The Man at the Center

If the plantation system robbed the common Southern white of much, it had not robbed him completely.

Since it was based on Negro slavery, and since Negro slavery was a vastly wasteful system and could be made to pay only on rich soils, it had practically everywhere left him some sort of land and hence some sort of subsistence.

And in doing that it had exempted him from all direct exploitation, specifically waived all claim to his labor, and left his independence totally unimpaired. So long, indeed, as the "peculiar institution" prevailed, he might rest here forever, secure in the knowledge that his estate in this respect would never grow worse, after his fashion, as completely a free agent as the greatest planter of the country.

In this regard, the Old South was one of the most remarkable societies which ever existed in the world.

Was there ever another instance of a country in which the relation of master and man arose, negligible exceptions aside, only with reference to a special alien group, in which virtually the whole body of the natives who had failed economically got off fully from the servitude that has almost universally been the penalty of such failure?

If the Southern social order had blocked-in the common Southerner, it had yet not sealed up the exit entirely. If he could not escape en masse, he could nevertheless escape as an individual.

Always it was possible for the strong, craving lads who still thrust up from the old sturdy rootstock to make their way out and on, to compete with the established planters for the lands of the Southwest.

So close to the frontier stage did the whole country remain, so little was the static tendency realized, so numerous were the bankruptcies, with such relative frequency did many estates go on changing hands, and above all, so open an opportunity did the profession of law afford, it was possible to carve out wealth and honor in the very oldest regions.

Thus, of the eight governors of Virginia from 1841 to 1861, only one was born a gentleman, two began their careers by hiring out as plow hands, and another (the son of a village butcher) as a tailor. But in their going these emergent ones naturally carried away with them practically the whole effective stock of those qualities which might have generated resentment and rebellion.

Those who were left behind were the simplest of the simple men of this country, those who were inclined to accept whatever the day brought forth as in the nature of things, those whose vague ambition, though it might surge up in dreams now and then, was too weak ever to rise to a consistent lust for plantations and slaves, or anything else requiring an extended exercise of will, those who, sensing their own inadequacy, expected and were content with little.

Moreover, they were in general those in whom the frontier tradition was likely to run strongest, which is to say that they were often almost indifferent, even in their dreams, to the possession of plantations and slaves and to the distinctions which such possessions set up.

It is characteristic of the frontier tradition everywhere that it places no such value on wealth and rank as they command in an old and stable society. Great personal courage, unusual physical powers, the ability to drink a quart of whisky or to lose the whole of one's capital on the turn of a card without the quiver of a muscle, these are at least as important as possessions, and infinitely more important than heraldic crests.

In the South, if your neighbor overshadowed you in the number of his slaves, you could outshoot him or outfiddle him, and in your own eyes and in those of many of your fellows, remain essentially as good a man as he.

Seeing the success of these, and recalling obscurely that somewhere out there beyond the horizon were fertile lands to be had for the taking, it was the easiest thing for men steeped in the tradition of the frontier to harbor the comfortable, the immensely soothing, faith that if only they chose . . . that if only they chose. . . 

If the plantation had introduced distinctions of wealth and rank among the men of the old backcountry, and, in doing so, had perhaps offended against the ego of the common white, it had also introduced that other vastly ego warming and ego expanding distinction between the white man and the black.

Robbing him and degrading him in so many ways, it had simultaneously elevated this common white to a position comparable to that of, say, the Doric knight of ancient Sparta.

Not only was he not exploited directly, he was himself made by extension a member of the dominant class, was lodged solidly on a tremendous superiority, which, however much the blacks in the "big house" might sneer at him, and however much their masters might privately agree with them, he could never publicly lose. Come what might, he would always be a white man.

And before that vast and capacious distinction, all others were foreshortened, dwarfed, and all but obliterated. The grand outcome was the almost complete disappearance of economic and social focus on the part of the masses.

One simply did not have to get on in this world in order to achieve security, independence, or value in one's own estimation and in that of one's fellows.

