Are There Distinctive Political Traditions for the South?

Abstract

There is a southern aristocratic tradition. Proof of it is to be found in the actual social, economic, political, and intellectual history of the South. There was aristocratic living in the old South. There is a factual basis for the familiar southern stories of cavaliers, chatelaines, chandeliers, mint juleps, magnolias, leisure, travel, enjoyment of the classics, hospitality, good manners, and good and gay living. There was political aristocracy in the South. A land-owning minority generally controlled the southern state governments from the beginnings until near the end of the nineteenth century. Leading southerners in the Convention of 1787 joined some northerners in efforts to fix that sort of rule in the new central government: Pierce Butler and John Rutledge of South Carolina maintained that property, in its stabler forms, was the only just and reasonable standard for representation in Congress: Charles Pinckney of South Carolina and George Mason of Virginia fought for high property qualifications for president, senators, and judges, in order to make property rights secure in the policy of the new nation.! The original state constitutions, both northern and southern, confined voting and office-holding to small groups of property-owners;