THE DIVERSITY AMONG SOUTHERNERS[1]
A "Solid South" would seem to presuppose a homogeneous Southern people coextensive with the geographical, or rather political, area thus designated; but to draw this inference would be to make a mistake almost equal to that made by the European who thinks Chicago a three or four hours ride from New York, and confounds our Eastern and Western populations. If political opinions and prejudices be not taken into account, the typical Charlestonian will be found to differ as much from the average inhabitant of Nashville as the typical New Yorker does from his rival of Chicago. The Virginian and the Georgian have points of contact, to be sure, but they differ radically in many important respects—just as radically as a citizen of New Jersey does from a citizen of Wisconsin. They may, perhaps, differ more radically, on account of the fact that state lines are more strictly drawn in the South than in any other portion of the Union. It is, of course, measurably true to affirm that the Southern people are descendants in the main of that portion of the English people "who had been least modernized, who still retained a large element of the feudal notion." The usual assumption that the civilization of the North is Puritan, while that of the South is Cavalier, rests on a substantial though small basis of fact. It is further true that the institution of slavery gave a more or less uniform patriarchal tone to society in every Southern state. But when all the points of resemblance are numbered and estimated, it will still be found that the tidewater South differs from the Southwest as much as New England does from the Northwest, that each state of a subsection differs from its neighbors, and that there are important lines of cleavage within some of the states themselves.
- ↑ Reprinted from the article "Dominant Tendencies of the South," Atlantic Monthly, Vol. LXXIX, page 42.
