Identity Politics and Civil War: South Carolina’s Public History (1862-2012)

IDENTITY POLITICS AND THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOUTH CAROLINA’S PUBLIC HISTORY, 1862-2012 Several episodes, almost a quarter of a century apart, reveal the continuing power of identity politics in South Carolina history. That revelation leads one to ask: How much difference has a hundred and fifty years made in how people publicly relate, and relate to, their past in the Palmetto State? The sesquicentennial of the American Civil War has brought the question to the fore all over those portions of the United States whose citizens fought. Yet, in South Carolina, frequently regarded as the epicenter of the conflict, the question has not had as much resonance as it might. This is because people in the state in effect have taken a post-modern turn in their presentation of the war. Rather than synthesize and integrate the story of the conflict and its implications, from the run-up to secession through Reconstruction, many consumers, commemorators, commentators, and re-enactors instead focus on the elements of the history with which they identify. That often also means ignoring, scoring, or scorning other elements. Now, it may be doubted that most Sons of Confederate Veterans or participants in the 54th Massachusetts re-enactment troop think of themselves as post-modern. The point isn’t that any particular group is, but 1 rather that the result of these competing, present-day perceptions and narratives of the Civil War are multiple, fragmented, subjectified, and personalized. The holders of these competing views may assert and believe the truth of their particular narratives and deny or dismiss the truth of others, but the unaffiliated public sees these different histories, in their presentation at diverse sites and on diverse occasions, as so many turns of the kaleidoscope. Each turn reveals a different war, with different motives, and a different judgment about the conflict’s outcomes. Once past the agreement that the war happened, killed many people, freed the slaves, and had long-term ramifications, the narrators often talk to their ilk and past everyone else. i ***** It was in the late 1980s that a staff member at the South Carolina Historical Society came to me with empty folders from records of, I believe, the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry of Gregg’s, later McGowan’s, Brigade, which famously fought through the entire war, losing more than a thousand men. A police corporal, she said, had been coming in on lunch hours, wearing his side arm and badge, to go through records related to the original regiment. He was commander of a local reenactment troop. Apparently, as the empty folders suggested, he had been pilfering the originals. A check of microfilm of the collections in question said that numerous items indeed were missing. A lawyer on the Society’s board called a city attorney to find out how to proceed. The next time the corporal appeared, we called his sergeant, who came down and searched his vehicle. Several documents were found then. We offered to forego aggressive prosecution if the corporal would return everything he had taken. Although he said he would—and, with his help, the police recovered numerous additional items at his house—he lied. He withheld a number of pieces, because he had bragged about having recovered these endangered treasures, which he wanted to share at the next re-enactment encampment. That decision sent him to jail for some time. Thankfully, the Historical Society ultimately recovered what 2 we knew to be stolen. The South Caroliniana Library, the Charleston Library Society, and the local and state government archives also recovered materials. At the time, Charleston had a black, Jewish, Irish, sociologist police chief. I asked him why he had given the corporal time off for re-enactment activities. “Ever since I got here,” the chief said, “I have been hearing how one boy in gray is worth ten in blue.” A couple of weeks later, on a Saturday, a delegation from the re-enactment troop called on me at the Historical Society. They had come to apologize for the dishonorable conduct of their commander and for the hurt done us. They were dismayed that these thefts might tarnish the reputation of their troop’s good men and the memory of the soldiers whom they honored for having fought so gallantly a hundred twenty-five years before. There were tears in their eyes. The sincerity of the men was palpable. Yet, when I asked why, in their judgment, this episode had occurred, they had trouble answering. They didn’t understand how personal investment, involvement, and identity, as well as ego and pride, had undermined the adherence, by their commander, to the standards that they had committed themselves to honor and uphold. These delegation members fused honor and identity, almost equating them. Fast forward to a small conference in Columbia, South Carolina a couple of years ago. Most in attendance were dumbfounded by a passionate paper presented there by an adjunct professor of literature with both a doctorate in English and a divinity degree. It attacked the Union cause, presence, and impact in South Carolina a hundred and fifty years ago. The paper was filled with hurt and bitterness. That was what was surprising, not the neo-Confederate argument, a local staple. So heated and angry was the paper that the author leapt to breathtaking conclusions. For instance, he blamed General Sherman, leader of the Union army’s march through South Carolina, for his role in the creation of global warming and the