Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 29: John Crowe Ransom talks the Lost Cause some more

The 2:5 (Mar 1934) number of The American Review contains a long piece by Aubrey Starke ("The Agrarians Deny a Leader") scolding two of the Southern Agrarian, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren of the poet Sidney Lanier (1842–1881). John Crowe Ransom responds in the same issue with "Hearts and Heads."

For our purpose here, the specific disputes over Laniers treatment of the industrialism in his poetry isn't especially relevant. But Ransom draws on neo-Confederate/Lost Cause pseudohistory in his essay in a couple of places. Ransom complains that Lanier was way too friendly to the Yankees and criticizes him for leaving his native Georgia to go live among them. He writes of the immediate post-Civil War period:

Lanier's love for his enemies [Yankees] was premature; their enmity was still active. The plainest duty of the [white] South happened to be the one which was humanly the easiest: to offer contumacious resistance.

That would be resistance to democratic government, the US Constitution and to the rule of law.

The [white] South had lost its national voice, but it was still itself, not having been dismembered or physically destroyed though it had been impaired, and it could not trifle with the risk of disintegration by crumbling. There was the fact that the South was being forcibly reconstructed politically. Behind that was the fact that the [white] South, if and as it should be allowed a normal self-determination within the Union again, would have to fortify its economic and cultural paterns, Nationalism was not an attitude which was open to the South at the moment, and it would be open, when peace [the end of the democratic Reconstruction governments int he mid-1870s] did come, only with very steady reservatons. But Lanier early became a burning nationalist, asking of the sections not that they, not even that his own, be anything in particular, but only that they be bound together in brotherly love.

The latter being a contemptible attitude in Ransom's evaluation here.

Ransom criticizes Lanier because he "did not have in him a normal degree of the sense of being placed or rooted anywhere." He holds it hard against Lanier that:

At the moment when the expansive Sidney Lanier was seeking friends in the North, and loving them as hard as they would allow him, many other Southerners were still at home indulging in the only post-war luxury that is given to all the vanquished: hatred.

Ransom does allow, "They should have found something better to do." But it's not clear what better thing Ransom has in mind, as he goes on to say, "Love could not solve the problems of the South in Lanier's day; no more than its problems today." And he expands on that point, illustrating the intimate relationship of his vision of Agrarianism and Southern segregationist/Lost Cause ideology:

Lanier ... was also an uncritical nationalist, and uncritical nationalism was the last thing to be recommended to the [white] South; the national ideal pointed one way and the Southern agrarian ideal pointed the other way. if Lanier was not in a position to see this, nevertheless his section [the white South] assumed the croorect attitude while he apostatized. The [whites of the] secton was actuated by the instinct of resistance, as opposed to Lanier's impulse to love ... There was a very definite relation between agrarianism and nationalism, which Laneier did not even suspect. [my emphasis]

Here, Ransom uses nationalism and agrarianism as virtual synonyms for, respectively, support of democratic Reconstruction and opposition to Reconstruction and Constitutional democracy. He explains further:

It went like this. At the centre of the Republican government during the Civil War, if we leave out Lincoln, who was fully occupied with conducting the war, was a group of long-sighted men engaged in consecrating the new party to an economic policy to which it has been faithful nearly ever since. This policy had the spread of manufactures in mind, and protective tariffs, and big business, and rich Eastern Republicans.

Except for the odd exemption of Lincoln from any consciousness of this, this is true enough if we specify there was no conspiracy to do this. It was the open policy of the Republican Party. And in the jargon of the Southern Agrarians, the evil notion of Yankee industrialism always implied the wicked system of democracy in which African-Americans would be allowed to participate as citizens. He continues, happily blending the substantive questions of governance that the end of the Civil War presented with the evil designs of conniving Yankees industrialists:

Lincoln scarcely knew what they were about. Upon the end of the war, and Lincoln's assassination, a new problem arose. The pre-war South had opposed tariffs and the growing power of industry; the same South would now certainly oppose Republicanism. The Southern States were ready to come back into the Unon, but the Republican leaders were not ready to receive them. Under the constitution the slaves had counted only three-fifths of their actual number for the purpose of determining representation in Congress, but now the slaves were free men and citizens, and the old South would return to Washington with a larger delegation than ever. The Reconstruction measures were designed to prvent this inconvenience; not so much a piece of malice as a piece of greedy economic planning. They were to b reak up the control of the former masters in the South, and bring to Congress elected Republican carpet-baggers and blacks. They failed, though not because of any special virtue in the Southern whites; such measures could not have succeeded against any section, over the local opposition, and the nausea of Democratis and many others in the North. [my emphasis]

The veil of Lost Cause denial of history seems to have slipped a bit in that part of Ransom's account, when he sneers about the lack of "any special virtue in the Southern whites." In other words, democratic Reconstruction was able to proceed for 10 years or so because there was some significant support for it among Southern whites. Voting in the South didn't break on strictly racial lines. Most black voters supported Republicans, but so did a significant portion of white voters. When Ransom and the other Southern Agrarians talk about "the South" during this period, what they really mean is the white South, and really not even that: they mean the South's conservative whites.

They [the Reconstruction governments] came to their ignoninious conclusion, if we wish to dramatize it in a single event, when the Republicans had to trade to the democrats the concession of withdrawing the Federal soldiers from Southern soil in return for declaring Hayes duly elected as President of the United States [after the 1876 Presidential election].

The Reconstruction measures failed, but not until the Republicans had consolidated their power and won the country to their industrial programme. The South therefore did not recover its power; agrarian farming came into great disrepute.

In the real world, the South did not recover its former wealth because of several major factors: the extensive damage to physical stock and the great loss of life and health during the war; the expropriation of the human property in slaves by Emancipation and the 13th Amendment, which erased huge amounts of capital investment; the "contumacious resistance" Ransom praises of white Southerners to Reconstruction and Northern capital ("carpet-baggers") at a time when the South badly needed both political democracy and Northern capital; the subsequent Jim Crow laws and racial violence, which discouraged outside investment in the South for decades; and, the poor public services, massive corruption and uncompetitive educational levels that the post-Reconstruction Redeemer governments and their successors brought to the South.