|Border States: Journal of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association, No. 7 (1989)|
The two Nashville Agrarians Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate
were born in the border state of Kentucky and shared a common
cultural heritage. Both emphasized the relationship of the writer
to time, place, and traditions from the past. Both believed that
the ordinary persons must have myths to live by and that the writer
should supply those myths. However, they differed widely in how
they interpreted the Civil War.
Robert Penn Warren in his Legacy of the Civil War gives
us his reason for studying history: "The asking and the answering
which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame,
the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot
give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller
understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that
we can better face the future" (100). This statement, at
first glance, is logical and respectful of the lessons that history
may teach us about the Civil War. Upon examination, Warren's views
turn out to be somewhat more ambiguous. According to Warren the
proximate antecedents of the conflict had their genesis in the
1830s. In the North, the Abolitionist movement showed an overzealous
righteousness and irresponsibility in its agitation against the
South (Legacy 20-34). In the South, "the possibility
of criticism - criticism from the inside - was over" and
"the stage was set for trouble" when members of the
Virginia legislature in the 1830s committed themselves to an ideology
of "slavery as a positive good" (35-36). Warren develops
this thesis in a way that suggests that the war resulted solely
from the ideological stands assumed by each side.
Warren's chief target in his characterization of the North is
the Abolitionist movement, and he describes Abolitionism in terms
of its most violent fringe, even though the movement ranged from
violent fanatics like John Brown to responsible leaders such as
Frederick Douglass, from New England religionists like William
Lloyd Garrison to transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson,
from Sojourner Truth to Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Significantly, there is little difference in Warren's approach
toward Abolitionism in Legacy in the 1960s and that in
his first published prose work, John Brown: Making of a Martyr
Warren mitigates the harshness of his attack on the Abolitionists
by acknowledging that the Abolitionists labored for a just cause,
and often "nobly." "But who can fail to be disturbed
and chastened by the picture of the joyful mustering of the darker
forces of our nature in that just cause?" (Legacy
23). While pursuing the "iniquitous" slave system, the
Abolitionists also, at the same time, refused to criticize the
"Lords of the Loom" who, in their New England textile
mills, mercilessly exploited women and children and reduced them
to abject poverty and squalor. In this respect, Warren's argument
is similar to the one developed by slavery ideologues in the antebellum
South (Fitzhugh, Ruffin) to claim a superior morality for slavery
as against New England capitalism.
Warren's treatment of the consequences of the Civil War focuses
on "false myths" which developed to justify the roles
of the two opponents in the conflict. The North, Warren says,
while it reclaimed "the Confederate States for the Union
. . . made them more Southern . . ." (14). The North's victory
in the Civil War confirmed its ideological stance of moral superiority
with what Warren calls "The Treasury of Virtue" (59).
The South, in its defeat, justified the Confederacy with "The
Great Alibi." Once the War was over the Confederacy became
a "City of the Soul" (56). By the Great Alibi "The
South explains, condones, and transmutes everything. . . . He
[the Southerner] turns defeat into victory, defects into virtues.
. . . If the Southerner, with his Great Alibi, feels trapped by
history, the Northerner, with his Treasury of Virtue, feels redeemed
by history, automatically redeemed. . . . [With] an indulgence
. . . for all sins past, present, and future, freely given by
the hand of history" (59).
Warren sees both post-war apologies as rationalizations that have
prevented a self-critical examination of our real history and
have allowed self-serving myths to substitute for reality. They
are among the psychological costs of the Civil War that "condition
in a thousand ways the temper of American life today" (54-65).
These false myths continue to echo "in the drama we now live
. . . the present momentous crisis of our history, when our national
existence may be at stake, makes us demand that we learn -- if,
alas, anything -- from that great crisis of our national past"
(101). Warren makes his reference specific when he likens the
U.S. stance of moral superiority toward the Soviet Union in the
Cold War as similar to the North's antebellum intransigent attitude
of moral superiority toward the South.
Tate also sees the beginnings of the Civil War in the agitation
carried on by Abolitionists who first attained national prominence
in the 1830s. Abolitionists, he explains in Stonewall Jackson:
The Good Soldier (1928), were "people in New England
who wanted to destroy democracy and civil liberties in America
by freeing the slaves." They weren't very intelligent, Tate
says, but they thought they were doing what God had told them
to do (25). Tate continues this tone with such statements as,
"The institution of slavery was a positive good [because]
it had become a necessary element in a stable society, and only
in a society of fixed classes can men be free" (39). Blacks
in the antebellum South benefited from slavery: the slaveowner,
because of his benevolence, protected the slave. "The White
man was in every sense responsible for the Black. . . . The Black
man, 'free,' would have been exploited" (39). Tate depicts
Stonewall Jackson the orphan who, through piety and identification
with the code of the Southern professional soldier, was the South's
greatest hero. He was also, to complete the idealization, a benevolent
slaveholder who loved and cared for his Negroes (53).
