Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil WarWhen Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely caned Senator Charles Sumner Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 21, 1856, southerners viewed the attack as a triumphant affirmation of southern chivalry, northerners as a confirmation of southern barbarity. Public opinion was similarly divided nearly three-and-a-half years later after abolitionist John Brown's raid on the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, with northerners crowning John Brown as a martyr to the cause of freedom as southerners excoriated him as a consciousness fanatic. These events opened American minds to the possibility that North and South might be incompatible societies, but some of Dixie's defenders were willing to go one step further -- to propose that northerners and southerners represented not just a "divided people" but two scientifically distinct races. In Normans and Saxons, Ritchie Watson, Jr., explores the complex racial mythology created by the upper classes of the antebellum South in the wake of these divisive events to justify secession and, eventually, the Civil War. |
From inside the book
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... James Mason of Virginia shortly after the Massachu- setts senator had finished his speech. Mason had been pilloried as a represen- tative of “that other Virginia, from which Washington and Jefferson now avert their faces, where human ...
... James Buckingham, described an encounter he witnessed in Columbia in which both parties were wounded. “But,” he said, “no notice was taken of the affair by the public authorities, and with the community it excited no sensation beyond ...
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Contents
1 | |
19 | |
2 Ivanhoe Race Myth and the Walter Scott Cultural Syndrome | 47 |
Mythology and Southern Polemics | 72 |
4 Race Mythology and Antebellum Fiction | 93 |
Northern Racial Mythmaking | 119 |
6 A Proud HighToned People Repudiate the Scum of the North | 135 |
Other editions - View all
Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of ... Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr. No preview available - 2008 |
Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of ... Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr. No preview available - 2023 |