Sara Mayeux on Southern Exceptionalism

C. Vann Woodward is one of my favorite historians, especially his work on Southern history. My daughter, Sara, a history doctoral student and law student at Stanford, gives a penetrating look at issues raised by Woodward in a book review she wrote for one of her classes. The book reviewed is Peter Kolchin's "A Sphinx on the American Land."

 

Sara Mayeux

HIS 351b
Book Review

10/23/09

Southern Exceptionalism?
Peter Kolchin’s A Sphinx on the American Land

The various myths of American exceptionalism loom over every American historian in one way or another.  But they loom especially large for historians of the American South, because they threaten to write the South out of America altogether.[1]  In C. Vann Woodward’s classic formulation, the former Confederacy was exceptional in America precisely because, unlike the rest of the country, it was unexceptional in the world.[2]  With its history of “quite un-American poverty” and “equally un-American … submission,” in the late 19th century “the South [underwent] an experience that it could share with no other part of America—though it is shared by nearly all the peoples of Europe and Asia—the experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction.”[3]

Yet for much of the 20th century, historians struggling to make sense of that experience did not seek inspiration or insight in the histories of Europe and Asia.  They dealt with the South’s distinctiveness not by turning outward, but by turning in on themselves.[4]  The parochialism of Southern historians was not entirely of their own making, however.  Slavery, secession, military defeat, and racial terror could hardly be fit into the story of national unity and enlightened progress that American historians in the “consensus” years, at the height of the Cold War, wished to promote.[5]  The above quotations by C. Vann Woodward come from his 1952 presidential address to the Southern Historical Association, in which he noted ruefully that

New England, the West, and other regions are occasionally permitted to speak for the nation.  But the South is thought to be hedged about with peculiarities that set it apart as unique.  As a standpoint from which to write American history it is regarded as eccentric and as a background for a historian something of a handicap to be overcome.[6]

Over the past few decades, the study of Southern history has become both “Americanized” and (especially in recent years) “globalized.”[7]  Historians outside the South, and even outside the United States, have increasingly engaged with Southern history; and in turn, Southern historians have increasingly adopted a comparative perspective.[8]  In the essays collected in A Sphinx on the American Land, delivered in 2002 as a lecture series at LSU, Peter Kolchin reflects on the promises of comparative history, and identifies questions in Southern history that would especially benefit from an international framework.  He also shares some preliminary conclusions from his own ongoing research comparing the emancipations of American slaves and Russian serfs.[9]

    By juxtaposing the South’s “peculiar institution” with Russian serfdom, Kolchin provocatively suggests that American slavery was not, perhaps, so thoroughly peculiar after all, even if its racial dimension was distinctive among systems of unfree labor.  Kolchin’s primary thesis is that although the processes of emancipation were quite different in the United States and Russia, the outcomes were strikingly similar: a decline from “heady enthusiasm” about “the dawning of a bright new era” into “disappointment, dismay, and disillusionment,” and, ultimately, “an era of reaction and retrenchment.”[10]  Kolchin does not here provide a full account of “[h]ow such different emancipation processes can have yielded such similar emancipation consequences,”[11] although one hopes that he will do so when the research is published in book form.  But he sketches a few tentative explanations:  First, in both Russia and the United States, emancipation was imagined not as an isolated reform but as the cornerstone of a “widespread effort to restructure the social order,” creating perhaps impossibly high expectations.  Second, in “a cruel irony” of history, both emancipations “occurred at the onset of a generation-long agricultural depression”—not an auspicious moment in which to attempt to “uplift[] … an overwhelmingly agricultural population.”[12]

    Kolchin also highlights, by contrast, the relative placidity of the postbellum South—an observation that will surely surprise American historians used to thinking of the late 19th century South as a uniquely violent and deeply divided society.  After emancipation, Kolchin observes, Russia’s peasants entered a phase of total confusion, fueled by rumors and conspiracy theories, and the countryside was rocked by “widespread rural disorders … that dwarfed whatever emancipation-generated violence occurred in the southern United States ….”[13]  The paradox, of course, is that Russian emancipation was designed to be gradual and peaceful, while American emancipation was the result of a hard-fought, bloody war.

