The Burden of Southern History

by C. Vann Woodward

In this book Woodward brilliantly addresses the interrelated themes of Southern identity, Southern distinctiveness, and the strains of irony that characterize much of the South's historical experience.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Race, Southern, Essays, Civil War

205 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Comer Vann Woodward was an American historian who focused primarily on the American South and race relations.

Reviews

[Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peculiar Evil was Not a "Positive Good"

This seminal book, published in 1960, began a decade haunted by arguably the most heinous and evil acts committed by private individuals (singularly and collectively) in the name of hatred borne of an insidious ignorance.

Dr. Woodward chronicles this malevolence as it mushroomed in the South up to 1960 and considers the tragic ironies. He vehemently argued that Southerners (particularly the hypocritical "intellectual" South) must face the experiences of evil and tragedy that are part of the Southern heritage in order to move on.

A couple of striking passages come to mind as particularly memorable:

"... the Southern heritage is distinctive. For Southern history, unlike American, includes large components of frustration, failure and defeat. It includes not only an overwhelming military defeat but long decades of defeat in the provinces of economic, social and political life."

"Much of the South's intellectual energy went into a desperate effort to convince the world that its peculiar evil was actually a 'positive good,' but it failed even to convince itself."

Included in the current version (which Dr. Woodward updated after 1960) are excellent chapters entitled, "The Burden of William Faulkner" and "The Burden of Robert Penn Warren."

I think this is a must for anyone with an interest in the real history of the American South, stripped of "traditions" and "lost causes."

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Historians are more skeptical of the alleged "lessons of history" than the laity, and they should know better than anyone else that when there is a choice between the "right" lesson and the "wrong," mankind has a strong predilection for the latter."
~~ C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History

"Power cannot be wielded without guilt."
~~ Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

"Equality was a far more revolutionary aim than freedom, though it may not have seemed so at first. Slavery seemed so formidable, so powerfully entrenched in law and prop­erty, and so fiercely defended by arms that it appeared far the greater obstacle. Yet slavery was property based on law. The law could be changed and the property expro­priated. Not so inequality. Its entrenchments were deeper and subtler."
~~ C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History

I could really pile on the quotes with this book, there's so many great passages. But they're also a bit on the wordy side and there's only so much space for a Goodreads review, so here we go...

The Burden of Southern History is a powerful collection of essays on the southern perspective and historical experience written from the vantage point of a virtual insider. C. Vann Woodward was born in Arkansas and was intimately acquainted with the peculiar myths and institutions of the American South. He wrestled with the same moral and ethical contradictions he wrote about (indeed, while Burden is broadly liberal in its discussion of race, Woodward -- perhaps inevitably -- drifted right as the gains and societal upheavals of the Civil Rights Era overtook his own sense of comfort). Such conflict is evident in entries pertaining to the Civil War, where he generally contradicts Lost Cause tenets but muddies the waters in his out-of-sequence presentation of Abraham Lincoln's views on emancipation and racial separatism, suggesting a stasis in the Great Emancipator's position that the linear historical record contradicts. The brilliance of this book isn't that Woodward is always right (I think he's wrong about a few things); it's the constant self-inspection and historical enquiry that resonates.

This is a book with many highlights. Woodward's critical assessment of John Brown is perhaps most emblematic of the conflicted feelings of a left-leaning Southerner who can simultaneously recognise the valour of abolitionist heroes without succumbing to the whitewashing of their moral and intellectual failings. Then there's the one-two-three punch of essays ("The Irony of Southern History," "A Second Look at the Theme of Irony," and "Look Away, Look Away") in and around the Civil Rights Movement, where I think Woodward does his best work, celebrating the accomplishments of Martin Luther King et al. against the forces of segregation and bigotry while sounding a note of caution about the future, invoking the squandered hopes of Reconstruction. He's not totally immune to wishful thinking, however, writing in "What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement" that a 1960s reprisal of post-Reconstruction reversals of changes in U.S. law and life pertaining to civil rights would be a "simply inconceivable... appalling reversal of history." Enter the Federalist Society... Enter Reagan... Enter Trump...

This is a fascinating, imperfect book that I think deserves five stars despite the fact that not all the essays in it gel together. The two concluding entries about William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren, while excellent on their own terms, stick out like sore thumbs. Ultimately, it is the strength of the writing and the sincerity behind it that makes The Burden of Southern History a must-read for those interested in the theme of historical memory.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The two key essays in this collection are the ones around which the book was built: "The Search for Southern Identity" (originally published in 1958) and "The Irony of Southern History" (1953).

