David Goldfield, who holds an endowed chair in history at the University of North Carolina, says in the opening sentences of his new book that he lives "in a tolerable yet sometimes intolerable place. Its sensual climate lures the unsuspecting, and the grace, manners, and civility of its citizens impart a preternatural quietude that belies the storm beneath."

That's a pretty dramatic opening, but Goldfield quickly ratchets it up a notch. Acknowledging that, although he has lived more than half of his life in the South, he doesn't "pretend to understand it," he adds:

I do know that there is a war going on here. It is an ancient conflict, as war and time go in this country. The Civil War is like a ghost that has not yet made its peace and roams the land seeking solace, retribution, or vindication.

Readers whose tastes don't run to Southern Gothic—especially those who've spent some time in the South and don't recognize the place Goldfield is describing—may be tempted to close the book and read no further. They should exercise more patience. Goldfield's basic point—that, in various and usually bloodless ways, the American Civil War still rages—is right. Past students of mine in Northern California seemed to assume that the Klan still runs wild in Dixie, and I sometimes found it challenging to help them see the war from a Confederate soldier's, or Southern mother's or farmer's, perspective. But prejudice cuts many ways, and since my arrival in Texas—which is partly Southern, partly Western and partly, well, Texan—I have stumbled over students who believe, because they have been taught in purportedly Christian schools, that the Klan was a charitable organization which held the South together in the face of Yankee depredations. I've also been told about grandparents who would be put off if their children's children married a Northerner. And I've observed a general approach to life that construes New England as foreign territory.

Goldfield does have a weakness for sweeping generalizations. "The Confederacy's demise," he writes in one typical passage, "created a dilemma for white southern women. Their men had lost a holy war." All of them saw the conflict as a holy war? On occasion, Goldfield modifies his claims—"For some white women," he notes, "desperation eventually replaced devotion" to the Confederacy—but his brush strokes are often too broad to be of much use.

It also seems that he makes too much of the South's distinctiveness—that is, while he does a good job of deconstructing some of the South's Lost Cause mythology, he buys into the fable, born of Southern self-absorption, that the South is unique and understandable only to natives. Of course, from a certain perspective, the South is a world unto itself—but one that contains numerous subcultures: Franco-Louisiana doesn't have much in common with northern Virginia, native Texans have an affinity for "the South" but see themselves as Texans first, and Wendell Berry's rural Kentucky doesn't have much in common with Flannery O'Connor's rural Georgia.

Still, it remains true that certain bizarre ideas have currency among some Southerners—particularly, it seems, among conservative Christian Southerners, along with their sympathizers. One of these ideas, as Goldfield observes, is that the Old South was a place of "happy slaves" and "gracious masters" whose enviable tranquility was smashed by reckless abolitionists. Or, as Douglas Wilson, Christian educator and founder of New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, asserts in a monograph he co-authored with League of the South official Steve Wilkins, since the demise of the antebellum South, there "has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world." And the "credit for this," they continue, "must go to the predominance of Christianity."1

Never mind that before the Civil War, church attendance was lower in the South than in the North. Or that the South was more violent than the North. Or that, following Nat Turner's slave revolt (1831), it was generally illegal to teach slaves to read the Bible for themselves or to attend churches unsupervised. Or that the South's supposedly jolly and contented slaves often ran en masse to Yankee lines when they could. Or that there is no substantial body of literature wherein former slaves pine for the good old days of unpaid labor in the cotton patch. Or that, generally speaking, following the war Abraham Lincoln was revered by Southern blacks and at least disliked by Southern whites, when not hated. The "Christians who owned slaves in the South were on firm scriptural ground," says Wilson, apparently unaware that the logical thrust of the spiritual equality Paul called for between 1st-century Christian slaves and masters leaned in the direction of emancipation and, in any event, that kind of equality was not the norm in the antebellum South.

Goldfield suggests that Wilson's kind of thinking—romantic and yet sinister—stems partly from a Southern inferiority complex and partly from common contemporary observations about American race relations. To recall the country's largest race riots—Detroit and Los Angeles come to mind—is to realize that the good ol' boys may be on to something when they say that they get along better with American blacks than do their sanctimonious non-Southern critics. Goldfield quotes John Hope Franklin as saying that "the races get along better" in the South. If Franklin is right, that's partly because black and white Southerners have had a longer time to get to know one another than have their cousins outside the South. And Southerners, black and white, seem to understand better than most that a lot of American history is rooted in a mixture of European, African and Caribbean soil.

Goldfield himself doesn't seem to think Franklin is right, and in my cynical moments I sensed that our author believes that Protestant Southern white guys who disagree with his politics—who are not as sensitive and caring as he—are just BAD. So perhaps it's understandable that, near the end of his book, Goldfield raises the grim specter of a "healing process." But as we have learned several times over by now, and as John McWhorter has recently pointed out in a useful collection of essays, so-called black leaders' definition of "healing" often involves financial shakedown (Jesse Jackson), the stoking of racial animosity (Al Sharpton) and legal hustling (Johnnie Cochran).2 At the same time, many white Americans' view of interracial "reconciliation" (to use another tired word) amounts to denial: the purging of memory and a feeling that black citizens need to "get over" slavery and Jim Crow.

My own view, tinged, perhaps, by sentimentalism, is that healing between people alienated from one another—and blacks and whites are less so now than ever—is a slow process, and usually progresses best when perceived differences aren't analyzed to death. In a few more decades, the great majority of Americans, black and white, who have any personal recollection of Jim Crow will be dead; and more interracial marriages will have taken place; and growing immigrant populations from Asia and Latin America will, by the force of their cultural difference, cause American blacks and whites to see that they have a lot in common. And historians will reflect on the fact that early 21st-century America's best golfer, Tiger Woods, was "black" and its best rapper, Eminem, was "white." And the South—and all of America—will be better off.

Preston Jones is a contributing editor to Books & Culture.

1. Steve Wilkins and Douglas Wilson, Southern Slavery As It Was (Canon Press, 1996).

2. John McWhorter, Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority (Gotham Books, 2003).

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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