progressive despoliation of a once edenic South. This is because, the argument went, he was the leading edge of both the invasion of the South and world dominance by capitalist, exploitative, industrial Yankees. Furthermore, the listeners were told, Sherman’s practice of total war visited a depth and degree 3 of horror on the South that no other civilized people had endured. No other people previously had had their culture attacked in that violent, comprehensive fashion. The speaker that day was a member of the South Carolina League of the South. One finds this argument suffusing the website of the organization (SCLoS.org). Most people, who hold neo-Confederate views, may not support the organization’s purpose, stated on the masthead of the League’s newsletter: “Advocating the Sovereignty and Independence of the State of South Carolina.” Not all would think wise the deliberately charged language of the article, “The Red Shirts Ride Again,” in the Autumn 2010 issue (23.4) of The South Carolina Patriot (p. 4). The piece reports that the organization’s chairman “put out a call for the Red Shirts [or members] to ride … to defend a brave lady in Summerville,” South Carolina, who had “placed a Confederate flag on the front of her house” in “a predominantly black neighborhood.” The counter protest, mounted by the Red Shirts, was against a march by “ignorant black bigots,” called “for Saturday morning 16 October.” The seventy or so African Americans were joined by “two South hating whites.” On the other hand, joining the thirty Red Shirts “from Charleston, Aiken, Lexington, Abbeville, Columbia, Summerville and elsewhere” was H. K. Edgerton of North Carolina. He famously is “the black man who dresses in a Confederate uniform and carries a large Confederate flag to protest against anti-Confederate flag groups everywhere.” The day was judged a good one, gaining the organization “three new members.” It is easy to characterize such actions and language as expressions of a fringe group. Yet, the member, who spoke at the conference several weeks before the Red Shirts rode again, was passionate in his convictions. Of course, Albigensians of the thirteenth century, the Sephardic Jews and the Byzantines of the fifteenth century, the Huguenots of the seventeenth century, the Acadians of the eighteenth century, and twentieth-century Armenians, Ukrainians, Bosnians, Jews, and many others in Europe, not to mention other places of “civilization,” would have disagreed with the judgments about the relative damage done the South in the American Civil War. After all, the Confederates did not suffer either physical annihilation or expulsion. In the face of the anguished and clearly warped judgment about the 4 comparative degree of southern losses and suffering, the natural, first response is disbelief. The second is dismissal. However natural, both are wrong. The passion was real, even if the claims based on it were exaggerated and extreme. The historian’s job is to deal with the evidence, not ignore what is distasteful or, at first blush, incomprehensible. Yet, to get past distaste and incomprehension is not easy. Entering into another’s thoughts does not require sympathy, but it does demand empathy. Also contextualization. One needs—I needed— not only to understand the logic and beliefs, or “facts,” informing this thinking but the consequences of it for public history in the state. Of course, the synechdotic narrative I confronted is only one version of the Civil War and Reconstruction story in the Palmetto State. Many people, who do not still identify with the Confederacy, find much more sympathetic the African American narrative represented by the monument erected on the east side of the state capitol in 2002. This was the year after the Confederate battle flag notoriously was removed from the capitol dome and placed behind the Confederate monument in front of the grand staircase leading up to the capitol’s front doors. ii Like the Confederate narrative, this African American one reflects pride in the face of historic wrongs and hurt. Witness the 54th Massachusetts and First South Carolina Volunteers (U. S. C. T.) reenactment troops active in the lowcountry. Not surprisingly, African Americans find such comparisons odious. So do most subscribers to the Confederate narrative. That is why these accounts treat many of the same events in radically different ways. The reason is not only the selection and weighing of evidence, but the commitment to group history. In this approach, history ultimately is about identity. Where there are multiple identities there are multiple histories. On the sesquicentennial of the Civil War in South Carolina, therefore, there are different histories for different audiences. That is an important fact to recognize but an unsatisfactory state of affairs. 