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. |
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... largely aban- doned by the South's polemicists in describing the new southern race. On the verge of the Civil War, the region's apologists were much more inclined to use Norman or Anglo-Norman to describe the founders of the South's ...
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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 |