In "The Search for Southern Identity," Woodward described a conviction among American southerners that their sectional identity was slipping away from them as the South developed and urbanized, and, in the 1950s, as the Jim Crow edifice began to totter. Woodward suggested that there actually was a distinctive and vital southern culture worth saving; it was a form of dissent from relentless American nationalism, materialism, and conformism. The South, unlike most of the country, was in a good position to question the myth of America's limitless abundance and inevitable success; it had known real poverty -- and the fact that defeat can be real and devastating -- for generations. The South had also, thanks to slavery, known what it meant to have a collective "tortured conscience," which was something that might occasionally do the rest of the country good. Thus, southern identity was something very valuable to conserve. The great danger for the modernizing South, however, was that it would cling to racism as its defining characteristic, as the Old South had clung to slavery. This would be a second great southern tragedy.

In "The Irony of Southern History," Woodward also addressed the question of what the South could offer the rest of the country during the 1950s. Borrowing the concept of historical irony from Reinhold Niebuhr, Woodward argued that the South, due to its "eccentricity" within the United States, was in a good position to show the rest of the country that America was eccentric vis-à-vis the rest of the world. As Niebuhr wrote, most Americans enjoyed unhealthy "illusions of innocence and virtue" that belied the nation's awesome postwar power. While Americans pretended to be uniquely unspotted by the corruptions of the world, their idealism in the nuclear age actually forced them into the position of potential global executioner. The South, of course, participated in this illusion and irony; but unlike the rest of the country, it had already seen vividly that claims of noble character sometimes conceal -- and even cause -- moral depravity, and that a people zealous for its beautiful traditions can thereby become fanatical in defense of its vices. The South, in other words, was a place where "history" had happened -- where there were limits to optimism about human goodness. Surely this knowledge could be useful to a victorious and idealistic American people who had never (yet) known the chastening of history.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some really profound and insightful essays in this collection. I loved Woodward's "Strange Career of Jim Crow" and this one is not as coherent or as powerful as that one. He also too readily dismisses the black power movement in both books. But the essays on southern populism, the south's consciousness of history and failure, and the one about vietnam are just excellent.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book during a period when I was living in Texas and trying to articulate why I hated it so intensely. Woodward is pretty fascinating - I really felt like he gave me some insight into the history of the Lost Cause. He carries the implications of the past forward in a really brilliant way - it was quite disturbing to read his analysis of how the Southern mentality differs from the mentality in the rest of America, and realize that he had basically predicted the hubris of George Bush and the likelihood of a war (like Iraq) when he wrote this book 40-some-odd years ago.

[Tommy Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best account of the South that I've ever read. It should be required reading for any American, painting a sobering picture of the wider United States that serves as a warning of the dark evils of hubris. It's the kind of book that speaks deeply to feelings I've had but never been able to articulate about growing up in the South and what that feels like, but also a book that has widened my perspective. More philosophically, I found Woodward's critique of other strains of interpreting Southern history very compelling. I think his arguments in the essays on Faulkner and Warren are really powerful. According to Woodward's criticisms, history has a lot to learn from literature, which is often more honest, sobering, and perceptive than historical accounts, not to mention more pleasurable to read. Lastly, I think Woodward's book is useful insofar as it serves as a historical case study on the politics of memory and how that complicates efforts to reconcile a divided society, transition to a more democratic politics, and push for justice.

