Barbarian History

"I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my History, that Time may not draw the color from what Man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds manifested by both The Greeks and The Barbarians, fail of their report, and together, with all of this, the reason why They fought one another."

In a speech in 1878--like many other speeches he gave in the last third of his life--Frederick Douglass was at that point, 1878, already fed up with Lost Cause arguments about what the war had been about.

He was also already, early in the process, fed up with the ways in which Americans were beginning to reconcile this bloody, terrible conflict around the mutual valor of soldiers, and in his view forgetting what the whole terrible thing might have even been about. 

And at the end of a magnificent speech he gave at a veterans reunion he said this: 

"The Civil War"--this is Frederick Douglass--"was not a fight between rapacious birds and ferocious beasts, a mere display of brute courage and endurance, it was a war between men of thought, as well as of action, and in dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield." He went on and on and on then to declare that the war had been about ideas, and he described the difference between those ideas, as he put it, was the difference between, quote, 

"Barbarism and Civilization."

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Southern Memory of the Civil War

Professor David Blight: Well, go South with me today. We're going to take up this question initially of — it's an old, old, old American question — how peculiar, or distinctive, or different is the American South? That used to be a question you could ask in quite some comfort. The "Dixie difference," as a recent book title called it, or "Dixie rising" as another recent book title called it. 

The South, of course, is many, many, many things and many, many, many peoples. There are so many South's today that it has rendered this question in some ways almost irrelevant, but, in other ways, of course not. 

We still keep finding our presidential elections won or lost in the South. Name me a modern American president who won the presidency without at least some success in the states of the old Confederacy. Look at the great realignments in American political history. They've had a great deal to do with the way the South would go, or parts of the South would go. 

We're on the verge now of the first southern primary in this year's election, in South Carolina, and everybody is wondering, is there a new modern South Carolina or not?


Now, this question is fun to have fun with in some ways because it's fraught with stereotypes, isn't it? The South: hot, slow, long vowels, great storytellers, and so on. Oh, and they love violence and football and stockcar racing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well I grew up in Michigan and I can assure you that Michiganders love all those things too and probably even more. But the idea of Southern stereotypes is very, very old. It isn't a product of the Civil War by any means. 

The South as an idea, the South and its distinctiveness was very much there even in the Colonial Period. Travelers from England and elsewhere, France, who would come to the American colonies and would travel throughout the colonies, would often comment on this, that somehow Southerners were different culturally, attitudinally, behaviorally.

And none other than Thomas Jefferson himself left this famous description of characterizations of Southerners and Northerners. He wrote this in the mid-1780s. He was writing to a foreign — a French — correspondent. And Thomas Jefferson described the people of the North — this was in the 1780s now, this is before the cotton boom and all that — he described the people of the North this way. 

Jefferson: "Northerners are cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties, chicaning, superstitious, and hypocritical in their religion." Take that Yankees. 

But Southerners, he said, "they are fiery, voluptuous, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous of their own liberties" — he changed jealous to zealous there. If we're doing close readings we might go into that for twenty minutes, but we're not. He's not over: "zealous of their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid and without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of their own heart." 

Now we can debate what Jefferson got right or wrong there, or what's held up, but do note how he said both sides were either jealous or zealous of their own liberties. That could be an epigraph on this course, if you like, because in the end when this Civil War will finally come both sides will say over and over and over again that they are only fighting for liberty. 

Everybody in the Civil War will say they're fighting for liberty.

In one of the greatest books ever written on the South, by a Southerner, in particular Wilbur Cash's great classic in 1940 called The Mind of the South, he did something similar to Jefferson, although he's focusing only on Southerners here. Cash was a great journalist, intellectual historian in his own right, deeply critical of his beloved South. In fact it was Cash who wrote a book called The Mind of the South in which he argued, in part, that the South had no mind. He didn't really mean it. He said Southerners are "proud, brave, honorable by its" — The South is "proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible in its actions. Such was the South at its best," said Cash, "and such at its best it remains today." 

Then comes a "but." But the South, he says, is also characterized by, quote, "violence, intolerance, aversion, suspicion toward new ideas, an incapability for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice."

Nixon Was Right

"Over the past months I had talked about resignation with my family with a few close friends, and with Haig and Ziegler. But the idea was anathema to me.

I believed that my resignation under pressure would change our whole form of government.

The change might not be apparent for many years; but once the first President had resigned under fire and thereby established a precedent, the opponents of future Presidents would have a formidable new leverage.

It was not hard to visualize a situation in which Congress, confronted with a President it did not like could paralyze him by blocking him on legislation, foreign affairs and appointments.

Then, when the country was fed up with the resulting stalemate, Congress could claim that it would be better for the country if the President resigned.

And Nixon would be cited as the precedent.

By forcing Presidents out through resignation, Congress would no longer have to take the responsibility and bear the verdict of history for voting impeachment."

Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978)

"I remember the first time I really understood what it was to be an American...What it was to be a patriot."

"I was just a kid...A million years ago, it seems sometimes. Maybe twelve. I was reading Mark Twain.

And he wrote something that struck me right down to my core...something so powerful, so true, that it changed my life. I memorized it so I could repeat it to myself, over and over across the years. He wrote --'In a republic, who is the country?

Is it the government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the government is merely a temporary servant: it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. It's function is to obey orders, not originate them.

Who, then is the country? Is it the newspaper? Is it the pulpit? Why, these are mere parts of the country, not the whole of it, they have not command,  they have only their little share in the command.

In a monarchy, the king and his family are the country: In a republic it is the common voice of the people each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak.

It is a solemn and weighty responsibility, and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or the empty catchphrases of politicians.

Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man.

To decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.

If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have your duty by yourself and by your country. Hold up your head. You have nothing to be ashamed of'."

Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right.

This nation was founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences.

When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree besides the river of truth, and tell the whole world--

--No. You move."