Colin Woodard (40 page)

CHAPTER 24

W
hile immigration reinforced the distinctions between the nations in the decades after the Civil War, differences in fundamental values polarized them into two hostile blocs separated by buffer states. The result was a cultural Cold War pitting an angry, humiliated, and salvation-minded Dixie bloc against a triumphant, social-reform-minded alliance of Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast. This culture war would simmer for a century after Appomattox before breaking into open conflict in the 1960s. This chapter traces the formation of these two blocs in the Reconstruction era and the divergent worldviews and cosmology that have kept them in opposition ever since.

 

The roots of the conflict began in the aftermath of the Confederate defeat, when the Deep South, Tidewater, and much of Greater Appalachia were occupied by a Yankee-dominated army. With over half a million deaths, the war triggered lasting resentment all around, but the occupation made these sentiments worse in the Deep South and Tidewater. As a result, these nations would create a strong Dixie coalition that would eventually include all of Greater Appalachia and come to dominate continental politics at the turn of the millennium.

Midlanders, New Netherlanders, and Yankees seized control of much of the former Confederacy in the aftermath of the Civil War and attempted to reformat the region on Yankee lines. The occupiers set up military districts, appointed governors, and deployed troops to enforce their decisions. Union-backed governors were seen by locals as puppets, with the exception of Tennessee's William Brownlow, a Unionist Borderlander from Knoxville.
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The occupiers banned leading Confederates from public office and the voting booth, allowed outside business interests to seize control of important segments of the regional economy, and rewrote laws to reflect their own values. The northern forces were confident that the region's people would quickly embrace their institutions, values, and political structures once their bloodthirsty leaders were deposed. They set up racially integrated, New England–style school systems, imported Yankee schoolteachers to run them, and imposed local taxes to pay for them. They “freed” an oppressed people—the region's enslaved blacks—but failed to provide the security or economic environment in which they might thrive. They assumed their natural allies in one region—the Unionist-minded strongholds of Appalachia—would support their effort to remake the zone of occupation in an essentially Yankee image. But despite the backing of military units, the control of broad sectors of government, education, and the economy, and a massive civilian outreach program, not only did the occupation fail to achieve most of its goals, it unified the three southern nations against them to a degree never before seen.

Scholars have long recognized that “the South” as a unified entity didn't really come into existence until
after
the Civil War. It was the resistance to Yankee-led Reconstruction that brought this Dixie bloc together to ultimately include even Appalachian people who'd fought against the Confederacy during the war.

