When 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. This mythology cast southerners as descendants of the Normans
of eleventh-century England and thus also of the Cavaliers of the
seventeenth century, some of whom had come to the New World and
populated the southern colonies. These Normans were opposed, in
mythic terms, by Saxons-Englishmen of German descent-some of whose
descendants made up the Puritans who settled New England and later
fanned out to populate the rest of the North. The myth drew on
nineteenth-century science and other sources to portray these as
two separate, warring "races," the aristocratic and dashing Normans
versus the common and venal Saxons. According to Watson, southern
polemical writers employed this racial mythology as a justification
of slavery, countering the northern argument that the South's
peculiar institution had combined with its Norman racial
composition to produce an arrogant and brutal land of oligarchs
with a second-rate culture. Watson finds evidence for this argument
in both prose and poetry, from the literary influence of Sir Walter
Scott, De Bow's Review, and other antebellum southern magazines, to
fiction by George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, and William
Alexander Caruthers and northern and southern poetry during the
Civil War, especially in the works of Walt Whitman. Watson also
traces the continuing impact of the Norman versus Saxon myth in
"Lost Cause" thought and how the myth has affected ideas about
southern sectionalism of today. Normans and Saxons provides a
thorough analysis of the ways in which myth ultimately helped to
convince Americans that regional differences over the issue of
slavery were manifestations of deeper and more profound differences
in racial temperament-differences that made civil war inevitable.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
