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Whitefield began his missionary career believing that he was a reformer in conversation with the Church of England about religious toleration. By the time Whitefield died in September 1770, he was for most unrecognizable as an Anglican minister. The itinerant and expansive nature of his career meant that he left no permanent ties to any locality or denomination. This made him a powerful religious icon that could be “claimed” by a number of causes.

Images associated with slavery in their own peculiar way made the South a more distinctive vacation spot. These images cleared a path for sectional reconciliation by tightening the bonds between the Yankee side and the Confederate side on the basis of white supremacy. Thus the whites' sense of racial superiority had survived the tumult of war and emancipation. In this proliferation of demeaning black stereotypes, tourist promoters hardly added anything original to the elements of racism in the United States, but in capitalizing on prevailing racial views, they did reveal how a deep racism had permeated American culture. In their own way, tourist promoters nurtured a climate in which racial separation would soon seem not only acceptable but also perfectly natural as they made African Americans souvenirs of an Old South, marginalizing blacks and the region as a whole while making African Americans and their culture safe for American consumption.

This chapter discusses the writings of the eminent 19th-century American classicist Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, founder of the first graduate program in classics in the United States and apologist for the Southern cause during the American Civil War. The chapter surveys Gildersleeve’s use of classics as exempla in his polemical and apologetic writings on the South and his use of the South as an exemplum in his writings on classics. It discusses the comparisons that Gildersleeve explicitly drew between the Peloponnesian War and the Civil War, and examines the wider connections between his pro-Southern writings and his classical scholarship, focusing on his views on slavery, abolition, and the Old South. The chapter pays particular attention to Gildersleeve’s writings on miscegenation and his scorn for the egalitarian views expressed in the famous abolitionist “man and brother” motto.

This book explores how and when the South developed as a tourist commodity. It begins in the late 1830s when the first promotional works on the South were published and ended in 1920 when the notion of an “Old South” was ensconced in the lexicon of tourism. Throughout this period, its aim has been to isolate, identify, and unravel recurrent images used by promotional tracts and determine why these images appealed to potential tourists and how these images contributed to the notion of a southern identity. The book's contribution is on how tourism, in particular those individuals and groups promoting tourism to the South of the United States, crafted southern identity in the formative period of southern tourism from the late 1830s to the early 1920s.

The introduction provides historical background on Natchez, Mississippi, and the town’s most famous heritage tourism product, the Natchez Pilgrimage, founded in the early 1930s. Similar to earlier expressions of historical memory in Natchez, the Pilgrimage home tours and pageants represented the romanticized values of the Old South and its Lost Cause. The town’s public and private historical memory following the Civil War through the Great Depression in the form of letters, emancipation parades, associations, militia groups, photography and other popular amusements are discussed. The history of the town in the aftermath of the Civil War and its impact on the formerly enslaved, the white planter class, elite free blacks, and social conditions following the war through the Great Depression are noted. The idea that historical memories are constantly in flux and frequently contested is discussed.

In this Epilogue, disparate visions of young women in the antebellum South—conservative vs. progressive, reactionary vs. rebellious—are examined, along with the emergence of a conflicted image of southern women in place of the unified motif of the southern lady. Focusing on the United Daughters of the Confederacy, formed a generation after the end of the Civil War to preserve and praise a particular image of the Old South, the chapter considers the role of southern white women in maintaining white supremacy, bolstering male superiority, and preserving class privilege in the post-Civil War South. More specifically, it discusses the notion that southern women helped to rebuild the New South in the image of the Old.

This book explores the meaning of southern womanhood from the vantage point of young, elite, white women in the Old South during the mid-nineteenth-century. Drawing on the personal writings of more than 300 southern girls and young women—from letters and diaries to memoirs, notebooks, scrapbooks, and autograph albums—it looks at coming-of-age as a self-fashioning process that involves adopting as well as adapting not only racial and regional identities but also gender identity. The book examines the ways young women in the Old South—a group it calls “Scarlett's sisters”—resisted their culture's imperatives while also embodying its ideals. It also considers how these young women took advantage of the opportunity presented by the Civil War to translate their long-standing resistance into outright rebellion. Just as the Civil War challenged the accepted institution of race-based slavery, young women challenged the conventional definition of southern womanhood. Finally, the book discusses the debate over the definition and meaning of youth and adolescence by using both the terms “girls” and “young women” to refer to its subjects.

This chapter considers the following questions: First, why did some Confederates need “so much cumulative evidence” before they admitted defeat? In other words, how did diehards sustain optimism and justify persistence in the last years of the war? Second, why does the perseverance of these Rebels matter? What can diehards reveal about the South; what mark did they leave on the region and its war legacy? The solid divide between Civil War and Reconstruction scholarship tends to separate these intimately linked questions, labeling one Confederate history and the other New South history, relating the former to the military and the latter to political science. This chapter combines such issues within a larger study of invincibility and defeat, faith and disbelief, and war and peace. The answers offered here are necessarily brief, but they illuminate a misunderstood group and encourage scholars to transcend the prevailing war and postwar typology. If historians are to understand white Southern culture during the “middle period,” they must tackle the same challenge that haunted their subjects—namely, how did Southerners try to overcome the chasm of defeat. Only then can history appreciate which elements of the Old South informed the New and which perished in the crucible of war.

