Back in the spring there was a lot of hoo-rah in northern Virginia about a plan to build a shopping mall on part of the battlefield at Manassas (“Bull Run” to Yankees). At first, some of us down here suspected a federal plot to obliterate the reminders of two humiliating defeats, but it turned out to be just the usual crowd of developers pursuing the economic logic that seems to lead inexorably to the paving of any open space close to a major metropolitan area.

Now, there’s something to be said for money-making as a goal. I’ll say it in a minute. In any case, it does seem pointless to expect investors to get all misty-eyed about a piece of land they bought in good faith and pay taxes on, just because some soldiers died there a long time ago. But let’s not forget that there are other ways to view life than through the cash nexus. Confederate propagandists used to argue that’s what those soldiers were fighting about. It may be that we in the South have now rejoined the Union in that respect. Back in the countercultural 60’s, David Riesman observed that the only students he had at Harvard who wanted to make a lot of money were Catholics and Southerners. And survey research shows no appreciable difference in cupidity between Southerners and other Americans. But in the past some Southerners at least affected to scorn the values of tradesmen. Consider, for instance. Colonel Robert Toombs of Washington, Georgia. Colonel Toombs was one of the great unreconstructed rebels. When someone met him at the Washington telegraph office during the Chicago fire and asked the latest news, he replied that the firefighters were battling the conflagration heroically, but the wind was on our side. To my mind, the best Toombs story concerns the time some progressive citizens of his town proposed to build a hotel, arguing that it would give commercial travelers a place to stay and be good for business. The colonel listened with ill-concealed displeasure, then announced that any gentleman who came to town could stay with him and anyone who wasn’t a gentleman shouldn’t be encouraged to stay the night. The hotel wasn’t built.

I admire that attitude, even if I don’t entirely share it. If that had been all the Confederates were fighting for, they might have deserved to win. But old Nathan Bedford Forrest, that untutored horse-soldier from the unpolished Southwest, let the cat out of the bag. After a session of high-flown Lost Cause rhetoric at a veterans’ reunion, he grumbled that if he hadn’t thought he was fighting to keep his slaves he wouldn’t have fought. As the title character in Walker Percy’s Lancelot observes, “the Second Revolution in 1861 against the money-grubbing North failed—as it should have because we got stuck with the Negro thing and it was our fault.” Lance does go on to call for a third Revolution, but recall that he’s in a hospital for the criminally insane.

Anyway, Toombs’s attitude was probably a minority view even among rebels. Many, like Forrest, seemed to have nothing against money-making, at least for themselves. Certainly by war’s end and for decades afterwards there were plenty who felt like Faulkner’s Jason Compson: “I haven’t got much pride. I can’t afford it.”

A sad story: when President Davis and the Confederate government fled fallen Richmond, south to Danville, then south again into North Carolina, what was left of the Confederate Army was prevented from destroying the bridge across the Dan River—by the Danville police. The mayor and other Danville notables subsequently surrendered the town intact to the pursuing federal troops. In cash-nexus terms, the Danville boys were right, of course. The war was over. Life would go on. Why tear down a bridge if you’re just going to have to rebuild it? Maybe that’s not the noblest attitude going, but we can understand it, can’t we?

It’s harder, though, to understand some latter-day Southerners who can afford pride but seem to have forgotten what it is. Consider, for instance, the Greater Columbia Convention and Visitors Bureau. They want you to bring your meeting to some of Columbia’s 4,000-plus hotel rooms, and they don’t care whether you’re a gentleman or not: you’re welcome to stay the night, and they’re spending the taxpayers’ money to tell you so. A full-page advertisement in the June 1987 issue of Association Management magazine shows a photograph of the ruins of Columbia, with the caption “After Sherman’s March we fired our booking agent!”

Now, this strikes me as roughly analogous to a tourist ad for Japan with a mushroom cloud and the caption “After Hiroshima we cleaned up our act!” But in this, as in much else, the Columbias of the South are just following the lead of Atlanta, pacesetter of the New South, a town that billed itself in the hateful 60’s as “the city too busy to hate.”

Think about that. As my friend Fred Hobson once observed, that’s a pretty sorry reason not to hate. Not too proud, too decent, too self-respecting, too Christian—just too busy. Compared to that, Fred remarked, even hate has a certain integrity. I once angered some Atlantans by writing that every time I look at their city I see what a quarter of a million Confederate soldiers died to prevent. Well, that’s the kind of thing I had in mind.

But let’s be fair: the absence of hate, for whatever reason, is rare, and precious. And, as big American cities go, Atlanta may be onto something. Last spring, I read an interview in the Pan Am in-flight magazine with a black minister from Boston who spoke of his hopes for his city. Why, he asked rhetorically, should Atlanta be “the only model city for black people” in the US?

Do you have any idea how strange it is to hear a Bostonian use the capital of Georgia as a good example? True, the man was black. The millennium hasn’t arrived; the lion hasn’t lain down with the lamb; no white Bostonian other than Robert Coles has yet been heard to utter a good word for the South. But let’s savor this anyway.

And let’s hear two cheers for the materialism which certainly has something to do with that outcome. Our polity is explicitly committed to the pursuit of happiness, which usually translates, North and South alike these days, as the pursuit of wealth. And there are worse ends for a society to pursue: strength, for example; usually, in practice, even virtue. Selling out your principles isn’t bad if they’re obnoxious, and principles often are.

The older I get the more wisdom I see in Samuel Johnson’s observation that a man is seldom more innocently engaged than when he is making money. It can’t be accidental that the most successful multiethnic society on earth is the one that probably best exemplifies stodgy, money-making, bourgeois values—I’m referring of course to Switzerland. Atlantans’ smug vulgarity can be insufferable, but perhaps that’s the price we have to pay for communal harmony and the envy of Bostonians.