Dixie's Martial Image: A Continuing Historiographical Enigma
1978; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 40; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1540-6563.1978.tb01215.x
ISSN1540-6563
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. Official Record of the Debates and Proceedings at the Southern Commercial Convention Assembled at Knoxville, Tennessee, August 10th, 1857 (Knoxville, 1857), 14.2. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), 159. My focus is upon white violence and militancy because this has been the major preoccupation of scholars and because it was white Southerners who generally guided the region's approach to foreign wars and the military establishment. Although considerable attention has been given to the history of blacks in the American military, the special issue of Southern blacks and the military is relatively unexplored. A recent study of black recruits in the frontier army of the late nineteenth century, which utilized War Department registers and census data, determined that a surprisingly small number of black recruits in the Army came from the deep South. These results, however, may have related more to the location of recruiting stations and socio‐economic factors at the time than to a lack of interest in the military among Southern blacks. (Marvin Fletcher, “The Black Recruit: 1870, 1880,” paper delivered at the Ohio Academy of History, April 24, 1976.) Violence among and by Southern blacks is a distinct historiographical subject because it has traditionally stemmed from different origins than white Southern violence. Much black violence has been a reaction to injustice from Southern whites. Nevertheless, as a number of recent scholars have stressed, black Southerners have as legitimate a claim to the appellation “Southerner” as white Southerners. And it is worth noting that the Civil Rights Revolution, in conjunction with a recent scholary emphasis upon slave resistance and black militancy in the late nineteenth century, has led to an historiographical revolution concerning the portrayal of Southern blacks. The emerging picture is of a Southern black community far more aggressive than had formerly been believed.3. Edward Channing, A History of the United States, 6 vols. (New York, 1905–26), 6: 11; James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States From the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877, 8 vols. (New York, 1900–19), 1: 361.4. Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven, 1949), particularly 6, 45, 91, 93, 168, and 194.5. John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800–1861 (Cambridge, 1956).6. See, for example, William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York, 1961), 238–39, 258.7. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil‐Military Relations (New York, 1957) (the quotation is from page 211). Other prominent Southerners in the antebellum military establishment included Jefferson Davis, Stephen Mallory, and Abel Upshur. Davis is generally credited with major administrative reforms in the military establishment accomplished while he was Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce; Mallory, a Floridian, had considerable impact upon naval affairs in the mid‐nineteenth century through his activities as chairman of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs and later as Confederate Secretary of the Navy; Upshur wanted a Navy equal to one‐half of England's and pushed for technical innovations such as the screw‐propelled war sloop. Walter Millis, Arms and Men: A Study of American Military History (New York, 1956), 73–75, 126; Maurice Matloff, ed., American Military History (Washington, D. C., 1969), 154–56, 180–81; Russell Weigley, History of the United States Army (New York, 1967), 134–43; Charles O. Paullin, “Naval Administration, 1842–1861,”U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 33 (December 1907): 1435–77; Claude H. Hall, “Abel Parker Upshur: An Eastern Shoreman Reforms the United States Navy,”: Virginia Cavalcade 23 (Spring 1974): 29–37. Huntington also stressed the contributions of two Virginians to American military thought: Dennis Hart Mahan and Matthew Fontaine Maury.8. C. Robert Kemble, The Image of the Army Officer in America: Background for Current Views (Westport, 1973), 75.9. Guy A. Cardwell, “The Duel in the Old South: Crux of a Concept,”South Atlantic Quarterly 66 (Winter 1967): 50–69; James R. Webb, “Pistols for Two … Coffee for One,”American Heritage 26 (February 1975): 