith, who nevertheless endorses the relevance of political history, seems poignantly appropriate in remembering the mass of ordinary Southerners, white or black. Almost all of my colleagues in this symposium have very recently made such distinguished contributions, directly or indirectly, to our capacity to empathize in that “drama of humanity's predicament” across the Civil War years, and brought so much of their illuminating perceptions to us in these three days, that I have no real qualms about turning briefly to elite history and even to political elites.

I have long been interested in the behavior of white Southerners during the interval between defeat of the Confederate efforts and the imposition of certain political constraints by the national Congress in 1867—the period of Presidential Reconstruction. My own observations of the surviving record suggest a pervasive assumption on the part of white Southerners seeking to retain positions of power that restoration, not change from the old ways, was the obvious goal. My work on Tennessee convinced me that the postwar political history of that state was essentially dictated by identifiable considerations from the Old South years: intrastate sectionalism, antebellum party antagonism that almost paralleled wartime animosities, and the indelible imprint of racial perceptions. I found, also, that continuity of political leadership across the war years was overwhelmingly the rule. Looking farther than Tennessee, I found that the immediate postwar political landscape was simply dominated by rivalry between prewar Unionists and Immediate Secessionists, a rivalry that in many parts of the South amounted nearly to the old familiar antebellum two-party politics, Whigs against Democrats. I would not want to generalize about the entire South from what Sydney Andrews wrote while traveling through North Carolina in 1866, yet the implications may not be far from the mark for much of the region. Andrews wrote: “… here, in North Carolina, I discover, with proper amazement, that the old parties are both alive, and neither of them a whit older or less pugilistic than it was twenty years ago. …”³ It is more than coincidence that in the 1865 congressional elections in the nine former Confederate states where the Whig party had had respectable antebellum organizations, old Whigs were elected to almost nine tenths of the United States House seats. In the Tennessee legislature elected in 1865, former Whigs held almost one hundred of the 109 seats. All but one member of the Virginia House of Delegates were formerly Whigs. And throughout the region Whigs and Douglas Democrats of 1860 dominated the elective offices.⁴ The dimension of continuity is, of course, the two-party rivalry as modified by the Unionist-Secessionist axis.

When by 1866 it became apparent that President Andrew Johnson's program was in trouble in the North and the widely publicized National Union Convention was called to meet in Philadelphia to support Johnson, the Southern way of claiming white solidarity against Republican party proposals for a different kind of political reconstruction was to send to Philadelphia state delegations that were either ostentatiously bipartisan or consisted overwhelmingly of those who had been Unionists in the secession crisis. Both kinds of delegations reflected the antebellum political landscape, though in different ways. Earlene Collier in studying the Southern delegates discovered that they were preponderantly antebellum political leaders and that many had been Confederate officials.⁵

Linking the records of individual political officeholders from antebellum into postbellum years is tedious and time-consuming work, made almost immeasurably more troublesome by incorporating in the study the unsuccessful candidates for political office. Among the few state studies that provide massive documentation of continuity of individual political participation across the Civil War years would certainly be included the prodigious labors of William C. Harris on Mississippi and William M. Cash, Jr., on Alabama.⁶ Their success in tracing many hundreds of individuals, taken together with much fine work on other states, makes abundantly clear the continuity of a Southern political elite from antebellum to postbellum years. The recent volume on Alabama Black Belt planters by Jonathan Wiener emphasizes from individual-level analysis the extent of planter-family continuity in that part of Alabama, and numerous recent studies have at least tangentially offered further support to the widely held view that landowning dominance went through no revolutionary process because of the war.⁷ Twenty-five years ago J. Carlyle Sitterson reported from a study of 120 nonagricultural business leaders in North Carolina that being born into families of considerable substance in the antebellum period was characteristic of the great majority of successful business men after the war. He uncovered, moreover, a remarkable amount of actual family and in-law continuity in the same kind of business enterprise spanning the war years.⁸

