The Role of the Yankee in the Old South (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS173 fast to her institutions despite impending doom and sure defeat. Clearly Durden regrets that the South did not bring itself to free the slaves. We all agree; everyone today is against slavery. But Durden seems to miss two major points in the whole episode over arming the slaves. First, the war brought the Confederates to the verge of destroying what they were all about. Slavery, the basis of southern social institutions, was the very cornerstone of her way of life. What the debate over arming the slaves illustrates is not the inability of the South to face change, but rather it shows that many political and military leaders as well as most of the prominent newspaper editors were willing to sacrifice basic institutions in order to win the war. It provides abundant evidence that waging war can destroy a society's basic values. Because we do not like slavery, historians have too often neglected this vital aspect of the Confederate experience. Durden's concluding chapter, entitled, "On the Confederacy's Tombstone: 'Died of a Theory,' " tends to perpetuate this neglect, and consequently his whole study adds little more to our knowledge of the Confederate experience than an extended collection of source material. Second, Durden seems to misunderstand the reasoning of those who sought to arm and free the slaves. In his preface, the author implies that the debate over arming the slaves involved a larger question of whether the South would "voluntarily initiate a program of emancipation ." He goes on to whet the reader's appetite with the promise that "The whole episode shows, however, that there was yet a reservoir of good will between the white and black races in the South . . ." but then fails totally to develop these points anywhere in the book. In fact most of the selections which Durden published suggest that support for arming the slaves rose not from a desire to initiate emancipation nor from a reservoir of good will, but rather from wartime necessity and from people who would go to any length to win the war. The Gray and the Black is an important collection of documents for someone who wishes to read the source material of an interesting conflict within the Confederacy. However, much of the material is repetitious , since the conflicting issue of the debate is readily apparent: wartime necessity to achieve independence versus maintenance of basic southern institutions. Durden has chosen an important topic but unfortunately has added little to our knowledge. John B. Robbins University of North Carolina, Charlotte The Role of the Yankee in the Old South. By Fletcher M. Green. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972. Pp. x, 150. $6.00.) This attractive little volume contains the Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures delivered in 1968 by the veteran scholar and teacher , Fletcher M. Green, Kenan professor of history emeritus at the University of North Carolina. Its delayed publication was the unhappy con- 174CIVIL WAR HISTORY sequence of lost luggage—including notes and manuscript—when Green was returning from a year as Harmsworth professor at Oxford. With typical tenacity, readily recognized by his many students and friends, he kept his commitments by starting again. The Role of the Yankee in the Old South is a study of northerners who moved south or immigrants who resided in the North before moving southward. Thus, the only community tie linking the many randomly selected Yankees is their former homeland north of the Mason and Dixon line. Green found, according to the 1860 census, that upwards of 360,000 Yankees had made homes in the southern states, and he estimated that more than half a million had made a similar move from the time of the American Revolution to the Civil War. He groups his case studies under such career headings as government, education, religion, theater, journalism, agriculture, and industry. In the group portraits which emerge from the series of vignettes, Green can give only impressionistic findings because he had no adequate controls for the multitude of variables in his raw material. His conclusions, however, are not mere serendipity. He holds that the Yankees exerted "an influence on Southern life far greater than is generally recognized and out of...