Among Bourbons the racial issue may have less to do with their remaining unreconstructed than other factors. All Southerners agree that slavery had to go; but many historians maintain that except for Northern meddling it would have ended in states like Virginia years before it did. Southern resentment has been over the method of its ending, the invasion, and Reconstruction; their fears now are of miscegenation and Negro political control in many counties. But apart from racial problems, the old unreconstructed South -- to use the moderate words favored by Mr. Thomas Griffith -- finds itself unsympathetic to most of what is different about the civilization of the North. And this, in effect, means most of modern America.

It is hard to see how the situation could be otherwise. And therein, I feel, many Northerners delude themselves about the South. For one thing, this is not a subject often discussed or analyzed. There seems to be almost a conspiracy of silence veiling it. I suppose the reason is a kind of wishful thinking: don't talk about the final stages of Reconstruction and they will take care of themselves. Or else the North really believes that all Southerners except a few quaint old characters have come around to realizing the errors of their past, and are now at heart sharers of the American Dream, like everybody else.

If the circumstances are faced frankly it is not reasonable to expect this to be true. The situation of the South since 1865 has been unique in the western world. Regardless of rights and wrongs, a population and an area appropriate to a pre World War I, great power have been, following conquest, ruled against their will by a neighboring people, and have had imposed upon them social and economic controls they dislike. And the great majority of these people are of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic descent. This is the only case in modern history of a people of Britannic origin submitting without continued struggle to what they view as foreign domination. The fact is due mainly to international wars, both hot and cold. In every war of the United States since the Civil War the South was more belligerent than the rest of the country. So instead of being tests of the South's loyalty, the Spanish War, the two World Wars, and the Korean War all served to overcome old grievances and cement reunion. And there is no section of the nation more ardent than the South in the cold war against Communism. Had the situation been reversed, had, for instance, England been the enemy in 1898 because of issues of concern chiefly to New England, there is little doubt that large numbers of Southerners would have happily put on their old Confederate uniforms to fight as allies of Britain. It is extraordinary that a people as proud and warlike as Southerners should have been as docile as they have. The North should thank its stars that such has been the case; but at the same time it should not draw false inferences therefrom.