The North's stance of moral superiority over the South Tate saw
continuing to the present day, as he revealed in his New Republic
review of Avery Craven's Edmund Ruffin, Southerner (1932).
Tate says there, "While the Eastern politicians were talking
a romantic Union, and Emerson an irresponsible freedom and individualism,
Ruffin, Rhett, Calhoun, and George Fitzhugh of Virginia, ignored
in their time, were issuing a realistic warning to the 'American
system' that is valid today." (26) The ideologues of slavery
whom Tate had long warned that the South could be forced to fight
a war for its independence in order to preserve the slave system
and its way of life. In his review, as in other writings, Tate
identifies with the most extreme Southern "fireaters"
who opposed all efforts to compromise the "irrepressible
conflict." Like them, he saw no room for Southern compromise.
The historical significance of the Civil War was an other issue
on which Warren and Tate differed. For Warren the "American
experiment" had been tested and the country united by an
ordeal of fire. If the fledgling nation was to fulfill the promise
of the founding fathers, slavery had to go (Legacy 7).
In Jefferson Davis Tate is sure that the Civil War was
not fought over slavery. Early in the Davis biography Tate interjects
his conviction that "The issue [of the Civil War] was class
rule and religion'" on the Southern side which he favored,
versus "democracy and science" on the Northern side
which he abhorred (Davis 87). He expands his view in the
book's epilogue: "The South was the last stronghold of European
civilization in the western hemisphere, a conservative check upon
the restless expansiveness of the industrial North, and the South
had to go" (301).
The sharp differences of interpretation between Warren and Tate
extend to post-war Reconstruction as well. For Warren, the victory
of the North "catapulted American society from what had been
in considerable part an agrarian handicraft society into the society
of Big Technology and Big Business" (Legacy 8). With
the paralyzing controversy over slavery resolved, the pragmatic
predilections of the American character, already inherent in American
experience, enabled the release of "enormous energies, new
drives and know-how for the sudden and massive occupation of the
Continent" (10-11). Tate views the rise of Big Business industrial
capitalism, the flourishing of a science, and the expansion of
popular democracy as leading to a decadent society which has lost
its moral bearings. Industrialism was responsible for the decline
in influence of traditional Christianity and the abandonment of
absolute moral standards. He focuses his attack on positivism
in science and humanism in religion, which he describes in much
the same terms as the religious right today describe "secular
humanism" ("Religion" 158).
The American stance of self-righteousness in today's world arena
Warren sees as one of the most pernicious products of the North's
Treasury of Virtue: "Righteousness is our first refuge and
our strength -- even when we have acted on the grounds of calculated
self-interest, and have got caught red-handed, and have to admit,
a couple of days later, to a great bumbling horse-apple of a lie.
In such a case, the effect of the conviction of virtue is to make
us lie automatically and awkwardly, with no élan of artistry
and no forethought; and then in trying to justify the lie, lie
to ourselves and transmute the lie into a kind of superior truth"
(75). Tate also deprecates the mantle of morality used by the
United States to justify its policies in the world arena. He objects
that the moral decadence of American society precludes a stance
of moral superiority.
Warren sees racism as the most serious fruit of both "The
Treasury of Virtue" and "The Great Alibi." Why,
he asks, after listing the appalling costs of the Civil War in
lives and treasure, did not passage of the Thirteenth Amendment
to the Constitution abolishing slavery win real freedom for the
Negro? He finds the answer in Northern attitudes toward the Negro
as much as in the South's. He points out that Northern whites,
from the top to the bottom of society, before and during the Civil
War, never envisioned Negro equality as a sequel to abolishing
slavery, or the abolition of slavery as a war aim. During the
war itself there were glaring instances of racism and oppressions
of the Negro by the Federal military and in Northern civilian
life (Legacy 62-63).
Warren proposes these facts to explain why the half-hearted post-war
"Reconstruction" culminated in the Northern conspiracy
with the white Southern landowners in what he calls "The
Big Sell-Out of 1876," the deal "to make Hayes President
in return for the end of any Reconstruction whatsoever in the
South" (67). With this deal, the North handed back political
control in the South to the same landholding class which had been
so decisively defeated in the Civil War itself. The legacy of
these events has continued their negative consequences into the
latter years of the twentieth century as a heavy burden on democracy
and the economy, not only in the South, but in the nation as a
Tate was so attached to "the good" in slavery, resulting
from the humanity and benevolence of the master class of the Civil
War to be "in many ways worse than the old" ("Sanctuary"
151). The defeat of the Confederacy was followed by the "terrors
of Reconstruction" (Davis 299). Southern whites turned
to frequent lynchings of Negroes after the war because "Negroes
had been stirred to violence by the Northern whites" (42).
