"Let it not be said of us that we allowed the South we love to perish."

 

This article was originally published in Southern Partisan Magazine in 1997.

“Being a Southerner is a spiritual condition, like being a Catholic or Jew.” So wrote Richard Weaver in his essay “The South and the American Union” in The Lasting South (1957). The South’s experience during the war for its independence, he added, only confirmed this separateness of spirit and a need to be a separate nation.

The South might be viewed as an American Ireland, Poland or Armenia, not indeed unified by a different religious allegiance from its invader, but different in its way of life, different in the values it ascribed to things by reason of its world outlook, and made more different after the war by its necessary confrontation of the tragic view . . . .”

With the United States seeking independence for countries around the world, Weaver wrote, “it has certainly been handsome of the South not to raise the question of its own independence again.”

More @ The Abbeville Institute