Am I too easily slurring over that narrow class consciousness and that land-and-slave snobbery which I have myself laid down as marked characteristics of the master class?

Granted all that I have said, these would still remain men who, by token of the very things I have predicated of them, by token of their possession of land and independence, by token of their memory of common origin with the planters, would be fiercely self-assertive and sensitive and inordinately resentful of slights and snubs, would be sufficient by themselves to propel such men headlong into class awareness and hate?

So it might seem. But to understand what actually took place here, we must recall again how close the Old South always was to the frontier in time, how late it was before the flux of land-grabbing and fortune-building began to yield place to crystallization, before the planter group or any other acquired even proximate fixity of personnel and character.

For this clearly means that distinctions were to the last more in the process of becoming than realized, that such rigidity as they possessed resided more in the concept than in the application.

They might determine, these distinctions, whom one would marry or whom one would have in for dinner, but never with quite the strictness that the legend of the Old South has led us to expect. Behind the normal inclination of property to ally itself only with property, behind the convention that rank must wed only with rank, the backcountry heritage often showed through.

Planters very commonly intermarried with yeomen, and alliances between planters and people who were pretty definitely reckoned poor whites were not unheard of. Fully three-quarters of the planters were accustomed to having their farmer neighbors and cousins at their tables now and then.

Nor was it any rare thing for a great man with political ambitions to seize on a dozen crackers at a camp-meeting or a party rally and bear them off to his home to sleep on his best beds and make merry with his best liquor - or anyhow his second-best liquor.

And in all save the oldest districts and the haughtiest of the "big houses", the line at parties and dances was drawn, with discrimination of course, but with scarcely more discrimination than one would normally expect in a farmer community anywhere. But there was something more important yet, something that I perhaps begin already to suggest. The very marrow of this tradition of the backcountry to which I have referred so often, of the feeling which was basic in the Southern situation, was a sort of immense kindliness and easiness - the kindliness and easiness of men who have long lived together on the same general plane, who have common memories, and who are more or less conscious of the ties of blood.

And now, at the exact moment when distinctions were springing up, when land-and-slave pride and the snob spirit were swelling into being, this kindliness and easiness were flowing over to join forces with other factors to give rise to, to serve as the kernel of the famous Southern manner.

We shall find as we go along that this manner, as it was practiced, was not so altogether lovely as we have been told. But for all that, it served wonderfully as a balance in the Southern social world and so as a barrier against the development of bitterness.

If the common white was scorned, that scorn was so attenuated and softened in its passage down through the universal medium of this manner, struck at last so obliquely upon his ego, that it glanced off harmless. When he frequented public gatherings, what he encountered would seldom be naked snobishness.

Rather, there would nearly always be a fine gentleman to lay a familiar hand on his shoulder, to inquire by name after the members of his family, maybe to buy him a drink, certainly to rally him on some boasted weakness or treasured misadventure, and to come around eventually to confiding in a hushed voice, to patronize him in such fashion that to his simple eyes he seemed not to be patronized at all but actually deferred to, to send him home, not sullen and vindictive, but glowing with the sense of participation in the common brotherhood of white men.

To sum up, the working code of the Old South, the code which really governed most relations between the classes, was exactly adapted to the exigencies of the Southern order, the old basic democracy of feeling, and simply an embodiment of that feeling.

To stand on his head in a bar, to toss down a pint of raw whisky at a gulp, to fiddle and dance all night, to bite off the nose or gouge out the eye of a favorite enemy, to fight harder and love harder than the next man, to be known eventually far and wide as a hell of a fellow, such would be his focus.

To lie on his back for days and weeks, storing power as the air he breathed stores power under the sun of August, and then to explode, as that air explodes in a thunderstorm, in a violent outburst of emotion, in such fashion would he make life not only tolerable but infinitely sweet.

But I must not leave the theme without calling your attention specifically to the stimulation of the tendency to violence which these things obviously involved. Nor must I leave it without pointing to two significant patterns which grew up in the closest association with this romanticism and pleasure seeking.