The concept of honor that was deeply ingrained in southern culture during the antebellum period tolerated and even encouraged men to engage in such activities as gambling, drinking, and dueling—behavior that directly contravened the principles of self-restraint and strict biblical morality promoted by evangelicals. Capitalizing on their increasingly prominent role in society after the Civil War, southern evangelical prohibitionists, especially Methodists and Baptists, began to redefine the concept of honor to push their prohibitionist agenda. By defining honor along more Christian and middle-class Victorian lines, evangelicals were able to convince Southern men that living a Christian lifestyle and taking up the cause of prohibition constituted an honorable and manly undertaking. By extension, anyone who opposed prohibition was considered dishonorable.

Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts explore what they call the “highly bifurcated” tourism they found in Charleston, South Carolina, heralded as “America’s Most Historic City.” As Kytle and Roberts argue, the historical narratives offered by the city’s tour guides often diverge over the issue of race and slavery. This means that the same tourist sites within Charleston are interpreted by white tour guides as places of Old South romance and chivalry, while black tour guides tell of the heartbreak of slavery at those same sites. These divergent narratives of the city’s past complicate the tourist experience in Charleston as well as its urban identity.

This chapter examines the historical and historiographic legacy of J. D. B. De Bow and De Bow’s Review. De Bow’s antebellum editorial contributions created the foundation for a “New South” that historians often have attributed to southern boosters after the Civil War. De Bow urged antebellum southern readers to accept and invest in urban development, industrial growth, commercial prosperity, railroads, and scientific farming. This chapter corrects past historiographic oversights and mistakes by highlighting De Bow’s editorial contributions and contextualizing his ideas with his readers’ actions. Review readers become as important as De Bow because they offered him an outlet for new ideas and innovations.

Courtship was not always successful in allaying young women's fears of commitment or discouraging them from seeking marriage. Yet young single women in the nineteenth-century Old South did not proceed immediately from courtship to marriage. Instead, they experienced—and in many cases, insisted upon—a lengthy period of engagement. This chapter explores how engagement allowed young southern women to strive for intimacy with their intended husbands and to come to terms with their persistent misgivings about marriage. Focusing on the personal experience of Texas bride Lizzie Scott, who, pondering the meaning of marriage in her journal, predicted, “My life will be entirely changed,” it considers how young women of the Old South turned to engagement as a means to use the ideal of romantic love to redefine their role within marriage, as well as to resist the dictates of patriarchy even as they accepted the inevitability of marriage. Finally, the chapter discusses how the life stage of engagement served as a tipping point between resistance and resignation for young southern women.

This chapter explores De Bow’s development as a journal editor. He saw New Orleans and the area then known as the Southwest (comprising Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee) as the embodiment of what he hoped the entire South could become. His experience as a delegate at the Memphis Commercial Convention in late 1845 allowed him to meet like-minded men who hoped to build factories and railroads, diversify agriculture, invest in cities and towns, and create a commercial link with the Far West. His enthusiasm and knowledge helped propel his dream of starting a monthly economic journal. With the blessing of prominent southerners, he published the first issue of De Bow’s Review in January 1846. Although an original thinker and advocate for change, De Bow understood his readership and published early articles on cotton cultivation, slave management, and plantation culture. He knew that for his plan to work he needed the support of planters as well as merchants and industrialists.

This chapter examines the difficulties that beset young women in the nineteenth-century Old South as they finished college and confronted their adult destiny as wives and mothers. It focuses on the personal experience of Laura Henrietta Wirt, a Washington, D.C. resident who declared that “it will never do for me to be married,” tutored her younger siblings, and dreamed of establishing a “charming happy hall” for single women with her cousin, Louisa Cabell. The chapter considers Laura's reluctance to commit herself to marriage as a form of resistance explored by young southern women, as well as the time that Laura and Louisa spent as single women. It also discusses southern girls' desire to maintain female friendships, and how this was often thwarted not only by physical distance but also by social conventions. Finally, the chapter highlights the search for “single blessedness” as one of the southern girls' most creative—although ultimately unsuccessful—forms of resistance.

Marriage was an important indicator—and maker—of adult status in the nineteenth-century Old South. It set the stage for well-to-do white women to practice adult responsibilities and enjoy elite status as wives of powerful men or the mistresses of slaveholding households. It also set new limits on southern women's resistance: their ability to envision (or enact) alternatives to the status quo. This chapter examines motherhood as the final step in the transformation of young women in antebellum South from girlhood to womanhood, a representation of the final stage of coming-of-age and an effective end to female resistance. It focuses on the trials experienced by southwestern migrant Martha Hunter Hitchcock, who, after several miscarriages, became “a perfect slave” to a sickly baby girl. The chapter also highlights the significance of motherhood in terms of bearing new responsibilities for child care and having new opportunities for personal fulfillment. Finally, it discusses southern women's concern about the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth as well as their tendency to look at sex with both dread and desire.

This chapter discusses the issue of flying the Confederate flag and focuses specifically on Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s conjure tale “Po’ Sandy.” In this tale, Chesnutt illuminates clearly how a symbol of the Old South—in this case, a kitchen built off of the main house—cannot be separated from the history of slavery and just represent southern pride or the romantic side of the time period. One should neither ignore the not-so-romantic other side of the coin, nor ignore that the “other” side reveals the illusory nature of the romance. Chesnutt’s short story illustrates that romanticizing the plantation home goes back at least as far as the nineteenth century—for as long as romance writers have used the Old South as a setting for their books and entertained readers with their sentimentalized portrayal of that place and time.