The South was defeated and was hauled back, in the status of a subject province, into the shell of the old Union. In that condition though with the barren comfort of technical political rights for its states, the South has remained. For from the moment of Southern defeat the regional imperialism of the Northeast began its effective reign...(110).
...Yet the Northeast should do well to realize that there are people with a burning sense of wrong who wish retaliation, and would inflict it if the turn of events under the Old Federalism should permit...yes, and would cheerfully take the risk of any injurious recoil upon themselves...
...it is the nature of industrial enterprise, corporate monopoly, and high finance to devour, to exploit, to imperialize; and a region which specializes in these functions is by that fact driven to engage in imperial conquest of one sort or another...
...it is the nature of small business, well-distributed property, and an agrarian regime to stay at home and be content with modest returns. The region that specializes in these things, or that balances them with its industry in fair proportions, is a good neighbor, not desiring conquest...Whatever restores small property, fosters agrarianism, and curtails exaggerated industrialism is on the side of regional autonomy...if we had a fair balance of this sort in America, it is possible that the Old Federalism, with very small changes, would suffice our modern purposes. But so firmly entrenched is the ancient enemy of all good balance, it is possible that regionalism must be called in as one of the means of dislodging him...
...If a given region is too hard pressed, if it is denied recourse, if it is irritated by an assumption of superior piety, then regionalists will think of the old watchword, independence. Independence, signifying as it does the end of colonialism, is a sacred word in American History. Among other things, it means that the land and the region belong to the people who dwell there, and that they will be governed only by their own consent...
How could they who thought they knew how to tame the monster realize that he might walk unshackled and wavering elsewhere? The Yankees, indeed, had never tasted defeat...They had freed the negroes, replying "I can" to duty's "thou must;" but they were fortunately exempt from the results of emancipation for no negroes lived among them...
...For in New England humanitarianism was the natural flower of good reuse. In a land where everything was so right, it was hard to imagine a perverse land where so much could be so wrong without disturbing either a people's composure or their happiness...
...But in the plantation country of Middle Georgia the social values required a different yardstick. The genius of Georgia was stretched out, relaxed and easy, in keeping with the landscape, which required a large and horizontal view of mundane affairs. The Georgian assumed that God would have sense and heart enough to take into consideration, when Judgment Day came around, a good deal besides external and man-made appearances...
...if New England encouraged man to believe in an ordered universe, Georgia- and a good deal of the South besides - compelled him to remember that there were snakes in Eden. Nature, so ingratiating and beautiful, which bound the Georgian to his land with a love both possessive and fearful, was a fair but dreadful mistress, unpreictable and uncontrollable as God. The New Englanders knew exactly where to find nature harsh and nature yielding, and he could make his arrangements accordingly. But the Georgian never knew. His safest policy was to relax, and he readily developed a great degree of tolerance for irregularity in nature and man. At his lowest level, this quality made him lackadaisical and trifling. In this he differed from the New England Yankee, who became a perfectionist, and then at his worst might turn into a zealot, strangely intolerant even while, as idealist, he argued for tolerance...
...History, like God and nature, had been both generous and unkind to Georgia and the South. The Georgia Rebel must approach his early history through a bloody list of war and reconstruction that was hazy and bygone to the Vermont Yankee. Defeat had possessed him and had rubbed deep into his wounds. Around him were the visible reminders of destruction and humiliation. His land had been ravaged and rebuilt, and he had been told to forget. But he would not and could not forget, and was therefore torn between his loyalty and his awareness that the great world was bored with his not forgetting. He had been rebuked for being inept at administering a newfangled government that he did not understand or like any too well, and in which he had been allowed to participate only by a kind of negligent afterthought...
...Turning desperately to the industrial civilization against which he had once taken arms, he had played it as a hedge against the problematic future. Though agrarian at heart, he had been forced to wonder whether the ingenious Yankee might not be right after all.
Thus he remembered the faith and hankered after the fleshpots at the same time. But industrialism, declining to be treated as a mere hedge, began Sherman's march to the sea all over again. It plied ugliness upon wreckage and threw the old arrangements out of kilter...
-Donald Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan
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