Continuity in Southern civilisation

By The League of the South

 

Historian Raimondo Luraghi in his book The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South points out that the Old South was not at all a progressive society. The drive that is found in the civilisation of the Northeast to remake society, taking on one social crusade after another, is not native to the South. The very concept of ‘progressive civilisation’ itself is alien to the traditional South. Conservative thinkers such as William Lind have pointed to belief in maintaining the continuity of society and its traditions as the underlying principle of conservatism. In the short passage below excerpted from Luraghi’s book the point (take from page 91) about the continuity of Southern civilisation is emphasised and contrasted to the lack of continuity in capitalist, progressive civilisations:

Sir Walter Raleigh‘s (or Relegh, as he preferred) Seal of Office

The American seigneurial civilization, from its very birth down to 1861, ranged over a span of about three hundred and fifty years. Yet a man born when Ralegh was still alive – either in Brazil or in the West Indies or in Virginia or even a man living in South Carolina at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a contemporary of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who might have been resurrected in the Old South at the rise of the Confederacy – would have found himself in a wholly familiar social milieu. Among the most striking features of seigneurial society was its immobilism – indeed, very few societies had ever been so static. Between the South Carolina of early 1700 and that of 1861 there was almost no difference – the same hierarchic organization, the same social culture, the same backward way of cultivating the land. Had this man been from the rice district, the crops and the way slaves worked the rice fields would have been familiar to him. Incidentally, this would, by itself, destroy the pretense that the southern civilization was “capitalistic.” As Marx adroitly observed, what most characterizes capitalist society is its high grade of dynamism. In the Old South, stillness was the basic concept. So, a man born on an eighteenth century Virginia or South Carolina plantation would have found absolutely no trouble adapting himself to plantation life in 1861.

Instead, how different the case of a man born in a capitalistic society of the eighteenth century and transplanted into the same area one hundred and sixty years later!