Away down South: a history of southern identity

Abstract

Understanding the South James C. Cobb has set for himself the monumental task of writing the history of identity in the South from the American Revolution to 2005, the year of publication of this work.Without getting bogged down in too much theory, Cobb defines southern identity as the search for and perception of a common regional culture by people who live and have lived in what has been classified as the most unique region in the United States.In the process, this identity needed an other in which to define itself against.Southerners have settled on the North as the contrasting symbol of, as Cobb puts in on page 9, a triumphantly superior America to which everything southern is compared, but more often contrasted.He also recognizes that this comparing and contrasting is a two-way street, with the North also using the South as the definition of other.Indeed, Cobb points out that from the revolutionary era through the Civil War it was usually northerners who emphasized the distinctiveness of the South.Only during the sectional crises of the 1850s and resulting construction of a southern nation between 1860 and 1865 did white southerners become interested in their own identity.He aptly titles this chapter The South Becomes a Cause.After the failure of the Confederacy, the Old Cause became the obsession of the New South.This focus on the results of the Civil War and Reconstruction came to dominate the southern imagination since then.Cobb thus believes, paraphrasing Robert Penn Warren on page 60, that the South was not born in Charleston or Montgomery but at Appomattox.By 1900 the New South propagandists had won the contest for defining post-War southern identity and created a very durable version of it.This identity was one that embraced the Lost Cause as well as a modern industrial future for the region in collaboration with

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