Book Reviews

But if slavery was a violation of the Western view of human na ture, which recognizes the natural urge of every person to be the arbiter of his own destiny, it does not follow that the South was wrong to defend the institution of States' Rights. The Constitution was a compact freely accepted by sovereign states, and the terms of ratification certainly did not pre clude withdrawal if the powers and rights protected by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the basic contract were infringed. The War Between the States would never have been fought if slavery had not poisoned the atmosphere of the eighteen forties and fifties. But logic tells us that it was not treasonable for the Southern Con federacy to insist that each sep arate state had the right to deal with an institution (in this case the "peculiar" institution of slave holding) which had been accepted by the Founders as a given fact when the original contract of fed eration was being negotiated.

Richard Weaver does not defend the institution of slavery. But he most certainly deplores the cen tralizing tendencies that have made a mockery of individual and 253 254 THE FREEMAN April States' Rights. A Southerner who dallied with socialism in his younger years, Weaver came to suspect the cliches of the collec tivistic liberalism which he had originally embraced. His search for his own roots led him to the detailed exploration of practically every publicist, letter-writer, dia rist, philosopher, sociologist, his torian, and novelist who expressed the "mind of the South" in all those dismal years after the defeat of Lee's army. His conclusion was that much more than slavery was at issue in the convulsive struggle of 1861-65. Slavery would have withered away in any event for purely economic reasons (it was an inefficient method of organizing production), but was it also de creed in the stars that the South must give up what Weaver calls "resistance to the insidious doc trines of relativism and empiri cism which the Southerner carried about with him"? Weaver quotes Edmund Burke's lament for the passing of his eighteenth century world: "The age of chivalry is gone - that of sophisters, econo mists, and calculators has suc ceeded." The Southern Tradition at Bay is, in essence, a comparable lament for the Southern "age of chivalry," when (again to quote Burke) there were "pleasing illu sions" which "made power gentle and obedience liberal" and "incorporated into politics the senti ments which beautify and soften private society."

The Literature of the South Regardless of how one feels about the possibility of restoring the eighteenth century, or of re creating a fabric that would "make power gentle," one can only have intense admiration for Weaver's powers of analysis and synthesis. I had not realized the richness of the "Southern tradition" before reading Weaver's study of the post-bellum works of Alexander Stephens, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Robert Lewis Dabney, Edward Albert Pollard, Bernard J. Sage, and Jefferson Davis himself, works which had the "object of confuting what they believed to he a monstrous aspersion, a 'war guilt lie' .... " These were not part of Vernon Parrington's "main currents of American thought," yet they are surely a distinctive part of our literature. We had our centennial of the War Between the States only three years ago, and the out pouring of commentaries and his tories that commemorated the cen tennial is still vivid. But we learned all too little about what motivated the Southern soldier.

Weaver corrects the emphasis by his rifling of the "virtual Ii brary" left by people like R. L.

1969 THE SOUTHERN TRADITION AT BAY 255 Dabney, John' Esten Cooke, and Henry Kyd Douglas on-the life of Stonewall Jackson, and by the members of Lee's personal staff who left memoirs. Who among us has read Raphael Semmes's A Memoir of Service Afloat During the War Between the States? Semmes, a lawyer as well as a seaman, was commander of the illustrious Confederate raider, the Alabama, and Weaver says his memoir is "bne of the really fas cinating narratives in the history of adventure." Besides being "seven hundred pages of colorful incident and description," the Semmes memoir is also a "remark ably skilled" polemic that reviews in succession "the nature of the American compact, the early form ative stages of the nation, and finally ... the question of slavery as it affected secession." Surely, if we are to have a rounded view of the history of our country, a Semmes should be read in the schools along with a William Lloyd Garrison on abolition, or a Daniel Webster on the sanctity of the union, or a William Tecumseh Sherman on the futility of the Southern rebellion.

Richard Weaver explores the reach of the Southern novel in a brilliant chapter called "Fiction Across the Chasm." He does not aver that John Esten Cooke, Thomas Nelson Page, Thomas Dixon, Augusta Jane Evans, Grace King, James Lane Allen, Opie Read, Francis Hopkinson Smith, Charles Egbert Craddock, and John Fox were great novelists or even great story tellers. He does not even claim too much for George W. Cable (Old Creole Days) or Joel Chandler Harris, the creator of Uncle Remus. But the Southern writers of fiction, if they were not in the same league with Mark Twain (himself a Southerner of sorts), William Dean Howells, and Henry James, did not deserve to be dismissed as dwellers in a Menckenian "Sahara of the bozart." The Overpowering Burden At bottom, Richard Weaver re sented the War Between the States because it kept the South from working out its problems in its own way. He held to the Burkean belief that society must be a "product of organic growth"

if it is not to do violence to "life's golden tree." But, since ideas must have consequences, the explosion of 1861-65 was the end result of the mistakes of 1787, when the Founding Fathers temporized with their own eighteenth century heritage of "natural law." The ac ceptance of slavery, which the late Isabel Paterson insisted was the flaw in the Constitution, was too great a burden. It prevented men 256 THE FREEMAN April from seeing things in terms of a reasonable disposition to let "or ganic growth" have its way. This does not mean that the suc cessive onslaughts of the North's "liberals" on the theory of States t Rights are justifi.ed. No nation made up of distinctive regions can be successfully dominated from a single point. Reality must be re stored to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which ostensibly up hold the powers and rights of the ~ RES PUBLICA by Thomas o. Mc Whorter (Nutley, New Jersey: The Craig Press, 1966), 265 pp., $4.50.

Reviewed by Sam R. Fisher ONE of the important elements in our culture is the heritage of class ical political thought, with its search for earthly justice and its roots in the Natural Law. Here is an excellent introduction to this tradition, tracing it from Plato through Cicero and Aquinas down to Burke and The Federalist. This book is a useful statement of the fundamental axioms and truths upon which republican government is based. The author, an attorney, believes with Cicero that Justice can be un derstood only by reference to the states and of the individual citi zens thereof, if the general prop ositions of the Founding Fathers are to be rescued from the central izing trends which Weaver so eloquently deplored. The Southern Tradition at Bay should be read for its general philosophical sense as well as for its evocation of a part of our culture that has been conveniently forgotten and ignor antly derided in most of the coun try for more than a full half century. ~ nature of man, and devotes the opening section of his book to this unique creature. The body of the text is a scholarly disquisition on law and government, amply docu mented. The concluding chapters show how tyranny grows up with in the forms of popular govern ment when the spirit of a people decays because of a failure in un derstanding and a loss of nerve.

This degeneration cannot be re paired, says the author, "until the realities of life cause each to look inwardly at himself and see there . . . a human heing with a will, volition, and a purpose in: life, sus ceptible to experiencing the deep satisfaction of self-reliance, inde pendence, and responsible liberty in a political society where he is master." ~ the Freeman VOL. 19, NO.5. MAY 1969 Speakman·l00 Dean Russell 259 How the enlightened pursuit of self-interest promotes human progress. Urban Renewal and the Doctrine of Sunk Costs Gary North 263 An important lesson in economics concerning when to abandon a lost cause. OneSided Capital-GainsTax Inflation gives the illusion of capital gains; the tax is real. Henry Hazlitt 270 Education in America: 8. The Multiversity George Charles Roche III 272 The problems of size when education is bent to serve the collective. ActivistJudges and the Rule of Law Edward F. Cummerford 280 "Government ot laws and not of men" threatened by judicial activism.