In his famous 1928 article “The Central Theme of Southern History” for The American Historical Review, the Georgia historian Ulrich B. Phillips argued that the determination of the White people of the American South that Dixie shall remain “a White Man’s Country” is the defining theme of Southern history:
“Yet it [the South] is a land with a unity despite its diversity, with a people having common joys and common sorrows, and, above all, as to the white folks a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained – that it shall be and remain a white man’s country. The consciousness of a function in these premises, whether expressed with the frenzy of a demagogue or maintained with a patrician’s quietude, is the cardinal test of a Southerner and the central theme of Southern history.”
I’ve always thought it was helpful to look at Southern politics, history and culture in that way. I admire Phillips’ candor in cutting through all the bullshit and just getting to the heart of the matter. Why not just admit that we are and want to remain a Western Christian European country?
We are not in the final analysis mere liberal abstractions. Those have been set aside on countless occasions since the beginning of the Union. From a historicist perspective, we are an offspring of Great Britain planted in the southeastern United States, and if we are honest with ourselves we are comfortable with that and would like to continue being that in the future. It’s nothing against anyone else. On the contrary, it is natural for any organism to want to survive and reproduce itself.
Note: In Southern History Series: German Romanticism’s Impact on the Antebellum South, we saw that the Romantic idea of “progress” was more about growth of the nation and individual in self-awareness of its own particular heritage than universal extension of liberal abstractions.