Their institutions and racial caste system under attack, Deep Southerners and Tidewaterites organized their resistance struggle around the one civic institution they still controlled: their churches. The evangelical churches that dominated the three southern nations proved excellent vehicles for those wishing to protect the region's prewar social system. Unlike the dominant denominations in Yankeedom, Southern Baptists and other southern evangelicals were becoming what religious scholars have termed “Private Protestants” as opposed to the “Public Protestants” that dominated the northern nations, and whom we'll get to in a moment. Private Protestants—Southern Baptists, Southern Methodists, and Southern Episcopalians among them—believed the world was inherently corrupt and sinful, particularly after the shocks of the Civil War. Their emphasis wasn't on the social gospel—an effort to transform the world in preparation for Christ's coming—but rather on
personal
salvation, pulling individual souls into the lifeboat of right thinking before the Rapture swept the damned away. Private Protestants had no interest in changing society but rather emphasized the need to maintain order and obedience. Slavery, aristocratic rule, and the grinding poverty of most ordinary people in the southern nations weren't evils to be confronted but rather the reflection of a divinely sanctioned hierarchy to be maintained at all costs against the Yankee heretics. By opposing slavery, one Southern Methodist minister declared, the Yankee “was disloyal to the laws of God and man”—“a wild fanatic, an insane anarchist, a law breaker, [and] a wicked intermeddler in other men's matters.” Since biblical passages tacitly endorsed slavery, abolitionists were proclaimed guilty of being “more humane than God.” The Episcopal bishop of Alabama, Richard Wilmer, proclaimed his church had been right to support the Confederacy in order “to maintain the supremacy of the Word of God and the teachings of universal tradition.” It was no accident that hard-core resisters of the northern occupation called themselves Redeemers, and that the end of the Union occupation in 1877 was labeled “The Redemption.”
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The southern clergy helped foster a new civil religion in the former Confederacy, a myth scholars have come to call the Lost Cause. Following its credo, whites in the Deep South, Tidewater, and, ultimately, Appalachia came to believe that God had allowed the Confederacy to be bathed in blood, its cities destroyed, and its enemies ruling over it in order to test and sanctify His favored people. Defeat of God's chosen on the battlefield, Nashville Presbyterian preacher and wartime chaplain James H. McNeilly noted, “did not prove the heathen to be right in the cause, nor that the Israelites were upholding a bad cause.” Confederate soldiers may have “poured their blood like festal wine,” McNeilly added, but it was not in vain, as “questions of right and wrong are not settled before God by force of arms.” Instead, a Deep Southern theologian would argue, the righteous would “by steadfastness to principle” defeat the federal government, which he had determined to be akin to the “beast having seven heads and ten horns” in the Book of Revelation. The righteous cause was, conveniently enough, to promote the folkways of the Deep South to the greatest degree possible, upholding the classical Roman idea of the slaveholding republic, prescribing democracy for the elite and obedience for everyone else.
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While the Lost Cause fostered a powerful Dixie alliance in this time period, there were distinct differences in the three member nations' goals. In the Deep South and Tidewater, the planter elite generally maintained effective control over their formerly enslaved workforce and so weren't opposed to having them vote, so long as they cast ballots as they were told to. The great planters weren't particularly interested in “white empowerment” if that meant empowering the poor whites of their region. The goal was to maintain the class and caste systems, making sure that neither blacks nor the white underclass got any Yankee or Midlander ideas about the “common good” or the virtues of a more egalitarian society.

In Appalachia, however, such rigid hierarchies had never existed, and free blacks initially had more room to maneuver. Ironically this relative social dynamism triggered a particularly gruesome counterattack in the borderlands. Appalachia's staggering poverty—made worse by war and economic dislocation—created a situation in which many white Borderlanders found themselves in direct competition with newly freed blacks, who tended to be less deferential than those in the lowlands. The response was the creation of a secret society of homicidal vigilantes called the Ku Klux Klan. The original Reconstruction-era Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, and remained almost entirely an Appalachian phenomenon, a warrior order committed to crushing that nation's enemies. Klansmen tortured and killed “uppity” blacks, terrorized or murdered Yankee schoolteachers, burned schoolhouses, and assaulted judges and other officials associated with the occupation. Revealingly, it was disbanded on the orders of its own Grand Wizard in 1869 because the Dixie bloc's white elite had become concerned that it was encouraging the lower white orders to think and act on their own.
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In all three nations the resistance to Reconstruction was largely successful. There could be no return to formal slavery, but the racial caste system was restored, backed by laws and practices that effectively prevented blacks from voting, running for office, or asserting their common humanity. In the Deep South and Tidewater, single-party rule became the norm and was exercised to resist change, social reform, or wide citizen participation in politics. The caste system became so secure that when sociologists from the University of Chicago came to study it in the 1930s, citizens openly bragged of participating in the torture and murder of blacks who failed to show “proper respect” for whites. (“When a nigger gets ideas,” a government official in Mississippi told the researchers, “the best thing to do is to get him under ground as quick as possible.”) In Appalachia, Scots-Irish historian and U.S. senator Jim Webb has noted, “Fresh or divergent opinions were stifled from above, sometimes violently . . . and resulted in the eventual diminishment not only of blacks but also of many whites.” Education levels fell. Economic isolation from the rest of the federation grew. As other parts of the United States expanded and developed through the late nineteenth century, Appalachia fell backward, its people caught in a life not much removed from that of their immigrant ancestors in the colonial era.
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While a Dixie bloc was coalescing around individual salvation and the defense of traditional social values, a Northern alliance was forming around a very different set of religious priorities. It was spearheaded by the clergy and intellectual elite of Yankeedom, but it found a ready audience across the Midlands, the Left Coast, and New Netherland.