Three extensive studies of the Deep South during the Presidential Reconstruction interval, when native white Southerners had relatively great freedom in managing adjustments to wartime impacts, tell essentially the same story. Harris's first book on Mississippi, after exploring many facets of the readjustment period, concludes that antebellum experience provided the frame of reference for postwar alignments. Former Whigs, as Unionists of 1860, seized the inside track in designing state policies; but, writes Harris, “In the end they followed policies more attuned to prewar experiences than those which fully recognized the harsh realities of postwar adjustment.” Sylvia Krebs, addressing the same wide range of concerns, concludes: “The majority of white Alabamians were inclined to adhere to past experience and familiar principle unless forced to do otherwise by circumstances beyond their control. These people attempted to pick up the threads that had been raveled and broken by the war and to continue weaving the same life pattern. … Under these circumstances, restoration of a former way of life seemed far more likely than any decided innovation to produce a new society.”⁹ Westley F. Busbee, Jr., was convinced by his exhaustive study of Georgia's Presidential Reconstruction that a gloomy outlook for long-lasting accomplishments cannot be blamed primarily on intrusion by outsiders but that “the heaviest burden of failure must fall on the white people of Georgia.” For “most whites,” he concludes, “looked backward in time for solutions to new problems.”¹⁰

The dimension of political continuity on into the period of Congressional Reconstruction of Alabama is documented heavily in a study that includes individual-level career information about twenty-seven hundred Alabama Republicans. William M. Cash reports that “Although some political newcomers were observed as officeholders, a pervasive characteristic of Republican participation … is continuity in officeholding from ante-bellum times through war and Presidential Reconstruction into the Congressional Reconstruction years. In addition, these Republicans did not differ radically in wealth, occupation, nativity, or age pattern from ante-bellum officeholders. …” Cash adds that almost all active Republicans among native-born white Alabamians had been Unionist in sentiment in 1860 and that the great bulk of Unionists away from the North Alabama hill country had been Whigs. “The inclination to Republicanism of these ante-bellum Alabama citizens,” he notes, “evidently had roots in their antebellum experiences, loyalties, and attitudes.” Acknowledging that many former Whigs and 1860 Unionists did not become Republicans, Cash maintains that “white Alabamians in Republican ranks did represent a line of succession characterized at each stage by opposition to Democratic party leaders and the policies of the dominant wing of the state Democratic party.”¹¹ Social scientists studying voter behavior would characterize this as continuity of a negative reference group.

Vicki L. Vaughn has just completed a study of the Southern Commercial Conventions that brings strong corroborating evidence and considerable identification of the substance of continuity across the Civil War. Those convention sessions were held a score of times in a dozen Southern cities over a period of thirty-four years, from 1837 to 1871, involving almost eight thousand delegates. “As the convention moved from city to city in these years … the sessions as a whole … constitute a type of southwide regional assembly,” she writes, providing the only “instance of a truly sectional body convening repeatedly over a long span of years.” After thoroughgoing analysis of personal attributes of almost six thousand delegates, far more extensive assembling of data on the six hundred most active delegates, and close study of the content of all convention proceedings, the author has some well-buttressed conclusions relevant to the theme of our symposium.¹²

She establishes that leading delegates may properly be credited with legitimate elite status, writing:

Individuals in the data set of this study portray many qualities that distinguish them as an elite within mid-nineteenth century southern society. … They held positions of real decision-making power as measured by their access to political offices of their state, federal, and Confederate governments. The shared social background which shaped their concept of a “good society” for the South provided the basis for a common group viewpoint. … The fact that six hundred of them were selected for positions of authority and honor at such non-politically oriented sessions as the conventions speaks further of the high regard in which they were held outside the limits of political officeholding. …

Turning to the perception this elite revealed in the course of convention debates before and after the Civil War, she summarizes those perceptions as follows:

Their most consistent underlying conviction, both before and after the Civil War, was a firm optimism about the potential for southern economic growth. …

If economic goals outlined at the prewar sessions are compared to those of the postwar sessions, similarities abound. … Sessions in neither time period looked to a revolution of the southern economy, to rapid or even widespread industrialization. The priority remained improvement of the agrarian sector of the economy. …

Despite the wartime personal sufferings of the delegates themselves, or of their families and neighbors, they … brought to their discussions the same perceptions, schemes, and goals presented at prewar … conventions.