5 It wasn’t always so. Up to the centennial of the Civil War, the state had a ruling master narrative. It was the Confederate one. Other perspectives could be glimpsed in a few public places—for instance, at Fort Sumter National Monument in Charleston harbor; at the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, where a school for freedmen was established in 1862; at Beaufort National Cemetery; and at military bases. The National Park Service’s 1952 booklet on the fort’s history, however, essentially eschewed large-scale interpretation. Its author chose instead to focus narrowly on the role of the site in the battles for and around Charleston. iii That approach avoided overt challenge of the Confederate narrative. This account had multiple components. It emphasized states rights and the threat to those rights by the Republican Party. It then argued the legality and necessity of secession, insisting that the Civil War was provoked by the North and constitutionally should not have occurred; for secession was a right of each state. Turning from the justness of the cause to the conduct of the war, the narrative wove together the heroism against huge odds and the privation and suffering of the Confederate army and people, on the one hand, and the brutality and rapacity of the Union invaders, on the other hand. Confederate women were celebrated for their sacrifices and service and the men for their honor and bravery. In this telling, slaves and slavery hardly figured among the causes of the war, although curiously abolitionists and abolitionism did. Instead, the slaves were hapless victims, freed to endure privation and to be misled by corrupt politicians among the black and white Republican leadership during Reconstruction. The departure of the federal army and the restoration of white rule under Democratic leadership returned order, sanity, and light to a world that had been in darkness, madness, and chaos for the previous dozen years and more. Such limited violence, as the Ku Klux Klan and Hampton’s Red Shirts had to use, served to effect and protect this restoration. Underlying this narrative was a Manichean split between good southerners and bad Yankees. Southern culture was built on noble aspirations, traditions, and commitments; Yankee culture on commerce, greed, and calculation. Southern nationalism defended itself against northern imperialism. Southerners 6 celebrated, and rose to defend, local self-determination against the tyranny of centralization and distant control. Northerners pushed consolidation and central power with the determination to snuff out southern freedom. Southerners and northerners both had become Americans, but northerners then had turned from the conservative commitments and the skepticism about power of the founding fathers. Their embrace of the newest and most pernicious and extreme “isms,” modernity, and industry perverted and polluted the government, the earth, and their souls. Southerners’ care for their country and principles largely protected Dixie from such developments. The southern people—for they always had been different from northerners in their origins, values, and priorities—needed to remember their heritage and resist these alien influences, the bad fruit of corrosive Yankee encroachment. Not all had or would, but true southerners could be counted on. These faithful citizens were those devoted to their region’s defense— Confederates and their descendents and sympathizers. Absent in this narrative or relegated to supporting roles—that, for instance, of loyal and loving slaves— were African Americans, Unionists, deserters, anti-Confederates, and Republicans. These bad southerners and blacks should not have had self-determination as their right at any time. That belonged properly only to true southerners, who managed progressively to restrict the franchise to loyal citizens. It was necessary at times to use violence, but eventually new laws and a new constitution reduced that need. Yet vigilance continued to be vital. iv Clearly, this historical narrative is about what in effect is an ethnic and national, as well as an ideological identity: southerners had particular origins in common and had developed their own culture on the basis of shared commitments and conditions. The assumption behind this nationalist reading is that history is a patriotic pursuit and duty, as well as a school for citizenship. One uses history to assert and maintain a people-hood (or, in the case of a polity, nation-hood). It may be that, by doing so, one is calling the nation or the people into being—that is, enacting ethnogenesis. Or one may be fighting to keep the nation 7 or people from being attenuated or submerged by time, hostile others, and alien cultural influences. Even though writing and speaking about the past, one does so for the future: long live the nation (or the people)! This southern nationalist narrative had antebellum roots but did not become hegemonic or totalizing, either in South Carolina or elsewhere in the South, until after the Civil War. Earlier, whites advanced diverse arguments about the future that they saw for the South and the reasons why. There were those who maintained that the southern states’ interests had never been served by the Union; those who insisted instead that the balance of interests was shifting from favorable to unfavorable; those who argued alternatively that the rise of antislavery doomed the Union; those who focused rather on the danger to southern rights in the North’s accelerating growth and political power; those who held that these other developments were less important than the fact that southerners were becoming strong enough to stand on their own as a separate people and country; and those who preferred to think that southerners always had been, or at least had become, a distinct people and, therefore, should have a distinct polity. Only a small minority of opinion makers held any of these views in the 1820s, but a large majority of the South Carolina voting population embraced them in one or another combination by December 1860. How was history deployed in the development of, and the recruitment of support for, these arguments? Many speakers, and also the crafters of secession declarations, basically said that they were following the example of their Revolutionary forefathers. This was in the effort to preserve the rights defended in 1776 and once again under