The Southern fondness for rhetoric.

A gorgeous, primitive art, addressed to the autonomic system and not to the encephalon, rhetoric is dear to the heart of the simple man everywhere. In its purest and most natural form, oratory, it flourishes wherever he gathers, particularly in every new land where bonds are loosed and imagination soars. It flourished over the whole American country in these days of expansion as it has rarely flourished elsewhere at any time.

In the South, there was the rising flood of romanticism and pleasure-seeking clamoring for expression.

And in the South there was the daily impact upon the white man of the example of the Negro, concerning whom nothing is so certain as his remarkable tendency to seize on lovely words, to roll them in his throat, to heap them m redundant profusion one upon another until meaning vanishes and there is nothing left but the sweet drunkenness of sound, nothing but the play of primitive rhythm upon the secret springs of emotion.

Thus rhetoric flourished here far beyond even its American average.

It early became a passion, and not only a passion but a primary standard of judgment, the mark of leadership. The greatest man would be the man who could use it best.

But to speak of the love of rhetoric is at once to suggest the love of politics.

The two, in fact, were inseparable. Hand in hand they emerged from the frontier tradition, flourished over the swelling territory of the young Republic of the West, and grew into romantic Southern passions.

Of politics it may be objected that I am assuming too much, that it has nothing to do with romanticism and pleasure-seeking, and that a conspicuous concern with it might well be the very hallmark of realism.

In the democracies of our Western world, one of the proper functions of politics is the resolution of essential conflict in interest among groups and classes. Then the fact stands fast that from such realistic content, participation in the politics of the South was limited in a peculiarly thorough fashion.

The end result of all the blindness and complacency bred in the masses by physical and social conditions was the thing which is commonly and somewhat inaccurately called the paternalism of the Old South.

Its almost inevitable connotation is the relationship of Roman patron and client. It suggests, that there existed on the one hand an essential dependence, and on the other a prescriptive right, that it operated through command and obedience and rested finally on compulsion.

The actual fact was simply that, unaware of any primary conflict in interest, and seeing the planter not as an antagonist but as an old friend or kinsman, the common white naturally fell into the habit of honoring him as first among equals, of deferring to his knowledge and judgment, of consulting him on every occasion, and of looking to him for leadership and opinion, and, above all, for opinion in politics.

The politics of the Old South was a theater of the purely personal, an arena where one great champion confronted another or a dozen, and sought to outdo them in rhetoric and splendid gesturing.

It swept back the loneliness of the land, it brought men together under torches, it filled them with the contagious power of the crowd, it unleashed emotion and set it to leaping and dancing, it caught the very meanest man up out of his own tiny legend into the gorgeous fabric of the legend of this or that great hero.

But the only real interest which was ever involved in it was that of the planter.

And even in his case the romantic and pleasure-seeking element would grow so potent, so preponderant, that eventually it would bear him outside the orbit of his true interest, would swing him headlong, perhaps against his own better judgment, into the disaster of the Civil War.

It is to our simple generic figure that we must look also for primary understanding of the South's religious pattern.

The legend, of course, has always had it that the land was Anglican, or at least that the ruling class was predominantly so. But in fact there were less than sixty thousand Episcopalians in the South at the outbreak of the Civil War, and these by no means included the body of the planters.

Anglicanism was confined almost entirely to the seaboard districts inhabited by the old aristocracies of colonial days. Here and there it passed over into the cotton country, here and there was to be found a little clump of planters gathered about a St. John's-in-the-Wood or a St. Michael's-in-the-Wilderness. But this was the exception and not the rule. There was a time, to be sure the period of the ascendancy of the Virginians,  when what may be called the Anglican spirit was the prevailing rule in the South.

There was even a time when atheism and French deism were pretty common both in the older regions and in the backcountry. In 1819 Mr. Jefferson could set up his university on a foundation that, though it was not "godless", as was charged against it, was still remarkable for religious freedom.