[Sean Chick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finally read a Woodward book that left me underwhelmed. The idea is a good one but the essays vary too much in quality and I think towards the end even Woodward had to admit that his thesis had come apart. Indeed, his thesis could have been expanded to America, for as the USA has encountered defeat it has also become more "southern" in its culture and politics. Most of all, he can be vague and repetitive. In discussing non-Southern authors he says they have no sense of history, so he ignores F. Scott Fitzgerald, possibly because it would disprove his contention. All of that being said, it is still Woodward. It is still well written, provocative, thoughtful, and engaging. The essay on John Brown is flawless. Even when he comes up short he still manages to impress.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This extremely dated collection of essays from the "Hofstadter of UNC-CH" contains two standouts: "The Search for Southern Identity," which does a fine job of fitting Southern-ness into a national framework, and "The Irony if Southern History," a perhaps too-gentle critique of the Cold War that compares the 1930s/1950 to the 1830s/1860s. Like Hofstadter, Woodward possessed a felicity of style lacking in many modern historians (George Chauncey and David Landes are notable exceptions). Also like Hofstadter, nothing Woodward wrote now strikes one as exciting or novel--merely well-written and eminently quotable. Woodward's literary pretensions are quite obvious (so many historians, myself included, are just failed or frustrated novelists): the book is dedicated to Robert Penn Warren, and "The Historical Dimension" is a largely uncritical analysis of modern Southern fiction (he argues that what unifies Southern writers is a shared historical sense, and gives us a wonderful quote about what he has learned from reading them: "Once the historian abandons an old and false analogy with the natural sciences and sees that his craft employs no special concepts nor categories nor terminology, he will admit that he attempts to explain history in the same way he explains events in ordinary life--his own as well as that of his fellow men--and with much the same language, moral and psychological").

[Bill Tyroler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth the price if for no reason other than Woodward’s caustic essay on John Brown, a failure at most everything he tried except jump-starting our bloodiest war.

[Drew Norwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays centered around "the collective experience and the distrinctive character of the South" (not the white South or black South, old or new, conservative or progressive, but rather the whole South collectively), which often takes up the subjects of race, the civil rights movement, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and historical consciousness. Woodward provides a careful and balanced take on these subjects.

The book's title stems primarily from the first essay, "The Search for Southern Identity." Woodward opens that essay with a remark that likely rings true for most Southerners nowadays, "The time is coming, if indeed it has not already arrived, when the Southerner will begin to ask himself whether there is really any longer very much point to calling himself a Southerner." Yet, Woodward answers in the affirmative--there is a point, and it may prove to be an important one. Not because the South is pure or its legacy is exemplary, but for the opposite reason. Defeat and frustration, "irony and tragedy," have been more prevalent in the South than in other regions. The South's legacy has often been marked, in contrast to the larger American tradition, by: poverty instead of plenty, failure instead of success, guilt instead of presumed innocence, and an affinity for particulars rather than abstractions. All of these elements can serve as a useful corrective to hubris or overweening confidence in progress. "In their unique historic experience as Americans the Southerners should not only be able to find the basis for continuity of their heritage but also make contributions that balance and complement the experience of the rest of the nation."

Vann Woodward was a good example of the type of historian our generation will need: "America has had cynical disparagement of her ideals from foreign, unfriendly, or hostile critics. But she desperately needs criticism from historians of her own who can penetrate the legend without destroying the ideal, who can dispel the illusion of pretended virtue without denying the genuine virtues.  Such historians must have learned that virtue has never been defined by national or regional boundaries, and that morality and rectitude are not the monopolies of factions or parties. . .Such historians must have a rare combination of detachment and sympathy, and they must have established some measure of immunity from the fevers and prejudices of their own times . . . ."

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess this is technically a DNF because I bailed during the last few essays that were written for the second and third editions. I appreciate the idea of the book, which tries to explain why the American south has a distinct culture compared to the rest of the country, but it’s entirely predicated on assumptions about pre-Vietnam American attitudes as a whole. The country has changed drastically in the last half century and unfortunately the south got sucked into the cultural morass of American homogeneity at some point, so much of what Woodward has to say about the south is far removed from my own experience as a southerner.
This also seems to have been written with a scholarly audience in mind, so every reference to other midcentury historians and their publications went right over my head and left most of the essays feeling more obtuse than Woodward probably meant.

If nothing else, I appreciate the cynical portions where Woodward paints the north as being equally guilty and complicit in the history of American racism. The country may have changed a bunch since this was originally published but the grand southern pastime of dunking on those damn yankees never goes out of fashion.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too academic for my liking (I had enough of that in my history graduate degree program). I enjoyed the John Brown essay, but most other essays were too wordy and long-winded. I wanted more details, facts, and evidence to support his claims and less filler. It sort of felt like a Southern historian trying to condemn but also excuse, at times, southern history. I did not completely agree with some of his assessments of the 1960s Civil Rights. And the language, of course, is very dated. I much more enjoyed and learned from Jefferson Cowie's Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power; Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends; and Lies About Our Past, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight.

