What does the Southern tradition have to offer America in 2025?
Richard Weaver wrote in his Southern Tradition at Bay that the Old South may not be a place where we would want to live, but it certainly could offer examples of how to live.
That’s a pregnant statement.
Southerners, more than Americans in other sections, held fast to tradition to moderate change and used it to mitigate some of the baneful effects of a world in flux.
History taught Southerners to hope, as Lee said, while tradition helped them cope.
Southerners accepted change, even in the antebellum period. They often reacted, but not always harshly.
John Taylor of Caroline wrote that Southerners toyed with the fanciful language of the Declaration of Independence and then woke up after they realized that perhaps they were a bit too idealistic during the War. Old republican virtue trumped Enlightenment idealism.
By the nineteenth-century, Southerners adapted to markets and technology and new views on society. There were more college educated women in the South than anywhere else in America. Northerners like Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe may be household names today, but they were intellectual dwarfs compared to Louisa McCord and Augusta Jane Evans.
Neither Alcott nor Stowe translated Bastiat, and modern readers, even those with terminal degrees, have a hard time matching Evans’s grasp of history and philosophy.
Even as the Southern economy whimpered into the twentieth century, New South proponents could not abandon the tradition that anchored them to a more vibrant South.
Defeat impoverished a people but did not destroy their heritage.
Confederate monuments represented a full-throated defiance to North over South, even if Southerners now had to accept the new American order.
Even Booker T. Washington suggested the South needed more monuments to great Confederate leaders as they represented the best of Southern society.
Basil Gildersleeve’s stirring 1915 appraisal of the War, The Creed of the Old South, emphasized a resilient Southern distinctiveness.
Industry and “foreign capital” shifted the Southern landscape, but as Southern industrialist Fuller Callaway explained in the early twentieth century, “I make American citizens and run cotton mills to pay the expenses.”
Southern paternalism influenced New South factory labor.
Factory work wasn’t easy, but in many cases, it was more humane south of the Mason Dixon.
Of course, we, at the Abbeville Institute, have been scribbling on these topics for over twenty years, and though we now have over 2000 articles on our website discussing what is “true and valuable in the Southern tradition,” more can and will be done.
We have much in store for 2025, and we hope to answer the opening question at our February conference in Columbus, Georgia. Time is running out to register.
The Southern tradition still has much to offer, even in our modern world, and we hope that you will continue to support our mission as we navigate these turbulent waters.
If you wish to support our efforts, please consider a donation.
See you in 2025.
Deo Vindice.
And HNY