The personal characteristics of delegates participating in the postwar sessions from 1869 to 1871 proved to be the same as for the delegates attending conventions before the Civil War. Continuity of individuals was substantial, but continuity of attitudes and goals were so great as to be striking. The subtitle for this study of Southern Commercial Conventions is, surely appropriately, Continuity of Perceptions, Values, and Leadership, 1837-1871.

Why should white Southerners have been expected to entertain seriously anything but continuation of the familiar, apart from forcible emancipation? To all living Southerners of 1860 the region had been remarkably the same in essential respects for as long as they could remember. No inmigration of consequence, white or black had happened in living memory. The homogenizing consequences were reflected in the extent of religious uniformity across the region. Economic changes, while striking for places and for individuals as the Southern system rolled westward, were of the predictable kind, as the unfolding of petals of a familiar flower. The resulting contempt for reform zealots, more contempt than fear until the mid-fifties, flowed naturally from the plausible assumption that it if ain't broke, don't fix it. In probing the Southern mind on the eve of secession, Joel H. Silbey, in an essay appearing in the 1981 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, brilliantly describes the reactions of a self-satisfied people, with no sense of need for public meddling in private affairs, to a suddenly looming Republicanism they perceived as the very witches' brew of noxious, self-righteous extremism in America. With the war's disasters behind, why would such a society's leaders voluntarily consider innovation above restoration?

I did promise to rub the cat's ears a little, and it is time to turn to one ear. A third of a century ago, down the road a piece at Jackson, Mississippi, Robert S. Cotterill offered as his presidential address to the Southern Historical Association a comment on “The Old South to the New.”¹³ Here may be found the most extreme statement of the continuity theme. “In no phase of its economic life was the New South new,” he announced. “It was not a Phoenix rising from the ashes of the Old; not a revival; not even a reincarnation: it was merely a continuation of the Old South. And not only in its economic life: the New South inherited, also, the spirit of the Old. It inherited its racial pride, and if anyone wants to call it racial prejudice, there can be no objection. … The New South inherited, also, a laissez-faire philosphy of living … [and] the Old South conviction that certain questions could not be surrendered to the jurisdiction of public law.” The Civil War, Cotterill claimed, “was, in long perspective, only an episode in a continuous southern history: a tragic episode, but even its tragedy was transient.” And to make certain that no listener missed his point or retained composure if in disagreement, he concluded: “There is, in very fact, no Old South and no New. There is only The South. Fundamentally, as it was in the beginning it is now, and, if God please, it shall be evermore.”

Well, that was a third of a century ago, and offered by a historian born about a century ago now. How has it seemed more recently? Two monumental studies of Reconstruction in individual states have recently appeared, Harris's on Mississippi and Joe Gray Taylor's on Louisiana.¹⁴ Harris has, while exposing the baffling complexity of state affairs during Reconstruction, nonetheless provided a stunning body of evidence of old leadership and old ideas riding out some turbulent times to safe haven in familiar antebellum social and political arrangements. Professor Harris wrote to me this past summer about his residual impressions. So many of the prewar characteristics continued after the war, he thinks, that the main changes occurred as a result of the fact that the South had less of everything after the war, and that Southerners had to adjust their lives and institutions to this somber fact. Professor Taylor wrote to me that, in his opinion, the South for three quarters of a century after the Civil War was more like the antebellum South than like the South of the past four decades. Sharecropping was in some ways close to slavery, he thinks, and the plantation system continued with the same class though not necessarily the same people in control. Though white sharecropping was postbellum, Professor Taylor wonders what would have happened to the yeomen's surplus sons if there had been no war. He does not think that the growth of manufacturing made a significance difference because it was neither new nor substantial in any but a small part of the South. What finally ended the continuing South, in his judgment, was urbanization during and even after the Second World War.

