The Mind of the North

 

In my opinion, the single best short summary of the political and cultural differences between North and South appears in the movie Ride with the Devil, starring Tobey Maguire.

Ride with the Devil is powerful, visually striking movie set during the guerilla war in Missouri during the War for Southern Independence. In one scene, Tobey Maguire’s character, a Southern guerilla fighter, spends an evening away from the bitter fighting in the home of a Southern sympathizer named Evans. Evans pours drinks for his two guests, who are extremely appreciative of Evans’ hospitality. Despite their attempts to avoid the subject, they start talking about how the war is going.
Evans nods thoughtfully, then predicts the Yankees will win. He asks his startled guests if they’d ever seen Lawrence, Kansas. They reply they have not. Evans tells his guests what he’d seen in the town while it was under construction:

As I watched those Northerners building that town, I witnessed the seeds of our own destruction being sown. I’m not speaking of abolitionist trouble-making, or even the number of Northerners. It was the school. Before they built the church, they built that schoolhouse. Then they brought in every farmer’s son and every farmer’s daughter and made sure they would think and live the same free-thinking way they do, without regard to station, or stature, or custom, or propriety. That’s when I realized that the Yankees will surely win, because they believe everyone must live and think just like them. We don’t want to make everyone be like us. We shall surely lose because we don’t care how other people live-we just take care of ourselves.

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