(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.”