[Richard Epstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Speaking of books you haven't read since college—and I was, honest, just yesterday—why not return to this one? I picked the pictured edition because it's the one I owned and read as an undergrad, and I remember it not only as a book good in itself, but as a perfect complement to my then-steady diet of Faulkner, as natural as a dill pickle with your chopped liver.

I recommend The Snopes Trilogy with a side of The Burden of Southern History.

[Kevin Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every historian or student of Southern history should own this book. It contains essays on a variety of topics. I'm a history TA and I carried it around in my school-bag for an entire semester, reading bits and pieces at the college when I could find the time. It induces reflection.

[Barbara Harrison · Rating 2 out of 5]

For an overview of Southen (USA) History, this does a good job. I had it in my bedside stack and made frequent forays into other genres, so it took me a while to finish. I picked it up hoping to understand the background of our current political climate and it helps some.

[Gregory Knapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

The varying essays in this book made difficult to follow, and to stay awake at night! Still I found a great deal of value into the minds of Southerners.

[James Goode · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me a few years, but I picked this back up after I found a little more time in my schedule. Woodward’s works are always profound in helping better understand the South.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

"What then of the suggestion I made sixteen years ago [in 1953] that the Southern heritage, the collective experience of the Southern people, might some day serve as a useful counterbalance to the national experience and national myths? Revolutionary changes of the last two decades have blurred the distinctiveness of the South. In the 'Great Barbecue' following the Second World War the South took a seat and helped itself to more than a taste of success and affluence and what it has learned to call 'progress.' It also shared in the national afflatus of victory and self-righteousness that came of the war. And somewhat against its will the South earned a small treasury of virtue in righting some of the ancient wrongs against its Negro people. These recent experiences have doubtless won more Southern adherents to the national myths, but they have not changed the region's earlier history. That history does not include an unbroken experience of invincibility, success, opulence, and innocence. The South does not share the national myths based on these experiences, not legitimately at least, and only vicariously at best. That is for the good and simple reason that, unlike the nation, the South has known defeat and failure, long periods of frustration and poverty, as well as human slavery and its long aftermath of racial injustice. Some of this heritage lies far enough back to be dimmed by time, but not all - not the poverty, the frustration, nor all of the guilt. And then quite recently the South has had to learn anew the bitter lesson history tried with only limited success to teach a century earlier - how to accommodate itself to conditions that it had repeatedly sworn it would never accept. 'Never' was the South's slogan. 'Never.' But it did accommodate. It did eventually accept. The South's experience with history has rather more in common with the ironic and tragic experience of other nations and the general run of mankind than have other parts of America. National experience and the myths based on it have isolated Americans to the degree that they qualify in foreign eyes as the 'Peculiar People' of modern times, quite as much as Southerners qualified for that dubious distinction in the last century. It is a dangerous isolation. If there were ever a time when Americans might profit from the un-American heritage of the South, it would seem to be the present.

But if history had caught up with America, it would seem that the irony of history had caught up with the ironist - or gone him one better. For in this fateful hour of opportunity history had ironically placed men of presumably authentic Southern heritage in the supreme seats of national power - a gentleman from Texas in the White House and a gentleman from Georgia in the State Department. And yet from those quarters came few challenges and little appreciable restraint to the pursuit of the national myths of invincibility and innocence. Rather there came a renewed allegiance and sustained dedication. So far as the war and the pursuit of victory were concerned, the people of the South seemed to be as uncompromising as those of any part of the country and more so than many. Perhaps it was unrealistic to expect Southerners to be any the wiser for their historical experience, even if it could be assumed that their fellow Americans have been the more misguided for theirs. Historians are more skeptical of the alleged 'lessons of history' than the laity, and they should know better than anyone else that when there is a choice between the 'right' lesson and the 'wrong,' mankind has a strong predilection for the latter."