What then of the South since the Second World War? Professor Charles P. Roland's recent fascinating volume on The Improbable Era: The South Since World War II, concludes with a chapter entitled “The Enduring South.”¹⁵ He describes what he considers to be objective differences that remain even today between the South and the rest of the nation, but he endorses the theme of an enduring South through a particular state of mind. “Recent scholarship suggests,” he writes, “that the ultimate distinctiveness of the South may lie, not in its empirical dissimilarities from other regions, but in its unique mythology: those images of the region that give”—and here he quotes George Tindall—“‘philosophical meaning to the ordinary facts of life.’” The parting shot of his book is to report that on the living room wall of a noted Southern advocate of racial desegregation and understanding hung a plaque of grateful recognition from the Detroit chapter of the NAACP, underneath which was displayed a pair of crossed Confederate rifles. Charlie Roland has not changed his mind very much during the past six years, as is clear from his presidential address to the Southern Historical Association in November 1981, entitled “The Ever-Vanishing South.”¹⁶

Now, this is all very amusing gamesmanship, from Professor Cotterill to Professor Roland, we are saying to ourselves, but the truth is that one of even median age among us tonight knows that profound changes have come to the South, not only since the Civil War but in living memory. And then we are jolted to see a map of the United States showing where the proposed Equal Rights Amendment has not been ratified or where state legislatures have been making noises about rescinding their ratification. There, on the map, except for the splinter northeastern corner and the totally new world of the southwestern quarter still called by the old name, Texas, stands as solid a block of the 1860 slave states as ever enraged antebellum abolitionists. The obvious and common sense acknowledgment should easily follow. Of course there have been changes, and of course there are continuities. It is the dimensions of each that historians rightly continue to pursue.

The most profound change across the years of the Civil War was in the status of the black people of the South. In the company I am keeping this week, it does not behoove me to do more than refer to this dimension of significant change. I shall risk adding that to emphasize how frustrated the black people were at falling so far short of their hopes and their rights by calling the change in status not very significant is to carry escalated rhetoric much too far. A pair of items struck me this summer as carrying a heavy freight of the meaning of this change. In a 1785 estate settlement in Ste. Genevieve, in what is now Missouri, two slave mothers and two children were divided so as to establish as nearly as possible equal inheritance shares. Each slave mother of about thirty had a daughter of about twelve. By requiring the mothers to swap daughters, the estate shares were brought from 7 percent inequity in value to 3[frac12] percent.¹⁷ Decades after the Civil War, Jacob Thomas, who had seen his slave parents separated by sale, “had no difficulty in relating what for him had been the overriding significance of freedom.” As reported by Professor Leon Litwack in his deeply moving recent book, Been in the Storm So Long, the aging Thomas replied: “I has got thirteen great-gran' chilluns an' I knows whar dey ever' one am.”¹⁸

Those Southern families possessed of many slaves in 1860 surely went through what they perceived as devastating changes. James L. Roark's graceful portrayal of Masters Without Slaves concludes with a chapter entitled “The Soul is Fled.”¹⁹ While this judgment of the author ought to be seriously addressed in evaluating the dimensions of change, there is still room to question this aspect of his compelling account. In any case, the large slaveholders were such a tiny fraction of the Southern white families that only by making that affluent small minority surrogate for the essence of the Old South could such a devastating judgment be sustained. The great mass of white Southerners were, of course, not owners of any slaves, while many others used the labor of only one or two slaves. Recently Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney have been exploring the fate of these people in what they call in one essay “The South from Self-Sufficiency to Peonage.”²⁰ Among the crucial elements in the decline, they identify the destruction of the great swine herds and the onset of legal requirements that herders fence in their stock. How much of these changes were already in the making, war or no war, and how much may be directly attributed to either war or emancipation remains to be studied.

This brings our attention to another of the self-evident changes across the war years, rural poverty replacing antebellum prosperity in agriculture. The difficulty of unraveling the effects of war itself from the less direct wartime influences as well as from secular trends only insignificantly deflected by the war has, however, been emphasized very recently by Gavin Wright's work on The Political Economy of the Cotton South. “The South was wrenched out of one historical epoch and into another during the decade of the Civil War,” he writes. “True enough, the South had lost a bloody Civil War, but apart from the enforcement of emancipation, the changes in Southern agriculture were not imposed by a victorious North. …” “The suddenness and extent of the changes,” he continues, “are explained instead by the unique historical justaposition of emancipation, war, and the onset of an era of stagnation in cotton demand.” In further stressing the secular trend of market forces, Wright argues:

The malaise of the postbellum South, the disputes and anxieties over tenancies, crop liens, interest charges, and overproduction, all confirm the rationality of the antebellum farmers who grew cotton only as a surplus crop. The behavior of these free households explains the demand for slave labor and the flourishing success of slavery during the era when cotton was king. Postwar circumstances and institutions pushed farmers of both races toward the alternative rationality of the market, but the forces of market demand after 1860 were too weak to restore economic progress based on cotton.