serious threat in 1860. In the case of the “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” the focus then shifted to the breach of the constitutional contract by northern states, which refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. v This was the ideological and lawyerly argument. Yet its framers were careful not to justify their cause in the philosophical terms used by Thomas Jefferson and the other drafters of the Declaration of Independence. As the secessionists were acutely aware, in the hands of abolitionists, the language of 8 universal rights had become a weapon against slavery. In part, this is why the secession declarations do not make similarly stirring reading, despite their repeated evocations of the Revolutionary past. The framers of 1860-61 were acutely aware as well of what they deemed the biblical, legal, and historical sanctioning of slavery. They did not feel the need to elaborate but assumed those grounds when insisting that they were protecting this time-honored and divinely approved institution against the radical, unhistorical claims of northern abolitionists—people committed hubristically to human equality and perfectionism in the face of both all the evidence to the contrary and also common sense. Those neoConfederates who deny, as most do, that slavery was a core issue for secession ignore these arguments. Other speakers and writers in 1860-61 insisted that history first may have justified union but no longer did so because of the divergent economic and social developments of the two regions. When South Carolinian William Henry Trescot, acting Secretary of State in the Buchanan administration in 1860, spoke of a government of class and race in South Carolina and the broader region, he was making a variation of the argument. He also looked at the decline or breakup of parts of empires in his day and concluded that rising interests, such as those of southern planters, could—and eventually should— successfully assert self-determination in the face of inimical and distant powers intent on ruling rather than enabling them. This was what had happened in the American Revolution, a conflict at least as much about the self-empowerment of Americans as about inherited political rights from fictive Gothic ancestors. vi In this spirit, editor and economist J. D. B. De Bow, another Charlestonian and fellow College of Charleston graduate, edited a journal, for most of the fifteen years before the Civil War and beyond, devoted to the southern economy and its political implications and claims. Still other writers and speakers pointed to the emergence of ethnic nationalism in Europe and, at the same time as they worried about the liberal and socialist tendencies of the revolutions, urged that the South follow suit. vii In making their case, these proponents often claimed different origins for southerners—for instance, descent from the Normans, not the Anglo-Saxons, or from the Cavalier loyalists to the Crown in 9 the English Civil War, not the Puritans, who were the backbone of the Roundhead army that both overthrew the monarchy and peopled New England. viii William Gilmore Simms, preeminent southern man of letters in the middle third of the nineteenth century, generally resisted such language about origins, as his justification for a southern nation was different: peoples (he often called them “races”) emerged out of the melding of earlier peoples, as the English had out of the mingling of Normans and Anglo-Saxons, and that was what was happening in the South. Similarly, he held, northerners were becoming a distinct people. Their attitudes towards southerners reflected and made ever more disagreeable the difference. It was the job of the historian to trace these developments, anticipate their consequences, and thereby protect and forward his people. History thus was not just a rearward looking, but a visionary pursuit and, therefore, the proper study of leaders. ix History also was fundamental to all these arguments in secession-era South Carolina. What it revealed, of course, depended in considerable degree on the narrator. Yet the narratives tended to the same end— southern independence—regardless of their divergent analyses. The war changed that. Whatever the reasons for asserting independence, the creation of the Confederacy meant that southern nationalism almost instantly became a fact in the minds and mouths of a wide range of opinion makers and their audiences. Very quickly this fact was assumed in most media outlets, the class room, and the pulpit. Strikingly, after the war, Protestant religious leaders in Kentucky, seeking civic and racial order through solidarity with fellow southerners, claimed Confederate identity and solidarity for their congregants. This was despite the fact that the bluegrass state had remained in the Union during the conflict. This Confederate nation within the nation after 1865 meant that all who shared Confederate identity necessarily, like African Americans, had a form of double consciousness. Southern whites felt themselves a people apart at the same time as they were a part of the nation to which they had returned. This was substantially because they understood themselves to be at once colonially dependent on the North and threatened by African American economic and political independence. What they wanted instead was African American dependence and, for themselves, equality with (if no longer independence 10 from) the North. The Confederate narrative aggressively asserted these points. It also cast the days before the war as halcyon. The Old South embodied the good and the