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

he publication of these essays on southern character and its tragic history, from Civil War to the abandoned civil rights efforts of Reconstruction could not have converged more significantly with its time when the volume first appeared in the 1960s. Even as Woodward reflected on reconstruction, drawing out why it failed to substantively change the condition of southern blacks, a new movement had begun on the ground. Woodward is a moderate, holding loyalty to the South without being defensive (in the manner of I'll Take my Stand), and writing to urge justice and reconciliation in race relations.Three of the essays concern the failure of reconstruction and of civil rights, with Woodward charting emancipation and enfranchisement as political motives for the Union throughout the conflict, darkly concluding that the chief reason northerners pushed through the amendments that, in the count of one, two, three, transformed millions of slaves into millions of voters, was to prevent the defeated aristocracy from triumphing at the ballot-box instead of on the battlefield. The other major theme is southern identity and the South's role to play in the United States. Woodward sees the southern states occupying a unique role in the American experiment. The United States in 1960 had never known anything but victory; every problem, every foe, it hitherto conquered through force of arms, or new inventions; for it, history was something that happened to other people. This put the nation in great danger of engaging in catastrophic mistakes like preventive wars. The south, however, had experienced history; had known defeat and occupation. It could offer to America a humbling perspective. The south's view was used as a check on American hubris in literature before; in one essay Woodward demonstrates how various northern authors, including John Quincy Adams' grandson Henry Adams, employed southern characters to shine a spotlight on the rest of the nation's sins. Although most of the book is dated by now, including the comparison between the Cold War and the feud between abolitionists and slavers, encountering a white southern voice from the 1960s arguing for civil rights is a breath of fresh air considering the usual Civil Rights narrative casts white southerners as villains.

[Vel Veeter]

This collection of essays is a kind of follow up to Woodward's book The Strange Career of Jim Crow. This is much less successful as a book, but's more of an issue of the scattershot approach here than anything particularly bad about a given article. As much as anything, this book is a fascinating look at what historical questions were being asked about the South at this time, from someone not writing hagiography or polemic. My biggest issue with the whole book is that the writing here is less clear and good than in the other book, so the essays take some time to warm up. In addition to this I am not a huge fan of historians weighing in on literary questions because the results are usually pretty middling.

I did enjoy Woodward's take on "Irony of American History", the Reinhold Neibuhr book about Americans myths we tell about ourselves. Something that occurs to me here, that after this book, we have what amounts to the Southernization of the whole country. The South has already predominated American politics, where its worse desires and impulses control the national questions. This has not actually stopped, but has shifted to the ways in which Conservative has done the same thing. This book is situated in the midst of that process happening, but not actually yet happening, so it has a foot in more than one camp.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of essays without cant, The Burden of Southern History begins and ends with a bang: in "The Search for Southern Identity" and "The Irony of Southern History," Woodward examines how Southerners--unlike Americans from other regions--have "experienced history" in their Civil War defeat and Reconstruction. Other essays treat the symbolic weight of John Brown, the difference between freed slaves' freedom and equality, and the use of Southern characters in the work of Meliville, Adams, and James. The middle sometimes wanes (as in the long treatment of Populism that assumes familiarity with a number of people and movements that have faded from view) but the style is solid and unmarred by the theory and hand-wringing that characterizes so much academic writing today. If you're pressed for time, read the opening and conclusing essays.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I particularly liked this. I love that it was dated. I love that my marginalia included musings on Iraq and Syria. His writing is beautiful and his thesis fascinating. Specifically, this was an intellectually entertaining read because of the publication date; Morrison Dictum, bring it on. I enjoyed Search for Southern Identity, John Brown, The Irony of Southern History above all. Highly recommend if you can suspend your present-day sensibilities long enough to appreciate Woodward's writing.

[Roger · Rating 2 out of 5]

Decidely mixed bag. More like 2.5 stars. Sometimes quite good (e.g., essay # 4 re the evolution of the Northern war effort from Union to emancipation though not to equality) others turgid or misguided. Deserves some slack, I suppose, given age of the 1st edition entries.

[John E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic studies in Southern History by probably the greatest historian of the American South. These essays discuss how the the South is different from the rest of the US and how that may not be such a bad thing. Excellent.

[Virginia · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first few essays provide great insights into the South's way of dealing with change that are highly applicable to race and the Black Lives Matter movement. Some of the later essays wander from that path and ring less true half a century later.

[Vicki · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read Zinn's 'A Peoples' History of the US' before this one, so it would set the stage for this one. But, this one was written too long ago, the author was biased and had a chip on his shoulder.

[Mark Cheathem · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books. Turned me on to history, esp. southern history.

[Thing Two · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays, not one complete piece of work. Many of the ideas he presents are note-worthy, but the overall tone of this collection seems dated, now, 45 years later.

[Garrett Cash · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of THE best books I've ever read. Period. Woodward is the C.S. Lewis of the South.