It is therefore the worldwide weakening of demand for cotton, more than war related consequences, that Wright is emphasizing when he concludes: “Thus, not just slavery, but the self-sufficient prosperity of 1860, was gone with the wind forever.”²¹

I am obligated to rub the cat's other ear at least briefly, so I shall now turn to pointing in some directions that if not necessarily new seem promising for further study of our symposium theme. The new history of the 1980s and beyond, so powerfully outlined in the 1981 Summer and Autumn issues of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, offers many exciting vistas for the study of our central problem. Family history, for example, has currently become almost a rage, and where is there a more fruitful field for either traditional family history or family reconstitution than in an area where society is self-consciously organic and family is sometimes a mortal religion—a religion equipped with perhaps more genealogical ministers per thousand people than any place in America. The undeniable impact of a war such as the Civil War on family relations, sex roles, child rearing practices, remarriages, and step-parent influences on children await only better research techiques and organizing concepts to advance significantly our understanding of nineteenth-century American society.

The onset of the psychological perspective in biography, for another example, should be welcomed by biographers of Southerners if, indeed, the distinctiveness of the South lies in its unique mythology that gives “philosophical meaning to the ordinary facts of life.” Professor Michael Barton's discovery that almost all of the published letters of condolence on the death of loved ones were written by Confederate rather than Federal soldiers during the Civil War is so intriguing that he may have to move fast to keep his investigations ahead of those of others he has stimulated to enter the lists.²²

The psychological dimensions of a society are being approached repeatedly through study of the process of elite recruitment. Though it is woefully superficial to assess any society from the simple notion of “show me a peoples' heroes,” serious comparison of antebellum with postbellum Southern society along this dimension may be possible. Johanna Nicol Shields offers suggestive insights into elite temperament and its roots in her study of “The Making of American Congressional Mavericks: A Contrasting of the Cultural Attitudes of Mavericks and Conformists in the United States House of Representatives, 1836-1860.”²³ Anyone with the stamina to digest tens of thousands of pages of autobiographical and other self-revealing writings of postwar Southern officeholders might bring to light some elusive clues about the extent of change or continuity in Southern social psychology across the war years.

Comparative history has been in and out of vogue frequently. Comparing postwar settlements following the American Civil War with settlements after other more recent wars has not been received as very enlightening. Comparing the extent of change over a major war period, however, seems to me a useful way to isolate essentials. The Japanese and German experiences after the Second World War are only the most evident examples. One of my colleagues, interested in Japanese history, tells me that age cohort analysis seems very useful for this purpose. Youthful Japanese reared to regard the Emperor as divine may have suffered far greater trauma than older and more experienced Japanese upon hearing on radio the Emperor's own very ordinary voice denying his own divinity.²⁴ In the study of slave experience through the Federal Writers' Project Slave Narratives and other twentieth-century interview projects, Professor Paul Escott, as well as other users, is explicit in considering age of the respondent when slavery ended.²⁵ I think that there is nothing comparable in studying white responses to the war and its consequences, and sustained attention is needed to the well-established psychological dimensions of stages of development through the life cycle. Stage of development is sometimes strongly related to the outcome of grief from the loss of important persons, and one psychiatrist and biographer argues that such loss may “lay down a precipitate of character traits” and that this is “particularly true in children.”²⁶ No other period in the American experience can match the extent of childhood bereavement among white Southerners during the Civil War. Where are the studies of the later behavior and influence of the age cohort that suffered this particular Civil War trauma? I certainly do not claim to know, but it may be more than coincidence that the children of the Civil War years were in their prime years for public leadership during the 1890s, when some significant things happened to the public forms of race relations in the South. Age cohort analysis, moreover, might help to answer a question posed during last night's discussion time. How did the idyllic antebellum slave image, Sambo and all, ever recover from the planters' wartime disenchantment with the attitudes and behavior of the black people? Again, I certainly do not know, but I think it may be worthwhile to try to identify the wartime ages of the principal contributors to the revived image. I am not unaware that some of the mature adults of wartime did later reminisce in that mode, perhaps sometimes for a contemporary practical purpose. It may well be, nonetheless, that it was the children of the Confederacy who could later actually believe the revived myth.

