The South has an enduring status as a region somewhat separate from the main thrust of American life. The tension be­tween agrarian and commercial impulses in American society, epitomized by the yeomen idealized in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and the striving industrial class whose rise was promoted by Alexander Hamilton’s Re­ports as Secretary of the Treasury, had its most bitter dimension in the conflict over the status of slavery. Although the American Founders sought to put slav­ery on the road to eventual extinction because they recognized it as an evil at odds with the first principle of the Decla­ration of Independence, substantial por­tions of the South resisted every scheme of emancipation, a resistance that intensified as opposition to slavery increased around the country. The most candid Southerners conceded that slavery could not endure among any people genuinely animated by the principles of the Decla­ration, so they recommended discarding the founding principle and replacing it with a new cornerstone: a doctrine of racial superiority which led some to con­coct the notion that slavery could be a “positive good.”

The Northern victory in the Civil War cannot be fully and properly understood as the result of a superior industrial base and a larger population prevailing over a people who had remained true to a set of agrarian, traditional values. A notable bit of nostalgia that frequently passes for conservatism today appeals to the enduring elements of these agrarian senti­ments. Although it is obvious that the policies of Reconstruction–administered with a vengeance by Radical Republicans who had resisted Abrabam Lincoln’s tempered and prudent policies through­ out the war–provided the seeds for many new discontents following the North’s victory, any reconciliation of the protracted antagonisms that main­tain current sectionalist sentiments with­in American society must ultimately de­pend upon unreconciled Southerners acknowledging that Northern victory was the only means of maintaining America’s true traditional principles. In otherwords, before the South can lay any legitimate claim to the notion that it is a region maintaining a tradition within a country deviating toward the cosmopolitan, it must transcend the legacy of the first deviation from the American tradition, the one given impetus by Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun.

Although we have elected three Southern Presidents during this century, (and, surely, the damage that Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter have wreaked on our institutions constitutes excessive retribution for anything done during Reconstruction), abundant evidence indicates that the South re­mains less than fully assimilated into American society. Unfortunately, neither of these books comes to grips with the reasons for the South’s protracted insulation within American society. They do, however inadvertently, provide abun­dant evidence of the limitations of the forms of inquiry that dominate the teaching of history and the social sciences, and therefore provide an indication of the reasons why many people schooled in those disciplines are unable to com­prehend genuinely principled conflict.

John Shelton Reed’s Southerners has a misleadingly broad title for an essay of considerably less scope. Reed’s text is much more aware of the book’s limitations than the title implies. The era from 1945 through the present has been a period of considerable change in the South. Beginning with V. O. Key’s South­ern Politics, social scientists have amassed an impressive body of evidence that would enable an ambitious researcber to trace the changes that have transpired during the past generation and assess them or predict potential new directions. The Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina allowed Reed and a colleague to insert some questions measuring sectionalism in a survey of North Carolinians done in 1971. Reed sustained several impres­sions of things he would like to say about the region in the decade since that sur­vey, and this book is an attempt to use the data from this survey to say them. One suspects that the results are less than satisfying, even for Reed.

An early paragraph of his concluding chapter, for example, alludes to changes in the South and asserts, “these changes have had momentous consequences….Some of these changes… have been improvements; others, in my view at least, have been regrettable; perhaps most have simply been changes. But, for better or worse, Southerners are becoming more ‘modern,’–that is to say more ‘American’ in many respects.” Lacking in the book is an articulation of the analytic foundation that enables Reed to view some changes as “improvements,” others as regrettable,” and still others with in­difference. What is it about modernity that ennables him to identify it with Americanism and label elements of modernization detrimental to the South and, by implication, to the nation? One suspects that Reed could write an in­triguing book answering some of these questions; this isn’t it. Part of the failure can be attributed to the data base (it is impossible to measure change over a generation with a snapshot survey taken at one point in the era), part can be attri­buted to inadequate research (the bib­liography contains few references to the classic studies of Southern political life), and part must be attributed to the au­thor’s inclination to elaborate on the data he has accumulated rather than to bring the data to bear on the questions that really concern him. As a result, the volume is of limited utility for academic specialists.

T. Harry Williams’s essays are won­derful experiences in historical scholar­ship. The author is thoroughiy familiar with the topics he tackles, writing from primary sources while arguing with the secondary literature in a usually elegant style. He considers the range of human traits involved in all of his subjects and demonstrates the differences that distin­guish first-rate leaders from lesser lights. He is especially insightful when dealing with Civil War generals (Yankee and Confederate) and other militaty leaders (particularly MacArthur and Eisenhower); he is enlightening, albeit somewhat strained, in his efforts to provide favor­able historical assessments of Huey Long and Lyndon Johnson.

Williams’s strengths and flaws are most apparent when he deals with the man who commanded the Northern generals, Abraham Lincoln. Williams comprehends the opposition that surrounded Lincoln, both Radical Republicans who wanted slavery abolished regardless of the con­sequences for the nation’s system of con­stitutional government and less heated Northerners who wanted the Union restored regardless of the consequences of slavery. He explains the bases from which each of the contesting parties operated, and he appreciates the tensions that maintained the conflicts and im­peded cooperation during the Civil War. Unfortunately, Williams lapses into that most American evasion of explanation, labeling Lincoln a “pragmatist” and portraying him as a political physicist, push­ing here, pulling there, always balancing to keep things on as even a keel as possi­ble. One almost gets the impression that Lincoln was an odd sort of weathervane, always leaning into the prevailing winds to avoid toppling from a precarious perch. The evasion is disconcerting because however prominently the political physicist prances on his perch while balancing competing interests, the “pragmatic” label encourages historians and students to concentrate on the winds blowing around him rather than inquire into the principles that might under lie the alleged “pragmatist.” The technique invariably leads historians to see these subjects as the product of forces around them, rather than as leaders responsible for governing the forces that would shape lesser mortals.

Yes. Lincoln did compromise and bal­ance where he decided it was necessary, but unlike other compromisers of his era, Lincoln argued from principles that guided his compromises, so that he could tell others where compromise was ap­propriate and where it was not. Yes, Lincoln was pushed in a great many di­rections that he did not particularly pre­fer, like any other democratic leader, but unlike most other leaders, and in contrast to Williams’s argument, Lincoln was a systematic thinker whose princi­ples, rooted solidly in the Declaration of Independence, enabled him to distin­guish major issues from minor ones and to discern which compromises would further the principles that he advocated. The inability to explicate the principles behind Lincoln’s politics is a major failure of historical scholarship because these principles form the key distinction between President Lincoln and the weathervane pragmatists who pursue the P.residency, between democratic leadership and servile obeisance to pub­lic opinion. Williams’s appreciation of Lincoln would have benefited from a reading of Henry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided.

The reconciliation of the protracted antagonism in American life requires that both sides come to terms with Abraham Lincoln. The South, however strongly it identifies with American traditions today, must concede that it once embraced deviations from those tradi­tions, ones that impaired American lives and liberties. Once we have overcome this deviation from the tradition of lib­erty, we will be in much better condi­tion to counter the perils to liberty em­bedded in the contemporary counsel of deviations far more dangerous than pragmatism.