What is History? Part 4A

American Views: The South

History is the memory of time, the life of the dead, the happiness of the living. —Capt. John Smith

Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God. —George Washington

Only the atheist considers success as the measure of right. —R.L. Dabney

Government is not the creator but the creature of human society. The Government has no mission from God to make the community, on the contrary the community is determined by Providence, where it is happily determined for us by far other causes than the meddling of governments—by historical causes in the distant past, by vital ideas, propagated by great individual minds—especially by the church and its doctrines. The only communities which have had their characters manufactured for them by governments have had a villainously bad character, like the Chinese and the Yankees. Noble races make their governments. Ignoble ones are made by them. —R.L. Dabney

We will meet them with it [our defiance] again, when it will be heard, in the day of their calamity, in the pages of impartial history, and in the day of Judgment. —R.L. Dabney

History in general only informs us what bad government is. —Jefferson

Jefferson on Education: . . . the reading in the first stage, where they will receive their whole education, is proposed, as has been said, to be chiefly historical. History, by apprising them of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.

. . . if centralism is ultimately to prevail; if our entire system of free institutions . . . is to be subverted, and an Empire established in their stead . . . then, be assured that we of the South will be acquitted . . . by the judgment of mankind, of all responsibility for so terrible a tragedy. . . . —Alexander H. Stephens

. . . the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which as overwhelmed all those that have preceded it. —Lee

The war waged against us disregards all constitutional restrictions and finds its pabulum in the proud and avaricious desire to set up a great government which will extend its power to the ends of the earth, and enable the merchant and manufacturer of the North to make money out of all nations. . . . From such a Union we believe it was the solemn duty of our State to withdraw; and since her withdrawal we have abundant evidence that we were right. —Resolutions of a Virginia public meeting, 1862

It was Calhoun who divined how the great western star's last race would run. —Allen Tate

(Calhoun on history will be a separate installment.)

Our Founders had a profound instinct for high style, a genius at dramatising themselves at their own particular moment of history. They were so situated economically and politically that they were able to form a definite conception of their human role; they were not ants in an economic anthill, nor were they investigating statistically the behaviour of other ants. They knew what they wanted because they knew what they, themselves, were. —Allen Tate

There was no surrender . . . which committed our people and their children to a heritage of shame and dishonour . . . [to] silent acquiescence in the scheme that was teaching the children . . . that Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were traitors to their country . . . that the young men who left everything to resist invasion . . . and died willingly on a hundred fields were rebels against a righteous government. —Rev. James Power Smith

No people has ever existed wholly without a meaning. —Rev. James Warley Miles

The South was dead, and buried, and yet she rose again. —Thomas Nelson Page

The South is a vital and long-lasting bond, a corporate identity assumed by those who have contributed to it. —M.E. Bradford

The past is never dead; it's not even past. —Faulkner

It was a hunter's tale that rolled like wind across the mountains once. . . . —Donald Davidson

Without a tragic sense there is no moral sense, and without a moral sense, violence, uncontrollable and meaningless, rots what is left of institutional society. —Andrew Lytle

During the second half of the 20th century Yankee historians created a rigid orthodoxy that reduced the War to a simplistic morality play with the South as swarthy villain and the Union as blond, blue-eyed hero. —Thomas Landess

Historical sense and poetical sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake. —Robert Penn Warren

The past is always a rebuke to the present. —Robert Penn Warren

The real problem in America is not so much what people don't know but rather what they think they know that just ain't so. —Will Rogers

Beloved, the South might not always be right, but we ain’t never wrong! —Brother Dave Gardner