The student of our affairs who does not understand this much about the South does not understand the South at all. I do not know who it was who made the observation first--Donald Davidson, or Richard Weaver, or Louis Rubin, or Arthur Schlesinger, or Vann Woodward, or some forgotten historian of eighty years ago; it does not really matter; untutored, I wrote it myself in high school--that alone among all the regions of the Union, the South has known defeat. To know defeat is to know sin; it is the ultimate blasphemy against the American theology. As a nation, we are geared to instant success: Listerine will vanish bad breath, and Bufferin will cure a headache; a touch of Wildroot will clear up one’s dandruff; any boy may aspire to be President, or to make a million dollars, or to play center field for the Yankees. Failure--permanent, total, unqualified failure--is unknown. It is intolerable. It shatters the grand American illusion.
But the South has known failure. It has known what it is to do one’s best, to fight to exhaustion, and to lose. This huge vein of gloomy foreboding, this constant trembling on the verge of despair, was not an isolated phenomenon of the Reconstruction period. In Cash’s phrase, it is part of the collective experience of the Southern people. We have known defeat.
And not in war only. Long before the War, as the industrial North leaped to surpass the agrarian South, the thin, serrated edge of poverty began to cut across the South. The Tariff of Abominations was a beginning of it, and Calhoun and the South cried out in anger against its unfairness. The terrible institution of slavery contributed to it, but slavery was a tiger by the tail, and men could not cling to it successfully or safely let it go. There was the War, and the westward expansion, and the lines of commerce that flowed east and west but seldom north and south. The bitter years of Reconstruction resulted in a lean and grinding poverty, a poorness the more pitiful for its stoic acceptance by a proud people. And we know that poorness yet: Look at the _Statistical Abstract_.
Defeat. Poverty. And Woodward adds to these two grim horsemen still a third: a sense of guilt. While the rest of the Republic has basked complacently in its own virtue, the South’s preoccupation has been with guilt, not with innocence, “with the reality of evil, not with the dream of perfection.” To Woodward’s shrewd insight, I would add a few reflections of my own. This preoccupation with guilt and this reality of evil have not been burdens the South has felt it could regard honestly as entirely its own responsibility. The “peculiar institutions” of slavery and segregation have descended upon the South like pregnancy upon a woman whose lover has ridden away. The New England slavemasters had their fun, and made their dreadful profits, and sailed off to Maine; and they left the South to raise the alien child. Oh, it was a willing union. It was not rape, not seduction. The Southerners who bought the frightened blacks lived for a hundred years in agreeable sin with the European and New England slavers who sold them. But when the assignation ended, the South had all the problems, and the North had all the answers. Thus the preoccupation with guilt is mixed with a resentment for hypocrisy; and when the North speaks loftily to the South, and asserts that we of the North are holier than thou, three hundred years of skepticism seek an outlet: Pray, sirs, since when?