He asserts further that "for society as a whole the modern
[economic] system is probably inferior to that of slavery . .
." (4). Tate nowhere connects the South of his day (the 1920s
to the 1950s) to the Southern landowners' post-emancipation success
in maintaining racism and white supremacy by defrauding blacks
of the political rights granted them by the Fourteenth (1868)
and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments to the constitution.
Warren and Tate both grew up in Kentucky small-towns where the
Negro's inferiority was taken for granted. In the 1950s the open
rebellion of masses of black people in the South against segregation,
discrimination, and oppression which was to explode into the Civil
Rights movement was already gathering steam. Warren made it a
point to expand his horizons on the issue of white racism, and
black reactions to it, and published Who Speaks for the Negro?
(1965), for which he interviewed Negro leaders in all walks of
Tate's attitude toward Negroes continued to assume "natural"
genetic superiority of the white race over black people, but Tate
was defensive about publicly expressing it after the biographies.
He carefully avoided publicly addressing the morally disturbing
legacy of slavery and the conditions which followed the failed
Reconstruction. His views did not change, however. In a Sewanee
Review editorial in 1945, Tate still insisted that the place
of Negroes in Southern society was solely a question for the [white]
South to decide. He opposed "federal intervention" to
protect the Negro's civil rights as "not . . . satisfactory
to anybody" (659-660). He never later reconsidered his racial
attitudes. When the Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis biographies
were reprinted in the 1950s and 1960s there were no revisions,
repudiations, or corrections of their blatant racial content.
Furthermore, although Southern literary history included outstanding
literature by black writers of poetry, short stories, and novels
from the 1920s through the 1960s, Tate, who was never humble about
his literary gifts, did not write criticism of black poets or
Why Tate chose the self-defeating course of championing the "lost
cause" of the Confederacy is not impossible to understand.
In his university days at Vanderbilt, as one of the Fugitive poets,
Tate already seemed willing to accept a role as poet-martyr (J.L.
Stewart 318). He affected the pose of the aloof aristocrat. He
never was interested in understanding the "common people."
One could not imagine him traveling through the South as Warren
did in 1956, button-holing white and Negro Southerners from all
stations in life and recording their views for Segregation:
The Inner Conflict in the South. Tate's championing of the
lost cause was linked in his mind with his religious seekings.
Perhaps Tate was trying to defend himself against the world he
found so uncongenial and was preoccupied with searching for a
reason to believe in a personal God who ordered the lives of men
and society. His strong identification with his Southern roots
led him to invent his own reality which contained the God he prayed
for and a society that had an exalted place for the poet. In his
biographies and other writings he sought to reinforce his self-image
of a temperamental kinship with the haughty lords of medieval
Europe and the "aristocrats" of antebellum society.
He saw both societies as led by natural aristocracies that included
poets in an honored place.
Warren, like Tate, was and is critical about what he sees as the
moral deficiencies of his society. He believes these deficiencies
are due to the human reluctance to understand or face its own
capacity for rationalization and self-deception about the uncomfortable
evil of one's own soul. He does not exempt himself from this self-criticism,
and seems to carry an inexplicable burden of guilt about himself.
He believes the road to redemption is an individual and solitary
matter that requires the recognition of self-complicity in the
evil of the world.
Craven, Avery. Edmund Ruffin Southerner: A Study in Secession.
1932. Rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1968.
Stewart, John L. The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965.
Tate, Allen. "The Prophet of Secession," Review of Edmund
Ruffin Southerner by Avery Craven. New Republic 17
---. "Mr. Davidson and the Race Problem." Editorial.
Sewanee Review Winter 1945.
---. "Faulkner's Sanctuary and the Southern Myth." Allen
Tate. Memoirs and Opinions: 1926-1974. Chicago: Swallow P,
---. Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall: A Biographical Narrative.
New York: Minton Balch, 1929.
---. Stonewall Jackson. The Good Soldier. New York: Minton
Warren, Robert Penn. John Brown: The Making of a Martyr.
New York: Payson and Clarke, 1929.
---. The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial.
1961. Rpt. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.
---. Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South. New
York: Random, 1956.
---. Who Speaks for the Negro? New York: Random, 1965.
This web page is maintained by
Dr. Harold D. Tallant, Department of History, Georgetown College
400 East College Street, Georgetown, KY 40324, (502) 863-8075