66–71, 82–83; Wilmuth S. Rutledge, “Duelling in Antebellum Mississippi,”Journal of Mississippi History 26 (August 1964): 181–91; Jack Kenny Williams, Vogues in Villainy: Crime and Retribution in Ante‐Bellum South Carolina (Columbia, 1959), 37–38; Clement Eaton, The Waning of the Old South Civilization (Athens, Georgia, 1968), 20–21.10. The bibliography on the “Lost Cause” is voluminous. See particularly Rollin G. Osterweis, The Myth of the Lost Cause, 1865–1900 (Hamden, Ct., 1973); Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought (New Rochelle, 1968); and Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York, 1963), 380–437. A good example of the glorification of the Confederacy is Frank Owsley, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” in I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners (New York, 1930). The best study of the Ku Klux Klan's use of violence during Reconstruction is Allen Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York, 1971). Ray Granade, in “Violence: An Instrument of Policy in Reconstruction Alabama,”Alabama Historical Quarterly 30 (Fall and Winter 1968): 202, strongly suggests that violence against Reconstruction led to a general acceptance of violence by the Southern people. Probably the most famous Southern glorification of the Ku Klux Klan can be found in Thomas Dixon's trilogy of three novels: The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865–1890 (New York, 1902); The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New York, 1905); and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (New York, 1907). Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Boston, 1963), 46–51, contains a good discussion of how the Civil War was perpetuated in the South's mountain feuds. For night riders and whitecapping, see Paul J. Vanderwood, Night Riders of Reelfoot Lake (Memphis, 1969); William F. Holmes, “Whitecapping: Agrarian Violence in Mississippi, 1902–1906,”Journal of Southern History 35 (May 1969): 165–85.11. Lyle W. Shannon, “The Spatial Distribution of Criminal Offenses by States,”Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Political Science 45 (September‐October 1954): 264–73; Stuart Lottier, “Distribution of Criminal Offenses in Sectional Regions,”ibid. 29 (May‐June 1938): 329–44; Austin L. Porterfield, “Indices of Suicide and Homicide by States and Cities: Some Southern‐Non‐Southern Contrasts with Implications for Research,”American Sociological Review 14 (August 1949): 481–90; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 158–60; Arthur G. Pettit, Mark Twain & the South (Lexington, Ky., 1974), 69–73.12. Donald Brooks Kelley, “Mississippi and ‘The Splendid Little War’ of 1898,”Journal of Mississippi History 26 (May 1964): 123–34; Richard Glen Eaves, “Pro‐Allied Sentiment in Alabama, 1914–1917: A Study of Representative Newspapers,”Alabama Review 25 (1972): 30–55; Alfred O. Hero, Jr., The Southerner and World Affairs (Baton Rouge, 1965), 4–7, 91–103; Wayne S. Cole, “American First and the South, 1940–1941,”Journal of Southern History 22 (February 1956): 36–47; Monroe Lee Billington, The Political South in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1975), 33–37; Joseph E. Fortenberry, “James Kimble Vardaman and American Foreign Policy, 1913–1919.”Journal of Mississippi History 35 (May 1973): 127–40; John Robert Moore, Senator Josiah William Bailey of North Carolina: A Political Biography (Chapel Hill, 1968), 177–91. Political scientist V. O. Key documented the disproportionate support of Sourthern Democratic Senators for pre‐World War II war preparations through roll call analysis in his classic Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York, 1949), 353–54.13. James C. Bonner, “The Historical Basis of Southern Military Tradition,”Georgia Review 9 (Spring 1955): 74–85 (the quotation is from page 74); John Temple Graves, The Fighting South (New York, 1943), particularly 3–5, 18, 90–91. For a similar, but earlier, presentation of the theme of the Southern martial spirit in the twentieth century, see Robert Douthat Meade, “The Military Spirit of the South,”Current History 30 (April 1929): 55–60. The press and popular periodicals often accept the martial South sterotype. See, for example, Time Magazine 107 (27 September 1976): 30.14. Harold H. Martin, Ralph McGill, Reporter (Boston, 1973), 218–19, 250–51; Pat Watters, The South and the Nation (New York, 1969), 187; Bruce M. Russett, “Making Defense Defensible,” in The Military and American Society, ed. Stephen E. Ambrose and James