perduring. Yet the New South had to grow for southerners to achieve prosperity again. How to value the old while promoting the new? That became the public task of history. Then, in the wake of World War I, the South’s history became a burden in the eyes of a growing number, not only outside, but within the region. As the emerging anti-lynching campaign and the civil rights movement showed, a legacy of racism and violence belied the Lost Cause myth of the halcyon Old South. Add to this legacy the fact that the South first lost the Civil War, its independence, and huge wealth, then committed to racial and agricultural practices that could not achieve a healthy economy and society, and thereby became, in the eyes of social scientists and journalists, the nation’s chief economic and social problem. x This compelling counter narrative drew historians to the region’s past in dramatic numbers in the quarter century following the centennial of the Civil War. So successful were the claims of the South on the historical community that now some argue that the very concept of the South has become a hindrance to historical understanding. xi In making this case, its supporters begin with the observation that the region presupposes the contours of its study. In other words, the subjects that get privileged relate to the South’s rise and roles. The focus on this region, according to this view, obscures aspects of identity, conflict, and culture that do not relate to the region as a region. Even when historians are challenging the Confederate narrative, they frequently continue the focus on regional identity and distinctiveness as shapers of people, culture, and perceptions. Or they ask: what traction do southern identity and realities, and those people cast in relationship to them, still have? To all appearances, the answer is at once not much and a great deal. In the divergent narratives of the Civil War sesquicentennial, many South Carolinians claim to historicize their identities but do not relate them historically. Confederate identity, in sympathetic tellings, is not about blacks but about a heroic struggle by a wronged people. Black historical narratives also reflect a 11 heroic struggle by a wronged people. Yet the fact that white and black descendents of the Civil War and Reconstruction era share the same stage and similarly structured narratives hardly figures. Neither does the mingling of cultures and people that makes the historical legacies of both white and black Carolinians a common, as well as a contested, inheritance. The impulse to use an historic sense of hurt as a basis for a present claim for justice and recognition is familiar to identity politics at every level. It not only plays out in negotiations over lands claimed by rival peoples, such as the Palestinians and Israelis or the Serbs and Croats, but in much more intimate settings, such as divorce court. In these diverse circumstances, history is a well for self-justification and selfassertion. It also serves to rally those with a shared sense of aggrievement. In doing so, it is as much about present concerns as past developments. It may also, like many nationalist histories of the nineteenth century, be about the future toward which one wants to go. xii To post-modernists, such divergent narratives, by and on behalf of different identities and interests, may be the norm. To many historians, however, they are a failing of the enterprise. Historians want identities to be integrated in the past’s telling, not just juxtaposed and defended without serious reference to each other. The past may be a foreign country needing mapping, but it is not a blank screen inviting selfprojection in the costumes of different eras. Although that faith may be naïve in the eyes of some observers, without it one may conclude that history loses much of its public value. It is reduced to an entertainment, a basis of association in a community of identity, or the grounds for a case being advanced. The Confederate narrative has become all three. The counterargument, of people committed to identity politics in history, is clear: no one other than members of the community exploring and sharing its history will tell what needs telling and do it correctly. It is not a question of getting the facts right, but of getting the story right. This judgment is as much about identity with the subject or the cause as with any body of knowledge and discourse. Yet, it makes learning from and about people, who do not share one’s identity politics, virtually impossible. The 12 effort at empathy that underlies the study of the other is radically different than the exercise of sympathy that affiliates someone to oneself or vice versa. Yes, it is easy to colonize and appropriate the other, if one is not careful, but empathy is not the end, it is the beginning of understanding. What would happen if, in South Carolina, present-day subscribers to Confederate history turned their attention to tellers of African American history and, conversely, if African Americans overcame enough of their anger to consider Confederate-inspired narratives? What might people hear beneath the stridency and patterned presentations? Would the tragedy of history displace in some measure the memory of historic hurt? Might the common ground on which those identity histories have played out emerge in some measure? Might there be in some measure dialogue rather than just a talking past one another? Might history actually become a basis of understanding in addition to a form of assertion? In those discussions, how should one address power inequalities—between Yankees