Southern Homogeneity by Dr. H. Rondel Rumburg

Can we ever get it back? Get back what? The unity of the Southern people. Can we ever get it back? In a day in which many Southerners are ashamed of their accent, their linage, their Southernness, their roots and their culture --- sadly, this litany could be carried further, hopefully not infinitum. Have we violated God’s requirement to “Honor thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise?” Reconstruction, or should one say, deconstruction, has surely made some spiteful in roads into our homogeneity. However, there is a sense of this homogeneity in most persons of Southern ancestry. When we meet folks, we still ask about their kin and their nativity. We do this instinctively or culturally. We still have our sense of kith and kin. At times this is evidenced by brotherly scrapping with one another, but hopefully standing together against our enemies. True Southerners should stand up for each other when others would seek to rob us of our character or defame the good name of our Confederate and Colonial forefathers. Yea, our anti-federalists fathers, such as Patrick Henry. Sometimes it is difficult for Southern people to understand the oneness of the South prior to the War of Northern Aggression or Lincoln’s War for Southern Genocide. That oneness perhaps was the reason so few could stand up against so many for so long. Dr. Basil L. Gildersleeve, a Confederate and foremost classical scholar of his day, explained it this way: “The Virginia farmer and the Creole planter of Louisiana were of different strains; and yet there was a solidarity that has never failed to surprise the few Northerners who penetrated the South for study and pleasure. There was an extraordinary ramification of family and social ties throughout the Southern States, and a few minutes’ conversation sufficed to place any member of the social organism from Virginia to Texas.” The Christian nature of the family in the South had a great impact on this homogeneity. Judith B. McGuire, a refugee during the war, reflected on this oneness, when in her diary she wrote: “It is delightful to see the unanimity of feeling, the oneness of heart, which pervades Virginia at this time; and we believe it is so throughout the South.”There was a continuity and solidarity that marked the Southern culture at that time. This was why the Southern people could resist an overwhelming enemy for so long. The unity of purpose was evident, and clearly so, when the Southern literature of the era is consulted. Another example was Randolph H. McKim, the Confederate Soldier and Chaplain, who, in A Soldier’s Recollections, asserted: “True, we Maryland boys had no home waiting to open its doors to us during our furlough, but the Virginians always gave us a peculiarly warm welcome, and, because we were exiles, did their best to make us feel that their homes were ours. The soldiers of the Union were well clothed and well fed, but they could never have such a welcome as we had, or be such heroes as we were when they went on furlough, because there was no such solidarity of feeling in the North as there was in the South. The condition of the two peoples was entirely different. The Southern soldier was fighting to repel invasion. He was regarded as the defender of the homes and firesides of the people. The common perils, the common hardships, the common sacrifices, of the war, welded the Southern people together as if they were all of the same blood, all of one family. In fact, there was, independently of the war, a homogeneity in the South that the North knew nothing of. But when the war came all this was intensified. We were all of one family then. Every Confederate soldier was welcomed, wherever he went, to the best the people had.”The Christian faith was a vital element in our homogeneity. As the hymn noted, Blest be the tie that binds Our hearts in Christian love: The fellowship of kindred minds Is like to that above. Most of the major Christian denominations in the South broke from their national organizations and formed Southern churches. Thus, denominations were divided between the North and the South. Actually, some of these denominations had broken ties before the War of Northern Imperialism began. The exceptional insight of John C. Calhoun gave the importance of the ties or cords that bound us as a people, and this was disclosed in his last speech, written in 1850. Calhoun’s health would not allow him to deliver the speech, so another delivered it for him to the U. S. Senate on March 4, 1850. He dealt with the cords that bound the States together. He asserted that the first cords… are spiritual or ecclesiastical; some political; others social.” And in that rather lengthy speech he declared, “The strongest of those of a spiritual and ecclesiastical nature, consisted in the unity of the great religious denominations, all of which originally embraced the whole Union…. Beginning with smaller meetings, corresponding with the political divisions of the country, their organization terminated in one great central assemblage, corresponding very much with the character of Congress. At these meetings the principal clergymen and lay members of the respective denominations, from all parts of the Union, met to transact business relating to their common concerns. It was not confined to what appertained to the doctrines and discipline of the respective denominations, but extended to plans for disseminating the Bible, establishing missionaries, distributing tracts, and of establishing presses for the publication of tracts, newspapers, and periodicals, with a view of diffusing religious information, and for the support of the doctrines and creeds of the denomination. All this combined contributed greatly to strengthen the bonds of the Union. The strong ties which held each denomination together formed a strong cord to hold the whole Union together…. This speech revealed the grounds of unity and the agitation of abolitionists who sought to destroy the country for their own ends. He was contending with such men as William Lloyd Garrison, a radical abolitionist, who had said, “This Union is a lie! The American Union is an imposition—a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell! I am for its overthrow!” The abolitionists cared nothing for the Constitution until they could twist it to advantage. Calhoun went on to describe the snapping of those cords of Union as a result of the abolitionist movement. Disunion from the North meant the maintaining of union in the South, and the Constitution, as one can observe. This separation had already commenced before 1850.Calhoun noted. The first of these cords which snapped, under its explosive force, was that of the powerful Methodist Episcopal Church. The numerous and strong ties which held it together are all broken, and its unity gone. They now form separate churches; and, instead of that feeling of attachment and devotion to the interests of the whole church which was formerly felt, they are now arrayed into two hostile bodies, engaged in litigation about what was formerly their common property. The next cord that snapped was that of the Baptists, one of the largest and most respectable of the denominations. That of the Presbyterian is not entirely snapped, but some of its strands have given way. That of the Episcopal Church is the only one of the four great Protestant denominations which remains unbroken and entire. This was the situation in 1850. As should be noted the last two denominations mentioned would sever relations with the Northern branch of their denominations in 1861.Calhoun was farsighted and believed that the perpetuation of the abolitionist agitation “will finally snap every cord, when nothing will be left to hold the States together except force.” Calhoun was correct. He continued by asserting that force could not, with propriety of language, be called a Union. One would be forced to question the depiction of a gun in one’s face as unity. He explained further, “It may, indeed, keep them connected; but the connection will partake much more of the character of subjugation … than the union of free, independent, and sovereign States, in one confederation, as they stood in the early stages of the Government, and which only is worthy of the sacred name of Union.”What has reconstruction brought to us except participation in a dying culture and the destruction of our heritage along with the disfigurement of the Constitution? Hopefully we can get Southern homogeneity back! Our forefathers were right in their resistance against tyranny in 1776 and 1861. Rev. Gen. Wm. Nelson Pendleton related that General Lee referred to the beginning of the Southern struggle for independence and said, in substance, that he had never believed that, with the vast power against us, we could win our independence unless we were aided by foreign powers. “But,” added Lee, “such considerations really made no difference with me.” And then he uttered those memorable words: “We had, I was satisfied, sacred principles to maintain and rights to defend, for which we were in duty bound to do our best, even if we perished in the endeavor.”The folks around whom we live, the children born into our homes, and the people our lives impact need to be informed as to our true history and the necessity of our being one people again. We need to have the sense of the sacred principles that our forefathers had. Perhaps we should pray in the same form as our Confederate forefathers, “Wilt Thou not revive us again: that Thy people may rejoice in Thee” (Psalm 85:6).