Alden Barber, Jr. (New York, 1972), 105; Hero, Southerner and World Affairs, 135–38; Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (New York, 1973), 218. Congressman Hebert's remarks were carried in The Officer 21 (August 1970), 13. The same issue of The Officer included an account of Senator John Stennis (Mississippi) at the same convention, equally hawkish. The article was headed “We Want to Come Out With Our Flag Flying,” and reported Stennis calling for support of President Nixon's Vietnam policies, a strong Reserve, and sufficient military spending, and attacking proposed shackles on the president's war powers. William Percy was the Mississippi aristocrat who felt guilty serving on Herbert Hoover's Belgian relief committee in the period preceding American entry into World War I: “I was tortured by the thought that others were suffering for what was right and I was not suffering.” His desire to be a part of the fighting eventually brought him to the front as an American officer. William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (New York, 1941), 161.15. Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., The Civilian and the Military (New York, 1956), 217–19; Bonner, “Southern Military Tradition,” 75–79; James Clotfelter, “The South and the Military Dollar,” New South 25 (Spring 1970): 52–56; Alfred O. Hero, Jr., “Changing Southern Attitudes toward U.S. Foreign Policy,” Southern Humanities Review 8 (Summer 1974): 282; Manning Dauer, “Florida: The Different State,” in The Changing Politics of the South, ed. William C. Harvard (Baton Roughe, 1972), 157; Carl Braden “ABM: Southerners Vote Yes,” Southern Patriot 27 (September 1969): 3; Eli N. Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South (New York, 1974), 106–8; Allen Guttmann, The Conservative Tradition in America (New York, 1967), 108. Guttmann asserts in passing that Southerners have come closer than Northerners “to the European ideal of honor” in their military behavior.16. Franklin, Militant South, 63–95; H. C. Brearley, “The Pattern of Violence,”Culture in the South, ed. W. T. Couch (Chapel Hill, 1934), 685; Frank E. Vandiver, “The Southerner as Extremist,” in The Idea of the South: Pursuit of a Central Theme, ed. Frank E. Vandiver (Chicago, 1964), 44; John Sheldon Reed, The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society (Lexington, Mass., 1972), 45; Bonner, “Southern Military Tradition,” 80–83; Granade, “Violence,” 182–83; William C. Harris, “The Creed of the Carpetbaggers: The Case of Mississippi,”Journal of Southern History 40 (May 1974), 216; Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism, 91.17. “Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Nothup,” in Puttin’ On Ole Massa, ed. Gilbert Osofsky (New York, 1969), 338.18. Cardwell, “The Duel in the Old South,” 51–52; Franklin, Militant South, 20–32; Bonner, “Southern Military Tradition,” 79–80. Eugene Hollon has hypothesized, for instance, that Texas's notorious violent tendencies related to Texas having spent “more than half a century trying to solve its Indian problem, while most frontier states took only a decade or two to do so.” W. Eugene Hollon, Frontier Violence: Another Look (New York, 1974), 43. Julia Floyd Smith has attributed “lawlessness and disorder” in early Florida to its frontier condition in Slavery and Plantation Growth in Antebellum Florida, 1821–1860 (Gainesville, 1978), 18.19. Vandiver, “Southerner as Extremist,” 45–54; Sheldon Hackney, “Southern Violence,”American Historical Review 70 (February, 1969), 924–25; Reed, Enduring South, 88–89; Robert M. Wier, “The South Carolinian as Extremist,”South Atlantic Quarterly 74 (Winter 1975): 86–103.20. Charles S. Sydnor, “The Southerner and the Laws,” in The Pursuit of Southern History: Presidential Addresses of the Southern Historical Association, ed. George Brown Tindall (Baton Rouge, 1964), 62–76; William D. Miller, “Myth and New South City Murder Rates,”Mississippi Quarterly 26 (Spring 1973): 143–53.21. Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York, 1941, 424–26.22. Hackney, “Southern Violence,” 910–12, 920–21; Raymond D. Gastil, “Homicide and a Regional Culture of Violence,” American Sociological Review 36 (June 1971): 417; Sydnor, “Southerner and the Laws,” 65.23. George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge, 1967), 45–69, 687–731; Hero, Southerner and World Affairs, 4–7, 91–103, and passim; Paul Seabury, The Waning of Southern ‘Internationalism’ (Princeton, 1957), 7–17. A good example of a World War I Southerner who followed Woodrow Wilson's transformation regarding the European War is Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, who was chairman of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs at time. He was appearently motivated by reasons of party unity. Francis Butler Simkins, Pitchfork Ben Tillman (Baton Rouge, 1944), 508–14. Bonner indicated that he felt the Southern martial spirit related to the region's history as regards slavery and race. The need for slave control led masters to run plantations in the style of military officers and to acquire command habits. Later a belief in racial supremacy contributed to continuing militancy in the South. Bonner pointed out that The Citadel was organized when Charleston was threatened with a slave uprising. Bonner, “Southern Military Tradition,” 81–82.24. Wallace M. Alston, Jr. and Wayne Flynt, “Religion in the land of Cotton,” in You Can't Eat Magnolias, ed. H. Brandt Ayers and Thomas H. Naylor (New York, 1972), 107; Hero, “Changing Southern Attitudes,” 281–82.25. Clotfelter, “South and the MIlitary Dollar,” 52–56; “Southern Militarism,”Southern Exposure 1 (Spring 1973): 60–99; Don Oberdorfer, “Rivers Delivers,”New York Times Magazine (29 August 1965), 30–31, 86–91; Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., “The Fertile Crescent: The South's Role in the National Space Program,”Southwestern Historical Quarterly 71 (January 1968): 277–92; Robert H. Haveman, Water Resource Investment and the Public Interest: An Analysis of Federal Expenditures in Ten Southern States (Nashville, 1965), 72–94. For a study of a much earlier example of the impact of military spending on one Southern community, see Ernest F. Dibble, Ante‐Bellum Pensacola and the Military Presence (Penscola, 1974).26. C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York, 1938), 355; Leonard D. White, The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801–1829 (New York, 1961), 212–15, 265–69; Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (New York, 1963), 144–201; John D. P. Fuller, The Movement for the Acquisition of All Mexico, 1846–1848 (Baltimore, 1936); Samuel Horst, Mennonites in the Confederacy: A Study in Civil War Pacifism (Scottdale, Pa., 1967). The Claiborne‐Prentss affair is covered in a large number of letters in the Claiborne papers at the Library of Congress (the quotation is from Gwin to Claiborne, August 21, 1841). Russell Weigley's The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York, 1973), 71–76, describes the chivalrous and old‐fashioned nature of Scott's Mexico City campaign. See Albert Castel, General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West (Baton Rouge, 1968), 89, 93, for resentment among some Confederates toward a perceived West Point clique in the Confederate command structure.27. Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers & Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1865 (Boston, 1968), 335–84; James L. Morrison, “The Struggle Between Sectionalism and Nationalism at Ante‐Bellum West Point, 1830–1861,”Civil War History 19 (June 1973): 138–48. My own research on pre‐Civil War filbustering expeditions correlates with this viewpoint. Although a number of the expeditions were proslavery in orientation, many of these military adventures hailed from the North or Europe. Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1973), 90–91.28. Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland, A History of the South, 4th ed. rev. (New York, 1972), 218. Another example is C. Robert Kemble's The Image of the Army Officer in America, which referred to an article by Cunliffe in a 1951 anthology but overlooked his far more important Soldiers & Civilans.29. Cunliffe, Soldiers & Civilans, 382–83.30. Paul H. Buck, The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900 (Boston, 1937), 236–46.31. Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power before the Civil War (Lexington, Mass., 1973); Peter Karsten, The Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Moderican Navalism (New York, 1972), 3–19; K. Bruce Galloway and Robert Bowie Johnson, Jr., West Point: America's Power Fraternity (New York, 1973); Dewey W. Grantham, Jr., Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South (Baton Rouge, 1958), 285–310. Alexander De Conde made this point strongly in his attack on Southern internationalism in “The South and Isolationism,”Journal of Southern History 24 (August 1958): 332–46.32. Thomas H. Coode, “Southern Congressmen and the American Naval Revolution, 1880–1898,”Alabama