and Confederates, whites and blacks, rich and poor, men and women? How do the fact of power and the tendency to its abuse become a ground for discussion of the wrongs done many in South Carolina? On the other side of the coin, how do the roles of honor and courage give dignity to people in conflict? Or do they? Are there not stories that make meaningful the terrible meaninglessness of both destructive war and the repression of people and their human rights? Looking beyond identities, is not the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction part of larger developments simultaneously affecting Europe and Asia as well? When, in 1861 and 1862, Karl Marx wrote from London for New York and Viennese newspapers about the American Civil War, it was because the war mattered to more than the combatants and the communities from which they came. The impact of the loss of Confederate cotton on English textile mills and their workers was enormous. It put hundreds of thousands out of work and on the dole, as a result of extra-ordinary government action. xiii The consequences of the war for South Carolina and its people, black as well as white, were all the greater. Indeed, they are still playing out. The seemingly endless debate over the flying of the 13 Confederate battle flag at the state house in Columbia is symbolic. True, the flag no longer flies over the capitol, as it did for thirty-eight years after its installation in 1962, in the midst of the Civil War centennial and growing civil rights protests. Still, by law, it must be there, in front, together with a monument honoring fallen Confederate soldiers in words by William Henry Trescot. And that is why the NAACP still boycotts the Palmetto State. xiv Around the corner from the flag, on the east side of the state house, is the sculpture in honor of African Americans. It was commissioned before but erected the year after the flag was moved. The juxtaposition is telling and was deliberate. Lead supporters of the flag and of its removal sought thus to give space for the African American story on the grounds of the Capitol, where since 1879 the Confederate dead had been the focus of attention. Yet, while the two histories both now have public places, the memories and identities that the monuments represent are left to talk past rather than with one another. The tendency, in the post-civil rights era, is not to confront history but to wave it like a flag. That does little to make sense of the enormity of the Civil War’s and Reconstruction’s impact on the state. That impact meant change—what it is that historians presumably measure and analyze, when not contemplating continuity and its reasons. Yet the visceral feelings about the Civil War’s and Reconstruction’s consequences mean that change continues to be read through identity-tinged glasses. South Carolina will persist in its post-modern presentation of history as a function of identity politics unless and until race is no longer a chief basis of identity where the war began and Reconstruction ended. See, for instance, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Intersections: History, Culture, Ideology, ed. David Moltke-Hansen (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011). ii See, for instance, K. Michael Prince, Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), and John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). iii Frank Barnes, Fort Sumter National Monument, South Carolina. (Washington: National Park Service, 1952). iv See, for instance, Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), and Tony Horowitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Pantheon, 1998). i 14 Written by Christopher G. Memminger, it is included in South Carolina Secedes, ed. Justin Saunders and J. R. Faunt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1960), 76-81. vi See Robert Nicholas Olsberg, “’A Government of Class and Race’: William Henry Trescot and the South Carolina Chivalry, 1860-1865” (Ph. D. Diss., University of South Carolina, 1972), and David Moltke-Hansen, “William Henry trescot,” Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 30: American Historians, 1607-1860, ed. Clyde N. Wilson (Pittsburg: Gale Research Company, 1984): 310-9. vii Cf. Andre M. Fleche, The Revolution of 1861: the American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). viii See Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), and Wiiliam R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and the American National Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). ix See David Moltke-Hansen, “Southern Literary Horizons in Young America: Imaginative Development of a Regional Geography,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 42.1 (2009): 1-32. x See, for instance, Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944), and C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951). xi See, for instance, the August 28, 2011 post from Edward H. Sebesta on H-South. xii On Hans Kohn, who influenced my early thinking on these matters, see, for instance, Noam Pianko, “Did Kohn Believe in the ‘Kohn Dichotomy’? Reconsidering Kohn’s Journey from The Political Idea of Judaism to the Idea of Nationalism,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 55.1: 295-311. xiii See, for instance, Donny Shraffenberger, “Karl Marx and the American Civil War,” International Socialist Review 80 (Nov.-Dec. 2011), online edition, accessed 28 May 2012 at 5 p.m. xiv Scott Conroy, “Confederate Flag Issue Could Impact MLK Day Debate,” Real Clear Political (Jan. 16, 2012), accessed 28 May 2012 at 5:20 p.m. v 15