    Kolchin’s own research takes up much of the book’s third chapter.  The first two chapters are historiographical, evaluating other historians’ efforts at what might be called “internal comparisons,” whether comparing the South with the North, or the “many Souths” within the region.  Here, two of Kolchin’s insights warrant particular emphasis.  First, he interrogates the ideological implications attached to the traditional Southern historiographical categories—particularly the frequent implicit equation of “Southerner” with “white male adult Southerner.”  For instance, the question of how much popular support the Confederacy enjoyed will have a different answer depending on which states are included in the sample, and whether or not blacks are included.[14]  Second, he insists upon attention to the dynamism of Southern institutions over time.  Antebellum slavery was in many ways atypical of the institution throughout its history.[15]

  Yet though he devotes two of the three essays to internal comparisons, Kolchin’s real agenda here is to encourage more attention to international comparisons, the type of comparative history that has been least utilized by Southern historians.  One of his more interesting proposals is for a study of Confederate nationalism through the lens of the historiography on 19th century European nationalisms.[16]  Kolchin also suggests that by placing the postwar South into global perspective, historians can not so much answer that enduring historiographical riddle—why did the South fail to grow?—as reframe it:  The “‘tragic era’ paradigm of the postwar South” is “based on a tacit assumption that things usually go ‘right,’ that poverty, exploitation, and oppression are aberrations to be explained rather than normal features of human experience,” an assumption that may not hold up under an internationally comparative lens.[17]  Both through his explicit arguments and the implicit force of his example, Kolchin makes a strong case for the value of comparative history both generally and to Southern history in particular, and along the way, provides a useful brief introduction to the historiography of the American South.

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[1] Of course, the South has had its own myths of exceptionalism, expressed in pop-culture stereotypes, academic histories, and everywhere in between. 

[2] C. Vann Woodward, “The Irony of Southern History,” Journal of Southern History 19, no. 1 (Feb. 1953), 4-5.  Woodward’s exact words are as follows: “from a broader point of view it is not the South but America that is unique among the peoples of the world.”

[3] Woodward, 5.

[4]Quite literally, Southern history was a discipline apart from not just world history but even American history: in C. Vann Woodward’s heyday, there was little need to distinguish between “Southern historians,” i.e., historians from the South, and “Southern historians,” i.e., historians of the South, since the two groups overlapped almost entirely.  See Peter Kolchin, A Sphinx on the American Land: The South in Comparative Perspective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 2 n. 2 (noting that it was only in 1986 that the Southern Historical Association first elected a president who was neither born in the South nor working in the South).

[5] For example, Kolchin discusses how in the postwar “consensus” years the Civil War was re-defined “as a ‘needless war’ brought on by a ‘blundering generation,’” with the implication “that had it not been for extremist agitators, southerners and northerners would have been able to work out whatever minor differences they had.”  Kolchin, 19.  On the postwar emphasis on “consensus” history generally, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), especially 333-35.  To be sure, the South hardly holds a monopoly on problematic episodes and themes.  One historian has recently suggested that popular and historiographical notions of an “‘exceptional’ South [have] served as a useful scapegoat in the past and the present.”  Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 25.

[6] Woodward, 4.

[7] Kolchin, 2.

[8] Thus, for instance, one set of historians has examined the American South alongside the Italian Mezzogiorno.  Enrico Dal Lago and Rick Halpern, eds., The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno: Essays in Comparative History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

[9] Kolchin previously published a comparative study of slavery and serfdom prior to emancipation, entitled Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987).  Kolchin apparently plans to publish the post-emancipation research as a sequel to that book.  See Kolchin’s CV, available at http://www.udel.edu/History/bio/kolchin_peter.html (last visited Oct. 21, 2009).

[10] Kolchin, 105.

[11] Kolchin, 106 (italics omitted).

[12] Kolchin, 106-7.

[13] Kolchin, 110.

[14] Kolchin, 57.

[15] Kolchin, 44-45.

[16] Kolchin, 88-89.

[17] Kolchin, 28-29.