Numerical and formal analysis, partly encouraged by the development of computing machinery, has passed its bumptious stage and is settling down to be a modest but useful kind of history. It is my impression that, together with American Colonial history, partly Southern history, of course, the various periods and themes of Southern history have been receiving more than their fair share of sophisticated numerical analysis. Since much of this work has been inspired by growing concern with history from the bottom up, the South has been a fertile field to cultivate. For where in America, we may ask, can historians find a larger underprivileged element of society to study than in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South? One of the most prolific segments of formal analysis, the New Economic History, has been devoted heavily to the South across the Civil War Era. The most persisting brouhaha in the profession in recent years stems from Time on the Cross and supplementing or challenging econometric studies of slavery and first freedom. So much of the New Economic History has been devoted to the South, in fact, that Harold D. Woodman recently provided a full-fledged historiographical essay on that growing body of work.²⁷

Whether in the history of medicine, in the encouraging involvement of anthropologists and historical archaeologists with the history of the past century, or in the broadening facets of the more familiar intellectual history, the theme of our symposium this year provides both challenging and promising opportunities for the historians who will do the so-called new things ahead in the 1980s. The South Shall Rise Again was not written of Southern history; that has never fallen, and has never shown fewer signs of ever falling than it does right now.

Notes

1. Journal of Southern History, XXX (November, 1964), 451-62.

2. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XII (Summer and Autumn, 1981). Peter H. Smith's essay is in the Summer issue, pp. 3-27.

3. Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War (Boston, 1866), 135-36.

4. Thomas B. Alexander, “Persistent Whiggery in the Confederate South, 1860-1877,” Journal of Southern History, XXVII (August, 1961), 305-29.

5. Earlene Williams Collier, “Response of Southern Editors and Political Leaders to the National Union Convention Movement of 1866” (M.A. thesis, University of Alabama, 1963).

6. William C. Harris, Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967); ibid., The Day of the Carpetbagger: Republican Reconstruction in Mississippi (Baton Rouge and London; Louisiana State University Press, 1979); William McKinley Cash, “Alabama Republicans During Reconstruction: Personal Characteristics, Motivations, and Political Activity of Party Activists, 1867-1880” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alabama, 1973).

7. Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).

8. J. Carlyle Sitterson, “Business Leaders in Post-Civil War North Carolina, 1865-1900,” in Studies in Southern History in Memory of Albert Ray Newsome, 1894-1951 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957).

9. Marjorie Howell Cook [now Mrs. Krebs], “Restoration and Innovation: Alabamians Adjust To Defeat, 1865-1867” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alabama, 1968).

10. Westley Floyd Busbee, Jr., “Presidential Reconstruction in Georgia, 1865-1867” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alabama, 1972).

11. Cash, “Alabama Republicans During Reconstruction.”

12. Vicki L. Vaughn, “Southern Commercial Conventions: Continuity of Perceptions, Values, and Leadership, 1837-1871” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri—Columbia, 1979).

13. Journal of Southern History, XV (February, 1949), 3-8.

14. Harris, Day of the Carpetbagger; Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-1877 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1974).

15. University Press of Kentucky, 1975.

16. Journal of Southern History, XLVIII (February 1982).

17. Furnished by Dr. Susan C. Boyle from an ongoing project under the direction of Professor Susan L. Flader of the University of Missouri—Columbia.

18. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).

19. Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977).

20. American Historical Review, Volume 85 (December 1980), 1095-1118.

21. Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978).

22. Michael Barton, Goodmen: The Character of Civil War Soldiers (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981).

23. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alabama, 1972.

24. I am indebted to Professor Robert M. Somers for this insight.

25. Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979).

26. Miles F. Shore, “Biography in the 1980s: A Psychoanalytic Perspective,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XII (Summer, 1981), 89-113.

27. Woodman, “Sequel to Slavery: The New History Views the Postbellum South,” Journal of Southern History, XLIII (November 1977), 523-54.