......honor transcends military, political, or rational purposes, and that
whole nations have over the course of centuries preferred extinction to
dishonor. As a more perceptive historian, Pierre Bourdieu, has observed
of the Berber tribesmen of Algeria, “He who has lost his honor no longer
exists.” Robert E. Lee confessedly lost his part of the war for
Southern independence; he never, lost his honor. The same may be said of
hosts of other Southern soldiers, and of the South itself.
This essay was originally published in the First Quarter 1992 issue of Southern Partisan.
A Review of: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (UNC Press, 1991) by Alan T. Nolan
When Frank Owsley sought from among the vast number of
interpretations of the cause of the war of 1861 for the principal cause,
he defined it as “egocentric sectionalism.” Not slavery, not economics,
not confusion about the meaning of the Constitution or the proper
relationship of the states to each other and the Federal government, but
pernicious pride.
In examining the language of the most vocal Northern crusaders and
the most extreme of the Southern defenders in the decades prior to the
war, Owsley found a “coarse and obscene” assault by abolitionists on the
very integrity of Southern society and institutions. The self-styled
Southern fire-eaters responded, of course, but even their “language of
insult…was…urbane and restrained” in comparison to “that’ of the
Abolitionists. ” Thus, he concluded, “in language of abuse and and
insult was jettisoned the comity of sections. And…peace between sections
as between nations is placed in jeopardy when one section fails to
respect the self-respect of the people of another section.”
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