Battle History of the Civil War Book

The two key essays in this collection are the ones around which the book was built: "The Search for Southern Identity" (originally published in 1958) and "The Irony of Southern History" (1953).

In "The Search for Southern Identity," Woodward described a conviction among American southerners that their sectional identity was slipping away from them as the South developed and urbanized, and, in the 1950s, as the Jim Crow edifice began to totter. Woodward suggested that there actually was a distinctive and vital southern culture worth saving; it was a form of dissent from relentless American nationalism, materialism, and conformism. The South, unlike most of the country, was in a good position to question the myth of America's limitless abundance and inevitable success; it had known real poverty -- and the fact that defeat can be real and devastating -- for generations. The South had also, thanks to slavery, known what it meant to have a collective "tortured conscience," which was something that might occasionally do the rest of the country good. Thus, southern identity was something very valuable to conserve. The great danger for the modernizing South, however, was that it would cling to racism as its defining characteristic, as the Old South had clung to slavery. This would be a second great southern tragedy.

In "The Irony of Southern History," Woodward also addressed the question of what the South could offer the rest of the country during the 1950s. Borrowing the concept of historical irony from Reinhold Niebuhr, Woodward argued that the South, due to its "eccentricity" within the United States, was in a good position to show the rest of the country that America was eccentric vis-à-vis the rest of the world. As Niebuhr wrote, most Americans enjoyed unhealthy "illusions of innocence and virtue" that belied the nation's awesome postwar power. While Americans pretended to be uniquely unspotted by the corruptions of the world, their idealism in the nuclear age actually forced them into the position of potential global executioner. The South, of course, participated in this illusion and irony; but unlike the rest of the country, it had already seen vividly that claims of noble character sometimes conceal -- and even cause -- moral depravity, and that a people zealous for its beautiful traditions can thereby become fanatical in defense of its vices. The South, in other words, was a place where "history" had happened -- where there were limits to optimism about human goodness. Surely this knowledge could be useful to a victorious and idealistic American people who had never (yet) known the chastening of history.