North Carolina Office of Archives and History

The Burden of Southern History by C. Vann WoodwardReview by: Robert F. DurdenThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (JANUARY 1961), pp. 103-104Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23516997 .

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Book Reviews 103

The Burden of Southern History. By C. Vann Woodward. (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press. 1960. Acknowledge ments and index. Pp. xiv, 205. $3.50.)

These interpretative essays by the author of such quickly established classics as The Origins of the New South and The Strange Career of Jim Crow will be enjoyed by thought ful laymen as well as professional historians. Seven of Pro

fessor Woodward's eight essays have already appeared in

various journals during the past decade; the light which they each, in different ways and degrees, shed upon Southern his

tory and the distinctive quality of the writing more than

justify this volume's publication. One of the secrets of Woodward's impact and appeal as a

historian is the ironic and even moral point of view from

which he writes. In the last essay in this volume, "The Irony of Southern History," he well describes his own achievement,

without meaning to do so, when he suggests that the observer

or historian who would advance the ironic interpretation must possess "an unusual combination of detachment and

sympathy" and "must be able to appreciate both elements in

the incongruity that go to make up the ironic situation, both

the virtue and the vice to which pretensions of virtue lead."

This philosophical attitude, coupled with scholarship which is as impeccable as the literary style, is nowhere better dis

played than in the volume's opening piece, "The Search for

Southern Identity." Pointing to the "Bulldozer Revolution"

which, together with other potent forces, each day makes the

South physically more like the rest of the United States,

Woodward probes for the significant core of "Southernism."

Without that, he argues, the "cyclone of social change" may leave the southerner not only "bereft of his myths, his pe culiar institutions, even his familiar regional vices" but strip ped finally of his very regional identification. Woodward may hum "Dixie" ironically, but the old melody, and the love of the South which it signifies, is still there. "In their unique historic experience as Americans," he declares, "the South

erners should not only be able to find the basis for continuity of their heritage but also make contributions that balance and

complement the experience of the rest of the nation."

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104 The North Carolina Historical Review

Before any neo-Confederates or Dixiecrats rejoice pre

maturely, however, they would do well to ponder the chief

ingredients of the southerner's "unique historic experience." These, Woodward argues, consist of the South's "long and

quite un-American experience with poverty;" its "overwhelm

ing military defeat" and prolonged defeat and frustration in other major areas of life, when American history as a whole

constitutes one of the world's greatest success stories; the

South's "experience of evil" in the form of slavery and its

aftermath, whereas the nation has reveled in innocence; and,

finally, the southerner's preoccupation with place, with local

ity, in a land where mobility and rootlessness have often been

described as paramount features of the national character.

Conceding that the South was "American" long before it was

"Southern" in any distinctive way and that "it remains more

American by far than anything else," Woodward calls upon the modern southerner to be secure enough in his identity to

cling to his "regional heritage" which is "far more closely in line with the common lot of mankind that the national

legends of opulence and success and innocence."

Other essays deal with "The Historical Dimension" in southern novels and short stories ("I am a grandchild of a

lost war, and I have blood-knowledge of what life can be in

a defeated country on the bare bones of privation," Katherine

Anne Porter is quoted as having written) and the use by Herman Milville, Henry Adams, and Henry James of "Con federate censors for Yankee morals" in the Gilded Age. A

piece on the John Brown Raid is not up to the standard of the others in originality or relevance, but two essays on the Negro question in the Civil War era treat blunt, important truthes with insight and sympathy. Finally, in "The Populist Heri tage and the Intellectual," Woodward strikes a few good blows, qualified but nonetheless effective, for the desperate southern agrarians of the 1890's on whom several learned smart alecks now unload the responsibility for anti-Semitism, isolationism, anti-intellectualism, and a host of other ugly isms of our own day.

Duke University. Robert F. Durden.

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