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Thread: The South's Gift to Posterity.

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    Default The South's Gift to Posterity.

    https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/b...-to-posterity/

    What does the South haveto offer that is valuable to humanity, to civilization?In 1939, the Pulitzerprize-winning historian Douglas Southall Freeman proposed an answer to thisquestion in his book The South toPosterity. He subtitled it AnIntroduction to the Writing of Confederate History, but it was somethingmore than that. In presenting the works of Confederate literature that had themost sincerity, human appeal, and enduring interest, Freeman was also making “apetition to the court of time.”

    He maintained that these worksof historical literature would always stand as solid evidence that the South had“fought its fight gallantly, and, so far as war ever permits, with fairness anddecency; that it endured its hardships with fortitude; that it wrought its hardrecovery through uncomplaining toil, and that it gave to the nation theinspiration of personalities, humble and exalted, who met a supreme test anddid not falter.”

    Freeman made his case forthe South to the “final tribunal” of history and proclaimed that these wordsshould be written across its record: “Characteris Confirmed.”Earlier in the 1930s, thecelebrated English writer and critic G. K. Chesterton gave his thoughts on whatthe “Old South” had to offer the world in his essay “On America,” in which heasserted that, although the twentieth century was the “Age of America,” therewas “a virtue lacking in the age, for want of which it will certainly sufferand possibly fail.”

    That missing virtue, accordingto Chesterton, was honor. “America,” he wrote, “iscrying out for the spirit of the Old South … And we need the Southern gentlemanmore than the English or French or Spanish gentleman. For the aristocrat of OldDixie, with all his faults and inconsistencies, did understand what the gentleman of Old Europe generally did not. He did understand the Republican ideal,the notion of the Citizen as it was understood among the noblest of the pagans.That combination of ideal democracy with real chivalry was a particular blendfor which the world was immeasurably better; and for the loss of which it isimmeasurably the worse.”
    More recently, in hisbook
    Why America Failed
    (2012),cultural historian Morris Berman expressed similar sentiments, characterizing theantebellum South as a culture focused on “honor and community,” and furtherstating, “In its flawed and tragic way, the Old South stood for values that wefinally cannot live without if we are to remain human.”

    In
    The South to Posterity,
    one man whose story Douglas SouthallFreeman offered as testimony to the “court of time” was a young Confederate cavalryofficer from South Carolina, Alexander Cheves Haskell. Freeman had recentlyread a biography of Haskell which drew heavily on his memoir andcorrespondence, and he singled out a letter Haskell penned in 1863 as among thefinest examples of “the war-time correspondence of high souls” and “one of themost beautiful born of war.” Freeman included only a portion of this letter inhis book, but all of Haskell’s wartime letters have finally been collected andpublished as part of his family’s correspondence in my new book
    An Everlasting Circle: Letters of theHaskell Family of Abbeville, South Carolina, 1861-1865.

    AnEverlasting Circle
    includes many outstanding letters writtenby a remarkable and prominent family that sent seven sons to war. Dr. James E.Kibler has contributed an excellent afterword to the book that comments on theliterary value of the letters and the kind of civilization that could produce afamily like the Haskells. It was a civilization shaped by classical learningand orthodox Christianity.

    The classical education of theHaskells, Kibler wrote, was “not window dressing, but instead allowedcomprehension of the Western world’s definition of the civilized man. Southernersof their class understood that they were the upholders of that tradition, sothat a Southern Agrarian writer like Allen Tate could declare of Southerntraditionalists, ‘We must be the last Europeans—there being no Europeans inEurope at present.’ The Haskells lived their own particular version of theagrarian ideal with the historical and religious scheme of Europe as theirexample, source, and prototype. Their letters provide a valuable window intothat world … [and] make it possible to put a face on these abstractions. Theydisplay chivalry in action to the extent that the term may be defined thereby.Honour and chivalry are brought down to the personal level. Here the conceptsentail far more than duty and a sense of obligation understood in thegentlemanly code as
    noblesse oblige.


    At the time
    The South to Posterity
    was published, recent popular books such as
    Gone with the Wind
    had sparked a strongpublic interest in reading more about the Confederate era, and Freeman’s bookwas written partly in response to that interest. In 1939, while America wasstill enduring the Great Depression, and the world was about to be plunged intoanother great war, Freeman speculated that the reading public’s interest mightbe explained by the terrible troubles that many people were facing at that timein the twentieth century.

    In his introduction he mused, “Do thewoes of the individual in this time of economic revolution and spiritual doubtseem less in the overwhelming calamity of the South? It may be so. To spiritsperplexed or in panic there may be offered, in the story of the Confederacy,the strange companionship of misery.”

    More importantly, Freeman hoped thathis book would provide readers inspiration, and even courage, through thestories of “men and women unafraid.”Alexander C. Haskell saw the war as agreat tragedy, and because of it, like most Southerners, the Haskells sufferedmany severe losses and tribulations. Yet, as James E. Kibler observed, theirletters also offer an inspiring story of “devotion to home, family solidarity,faith, virtue, fidelity, sacrifice, bravery, and a strength of character thatmakes it possible to survive terrible loss and trauma.” Thewartime story of the Haskells is one marked by its share of ruin and tragedy,but it is also a chronicle of honor and faith—some of the South’s pricelessgifts to posterity.



    ''... I believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people...are a safeguard to the continuance of a free government...whereas 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 has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.''- Gen. Robert E. Lee

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    Honor, something that is severely lacking in our society today.
    Wise Men Still Seek Him

  3. #3
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    Amen!
    ''... I believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people...are a safeguard to the continuance of a free government...whereas 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 has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.''- Gen. Robert E. Lee

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