The deference that is paid to Holy Writ and to evidences of divine intervention doubtless contributes to the character of the Southerner as Romantic. Faith and superstition and myth are cousins, hardly even once removed, and whatever else it may be, the South is first of all a land of legends. This is a terrible annoyance to historians; they look upon our pretty myths, and know they are not so, and expose their fallacies in a thousand footnotes, but like the South, the legends rise again. “Few groups in the New World have had their myths subjected to such destructive analysis as those of the South have undergone in recent years,” C. Vann Woodward once observed.
Yet the myths persist. There is the Old South legend of the white-columned plantation, the hoop-skirted belles, the hot-blooded men. In the foreground, beneath the magnolia trees, the darkies are plucking banjos; in the background, rows upon rows of cotton, and off to one side, a steamboat coming around the bend. Master loves the Negroes, and the Negroes love old Master. The words and music are by Stephen Foster. This, we like to say, was how things _were_ in the ante-bellum South. The exasperated scholar, emerging from his Will Books, cries out his anguish in the quarterly reviews: The records _prove_ it was not so; they prove that slave ownership was limited; the records prove that Southern Negroes--as many as 100,000 or 200,000 of them--deserted to the Union cause in the War; the records probably prove there weren’t but thirty-two banjos in all of Carolina.
These labors of genealogy go utterly unrewarded. With what Cash has described as the South’s “naive capacity for unreality,” our people pat the historians on their fevered brows, thank them kindly just the same, and return untroubled to an intuitive devotion to the things that never were.
“I am an aristocrat,” cried Randolph of Roanoke. And the Southerner regards him with an affection not extended to Clay or Calhoun or Jefferson. So, we imagine, were they all--_all_ aristocrats, men of ease, and grace, and elegance, and high birth; men who lived by a code of honor, and died beneath the dueling oaks; men who gambled with skill, and loved with passion; men who fought with a royal disdain for risk. Well, Cash and Woodward and a dozen others have had a hand in exploding this Cavalier myth. Tediously, with infinite pains, they have dredged up the pedestrian facts. The Southerner will have none of them; he knows better than to let a few facts interfere with a good story. His colonists all wear ruffled collars; his ladies, blue-veined, are pale and pure as talisman roses. “_I am an aristocrat: I love freedom; I hate equality!_” Who in the South could disclaim the Randolph inheritance?