Place Over Time: The Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness

by Carl N. Degler

What makes the South the most distinctive region in the nation? In isolating those characteristics of the modern South that still set it apart, Carl Degler disagrees with such recent interpreters as C. Vann Woodward and Eugene Genovese.

After identifying the social and economic elements peculiar to the modern South, Degler seeks out the roots of southern distinctiveness, focusing on the central role that plantation slavery played in forming southern institutions and attitudes. In a chapter on the antebellum years he finds, contrary to Genovese, that the South was not dominated by the planter class, nor was its culture profoundly different from that of the North. The shallowness of the differences between North and South was demonstrated by the rapid return of the South - without slavery - to the Union.

But the economic and social differences that slavery engendered between the two regions continued after the Civil War and left the South unique even after slavery was gone. Emphasizing that distinctiveness, this book argues cogently against those who maintain that the South is undergoing gradual assimilation by the rest of the United States. Degler concludes that the South still offers an alternative to the northern experience that is often erroneously defined typically as "American."

Genres: History

138 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this short book, Carl Degler examines slight historiographical differences between his conclusions about the antebellum and postwar South and those of Eugene D. Genovese and C. Vann Woodward. How distinctive was the South compared to other parts of the nation? Was the postwar period a time of continuity, or of radical disjunction, with the antebellum period? I'm going to skip over these ideas and just pick out a few interesting passages.

Slavery itself contributed quite directly to making the South violent, as Charles Sydnor showed years ago. On several counts, Sydnor remarked, slavery weakened the rule of law in the antebellum South. Since slaves could not testify against white men even when they were witnesses to crimes, injustice sometimes went unpunished by the normal processes of the law, thus encouraging men to take into their own hands the punishment of wrongdoers. The normal process of the law might be ignored or pushed aside, too, because slaves were personal property as well as human beings. Masters generally preferred - and the law generally encouraged them - to handle the disciplining of their own slaves, a practice that fostered a general willingness to settle other matters without recourse to law.

The ending of slavery did not end this tendency toward extra-legal action. In fact, it can be said that emancipation reinforced and extended it. From the beginning, after all, slavery had been much more than a form of labor; it was always a way of subordinating black people in a society that feared and hated them. When slavery was abolished the problem of controlling blacks became more, rather than less insistent. Once they were citizens, blacks could no longer be legally coerced or punished differently from other citizens. Yet the whites' desire to keep them "in their place" remained as strong as ever. Throughout the post-Reconstruction years, the high incidence of lynching in the South - reaching a figure of two hundred a year in the 1890s - not to mention other kinds of violence against blacks, testify to the extra-legal ways used by whites to control Negroes who had once been controlled by slavery. (pp. 63-64)

[Calhoun] certainly repudiated much of the Jeffersonain heritage when he rejected the idea of natural rights from which so much of Jeffersonian liberalism derived. But then in the twentieth century, most liberals have also abandoned the concept of natural rights without losing their credentials as liberals. [*Oh?] In the sense that Louis Hartz taught us to think about conservatism, Calhoun is clearly a part of the liberal tradition that is the centerpiece of American thought. (p. 86)

In those slave societies [in the New World outside of America] slavery was only one of several forms of subordination, albeit a severe one. In the United States, on the other hand, with its historic emphasis upon equality and freedom, slavery was an anomaly. It denied by its existence the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the long history of political democracy that had gradually removed all qualifications for political participation except manhood. There was no place in American political thought for degrees of freedom and equality; all men are created equal, the Declaration had said. Slavery could not be defended on the ground that some men were deserving of more freedom than others. But if it could be argued that some persons were not truly men, that they were biologically inferior to white men, then slavery acquired a new and surer defense in the American context of equality. And so American became the one slave society in which race became an important defense of slavery. (p. 90)

Some years ago, in response to Kenneth Stampp's observation that the end of slavery was abrupt and did not entail what today we would call a "resistance" movement, David Potter pointed out that the Civil War was a war without a resistance whereas Reconstruction was a resistance without a war. What Potter was telling us was that Reconstruction ought to be recognized as a true people's war on the part of the southern whites against the imposition of Negro political equality by northern political and military power. Local control of government and Negro inequality had long been values of southern life, as they were of American life nationally. Slavery had always been not only a system of labor, but a means of controlling blacks as well. One of the South's prime reasons for resisting the end of slavery during four years of war, aside from the pecuniary loss emancipation would bring, was the conviction of most white southerners that blacks would not work without compulsion. This argument runs all through the public and private writings of planters before and during the war...But once slavery was destroyed by the sword, southerners soon found that they could still use free black labor in much the same way and that free blacks could still be socially subordinated to whites. When the northern conquerors began to interfere with the whites' control over blacks, the South reacted violently. For that reason Reconstruction might well be considered a prolonged period of guerrilla warfare on the part of the white South to resist the attempt to interfere with the region's traditional attitudes toward and relationships with black people. (pp. 108-109)

What white southerners - even working-class whites - could not abide, so Reconstruction tells us, was the prospect of bringing blacks to the social and political level of whites. Southerners, in short, could accept the end of slavery, but they could not accept the end of white supremacy, especially when it was imposed by a North whose own hands in this respect were far from clean. (p. 110)

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best and most convincing entries in the “continuity vs. change” debate in Southern history