If the simple backcountry man who was to inherit the great South might sometimes, in his early isolation and engrossment with physical problems, lapse into indifference; if, in the first exuberant self-confidence born of the escape from traditional bonds, he might even be tempted into going all the way, into casting off bonds of every description, into throwing down gods as well as kings, in the long run he would have to retreat.

His chief blood-strain was likely to be the Celtic, of all Western strains the most susceptible to suggestions of the supernatural.

Even when he was a sort of native pagan, knowing little of the Bible and hooting contemptuously at parsons, he was nevertheless essentially religious. Ancestral phobias grappled him toward the old center, and immemorial awes, drawn in with his mother's milk, whispered imperative warning in his ears.

And of the intellectual baggage which he had brought from Europe and managed to preserve on the frontier, the core and the bulk consisted of the Protestant theology of the sixteenth century and the Dissenting moral code of the seventeenth.

Even if he was seeking pleasure, then however paradoxical it may sound, he was also likely to be a Puritan.

The sense of sin, if obscured, continued to move darkly in him at every time, not so darkly, not so savagely, not so relentlessly as in the New Englander, it may be, but with conviction nevertheless.

The world he knew, the hot sting of the sun in his blood, the sidelong glance of the all complaisant Negro woman, all these impelled him irresistibly to joy. But even as he danced, and even though he had sloughed off all formal religion, his thoughts were with the piper and his fee.

With this heritage, moreover, the physical world sometimes joined hands. If the dominant mood is one of sultry reverie, the land is capable of other and more somber moods. There are days when the booming of the wind in the pines is like the audible rushing of time, when the sad knowledge of the grave stirs in the subconsciousness and bends the spirit to melancholy.

There are days when the questions that have no answers must insinuate themselves into the minds of the least analytical of men. And there are other days, in July and August, when the nerves wilt under the terrific impact of sun and humidity, and even the soundest grow a bit neurotic, days full of heavy foreboding.

And there are those days, too, when the earth whimpers in dread, when the lightning clicks in awful concatenation with continuous thunder, and hurricanes break forth with tropical fury, days when this land which in its dominant mood wraps its children in soft illusion strips them naked before terror.

Nor was it only the physical world.

His leisure left the Southerner free to brood as well as to dream, to exaggerate his fears as well as his hopes. Like all men everywhere, he hungered cloudily after a better and a happier world.

And if this hunger could not move him to toil and battle for the realization of the vision here and now, it could and did impel him to the pursuit of the world beyond the world, could and did combine with everything within and without him to bear him to the sanctuary of religion.

But not to the sanctuary of Anglicanism, surely. It was not simple and vivid enough.

Its God "without body, parts, or passions" is an abstraction for intellectuals. It is priestly. It politely ignores hell and talks mellifluously of a God of Love. Its methods, begotten in the relaxing atmosphere of England and refined through centuries, are the methods of understatement. It regards emotion as a kind of moral smallpox.

What our Southerner required, was a faith as simple and emotional as himself.

A faith to draw men together in hordes, to terrify them with Apocalyptic rhetoric, to cast them into the pit, rescue them and at last bring them shouting into the fold of Grace.

A faith, not of liturgy and prayer book, but of primitive frenzy and the blood sacrifice, often of fits and jerks and barks. The God demanded was a God-as-man, the Jehovah of the Old Testament, a God who might be seen, a God who had been seen, a passionate, whimsical God to be trembled before, but whose favor was the sweeter for that, a personal God, a God for the individualist, a God whose representatives were not silken priests but preachers risen from the people themselves.

What was demanded here, was the God and the faith of the Methodists and the Baptists and the Presbyterians. These personal and often extravagant sects, sweeping the entire American country with their revivals in the first half of the nineteenth century, achieved their greatest success in the personal and extravagant South.

And not only among the masses. Fully nine-tenths of the new planters, of the men who were to be masters of the great South were to be numbered among their adherents.