Download E-books Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Southern Literary Studies) PDF

When consultant Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely caned Senator Charles Sumner Massachusetts at the flooring of the U.S. Senate on may well 21, 1856, southerners considered the assault as a effective confirmation of southern chivalry, northerners as a affirmation of southern barbarity. Public opinion was once equally divided approximately three-and-a-half years later after abolitionist John Brown's raid at the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, with northerners crowning John Brown as a martyr to the reason for freedom as southerners excoriated him as a realization enthusiast. those occasions opened American minds to the chance that North and South may be incompatible societies, yet a few of Dixie's defenders have been prepared to move one step additional -- to suggest that northerners and southerners represented not only a "divided humans" yet scientifically targeted races. In Normans and Saxons, Ritchie Watson, Jr., explores the advanced racial mythology created through the higher sessions of the antebellum South within the wake of those divisive occasions to justify secession and, finally, the Civil struggle.

This mythology forged southerners as descendants of the Normans of eleventh-century England and therefore additionally of the Cavaliers of the 17th century, a few of whom had come to the recent global and populated the southern colonies. those Normans have been adversarial, in mythic phrases, by way of Saxons -- Englishmen of German descent -- a few of whose descendants made up the Puritans who settled New England and later fanned out to populate the remainder of the North. the parable drew on nineteenth-century technological know-how and different assets to painting those as separate, warring "races," the aristocratic and rushing Normans as opposed to the typical and venal Saxons. in response to Watson, southern polemical writers hired this racial mythology as a justification of slavery, countering the northern argument that the South's abnormal establishment had mixed with its Norman racial composition to provide an conceited and brutal land of oligarchs with a second-rate tradition. Watson reveals facts for this argument in either prose and poetry, from the literary impression of Sir Walter Scott, De Bow's assessment, and different antebellum southern magazines, to fiction through George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, and William Alexander Caruthers and northerly and southern poetry in the course of the Civil struggle, particularly within the works of Walt Whitman. Watson additionally strains the ongoing influence of the Norman as opposed to Saxon fable in "Lost reason" concept and the way the parable has affected rules approximately southern sectionalism of today.

Normans and Saxons offers an intensive research of the ways that delusion eventually helped to persuade american citizens that neighborhood transformations over the problem of slavery have been manifestations of deeper and extra profound adjustments in racial temperament -- alterations that made civil struggle inevitable.