Historical Quarterly 30 (Fall and Winter 1968): 89–110; Donald A. Yerxa, “The State of Maine and the New Navy, 1889–1893,”Maine Historical Society Quarterly 14 (Spring 1975): 183–205; Arnold M. Shankman, “Southern Methodist Newspapers and the Coming of the Spanish‐American War: A Research Note,”Journal of Southern History 39 (February 1973), 93–96; Kelley, “Mississippi and ‘The Splendid Little War,'” 130–32; Milton Ready, “Georgia's Entry Into World War I,”Georgia Historical Quarterly 52 (September 1968): 256–64; C. Peter Ripley, “Intervention and Reaction: Florida Newspapers and United States Entry into World War I,”Florida Historical Quarterly 49 (January 1971): 255–67; Herman Hattaway, “The Code of Conduct and the South,” paper given at the Southern Historical Association Convention, November 13, 1976. Also relevant in this context is Duncan Kinnear's recent study of VPI, which noted considerable student irritation with the Corps of Cadets at that institution in the post‐World War II period. Duncan Lyle Kinnear, The First 100 Years: A History of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Blacksburg, Virginia, 1972), 369–72.33. D. Clayton James, The Years of MacArthur, vol. 1, 1880–1941 (Boston, 1970), 12, 48 ff.; Frederick Palmer, John J. Pershing: General of the Armies (Harrisburg, 1948), 7; Alfred F. Hurley, Billy Mitchell: Crusader for Air Power, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, 1975); Elting E. Morison, Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy, 5–11; Stephen E. Ambrose, Upton and the Army (Baton Rouge, 1964), 5, 6, 16 ff.34. George H. Gallup, ed., The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971, 3 vols. (New York, 1972), 3: 2115, 2222, 2227–28, 2316–17.35. Thomas A. Herzog, Adjutant General's Department, State of Ohio, to author, 11 September 1974; Larry D. Smith, Office of the Adjutant General, Alabama, to author, 5 August 1974; U.S. Department of the Army, Center of Military History, Directory of ROTC/NDCC Units (Washington, D.C.), 20 July 1973. Statistics on the Army National Guard were provided by the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C.36. Official Army Register (Washington, D.C., 1945, 1950, 1955, 1960, 1965); Maureen Mylander, The Generals (New York, 1974), 339–41; Directory of ROTC/NDCC Units.37. Army Regulation 601–210; Naval Enlisted Recruiting Manual; Air Training Command Regulation 32–2; Military Personnel Procurement Manual (Marines).38. George E. Mowry, Another Look at the Twentieth‐Century South (Boston Rouge, 1973). Sce also the arguments of Howard Zinn in The Southern Mystique (New York, 1959), 238–42. Zinn, in arguing that violence has been charracteristic of the nation, cites American (particularly Puritan) treatment of the Indians, persecutions of Orientals in the West, and labor strife throughout the North. He concludes, “Although there is a quantitative difference between murders in the South and those in the North … the essential sanction to it is given by the nation as a whole, in its literature, its folklore, its laws, its basic dependence on arms for both internal and external security.” For provocative treatments. concerning the general similarities of the Old South to the rest of antebellum America, see Grady WcWhiney, Southerners and Other Americans (New York, 1973), 3–25; Thomas P. Govan, “Was the Old South Different?”Journal of Southern History 21 (November 1955): 447–55; and Charles Grier Sellers, “The Travail of Slavery,” in The Southerner as American, ed. Sellers (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960), 40–71.39. Bill C. malone, Country Music U.S.A.: A Fifty‐Year History (Austin, Texas, 1968), 259, 304; Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (Glencoe, 1960), 85–89. Janowitz also acknowledged that the West, as well as the South, was disproportionately represented in the naval officer corps.40. Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1971), 119, 143–45.41. David M. Potter, “On Understanding the South: A Review Article,”Journal of Southern History 30 (February 1964), 462.Additional informationNotes on contributorsRobert E. MayThe author is Associate Professor of History at Purdue University. He expresses appreciation to the Purdue Research Foundation for assistance in the form of a grant and thanks Harold Woodman and Robert Eckles for their critical comments and suggestions. A shorter version of this article was read at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in 1976.
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