From the time of the Puritans, the Yankee religious ethos focused on the salvation of society, not of the individual. Indeed, the Puritans believed every soul's status had already been determined. All that was left to do was to carry out God's work and try to make the world a more perfect and less sinful place. As we've already seen, this led Yankees to embrace all sorts of utopian missions, from building a “City on the Hill” in Massachusetts to creating a model society in Utah based on the Book of Mormon to “saving” other parts of the continent by assimilating them into enlightened Yankee culture. The Yankees represent an extreme example of Public Protestantism, a religious heritage that emphasizes collective salvation and the social gospel. Whereas late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Southern Baptists and other salvation-minded denominations generally judged alcoholism as an individual failing of character, Yankee Congregationalists, Northern Methodists, Unitarians, and Anglicans viewed it as a social ill in need of legislative redress. While Salvationists concentrated on saving the souls of the poor, champions of the Social Gospel fought for labor protections, the minimum wage, and other collective solutions intended to reduce poverty itself. Whereas Private Protestants emphasized individual responsibility for one's lot in life, Public Protestants tried to harness government to improve society and the quality of life. These conflicting worldviews put the two blocs on a political collision course.
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Reconstruction was but the first large-scale social engineering effort by the Northern coalition. When Yankee teachers became disillusioned with the slow pace of their efforts to educate and uplift former slaves in the Deep South and Tidewater, many turned their attention to Appalachian whites, who were seen as people much like their “forefathers on the bleak New England shore.” Borderlanders began to enter popular consciousness in the North in the 1880s and 1890s, when a series of literary and scholarly articles appeared painting them as a people marooned in an eighteenth-century time warp, consumed by feuds and fixated on witchcraft and other superstitions. Studies falsely proclaimed that the Appalachian people spoke Elizabethan English and were “uncontaminated with slavery.” The Yankee-born president of Kentucky's Berea College, Congregational minister William Goodell Frost, committed to bringing the “saving elements” of modern civilization to Appalachia, which would turn it into “the New England of the South.” Hundreds of Yankee-run freedmen's schools were constructed across the region through the 1930s. By the eve of World War II the effort had lost its momentum—and had been forced out of parts of the southern mountains—but the region remained a place of abject poverty.
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Reformers in the Northern coalition had by then turned to other projects. Temperance and Prohibition were driven almost entirely by Yankees and Midlanders. Maine was the first state to ban the manufacture and sale of liquor (from 1851 to 1856), while the influential Women's Christian Temperance Union was founded in Yankee-settled Evanston, Illinois, and led by early feminist Frances Willard, the daughter of a Congregational schoolteacher from upstate New York. The lobbying group that won a constitutional amendment criminalizing alcohol, the Anti-Saloon League, was founded in Ohio's Western Reserve in 1893 by a Congregational minister; its most powerful leader, William Wheeler, was an Oberlin-educated native of the Western Reserve descended from Massachusetts Puritans. Deep Southerners would later embrace Prohibition (Mississippi didn't legalize drinking until 1966), but the crusade was conceived and spearheaded by Yankees.
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Yankees and New Netherlanders also led the turn-of-the-century crusades to ensure the welfare of children. These two groups were responsible for a radical reduction in infant mortality (by the development, in Rochester, N.Y., Massachusetts, and New York City, of a system to distribute hygienic, subsidized milk supplies to mothers); for the advent and expansion of playgrounds for urban children (Massachusetts
required
citizens of its forty-two largest towns to vote on whether to pay for them, and forty-one voted affirmatively); for the first concerted effort to help orphaned street children (the New York City–based Children's Aid Society, founded by Yale-educated Connecticut Congregationalist Charles Loring Brace); the first laws regulating child labor and adoption (both in Massachusetts); and the first organizations devoted to preventing child abuse (the Massachusetts and New York City Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children). The primary organization devoted to ending child labor, the National Child Labor Committee, was a union of New Netherland–and Appalachian Arkansas–based movements that fought to secure state laws against the practice; the effort met success in the Northern bloc but was resisted in the southern nations, which eventually had reform forced upon them via the federal government.
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