Any good books on this stuff?
Actually, I was rereading the post by
@Chuckwagon. For some reason I glossed over it, it was much better than my own ramble. You want stuff about how insane they got, that's where
Our Man in Charleston is helpful. It's not ABOUT Fire Eaters, but it's where I got my exposure to some of the crazies. Keep in mind, Charleston was basically the ringleader of this stupid shit, it was always far more rabid than the rest of the South. Broadly speaking, in fact, you get this sort of three-way split in that the whole Deep South seceded before Fort Sumter, the Upper South only seceded after Fort Sumter in response to/anticipation of Lincoln's intention of waging bloody conquest, and the Appalachian portions either went full Unionists or were, at best, extremely disloyal, chaotic shitshows of guerilla warfare (with the Cumberland Plateau, depicted well in the novel
Good Rebel Soil, and Missouri being the worst hotbeds of it).
Fitzhugh's own magnum opus was
Cannibals, All!, also published as
Sociology for the South.
The WPA slave interviews are the best source for the slave perspective in this. Libtards claim it's all tainted by the Blacks being terrified into saying what Whitey wanted to hear; I disagree vehemently with dismissing people's personal testimony like that. Comes down to that slavery was hard and exploitative but you often have a lot of complex feelings for the real human beings that you interact with day after day, and it wasn't an endless parade of pickanniny alligator bait and other such nonsense.
It's got fuck all to do with the conversation we were having, but just because of how annoying I find it that the Confederacy gets minimized on maps and stuff, it's worth reading
The Three-Cornered War on Confederate Arizona. Most people have never heard of it, it's never on maps, nobody gives a fuck but New Mexico Territory had its own internal civil war (the split was north-south back then, not west-east) with a giant shitshow of Confederate Texas, Union Colorado, Mexicans on both sides including a big battle between primarily Mexicans that came down to a duel by the Mexican flagbearers of both units, Comanches, Apaches, and Navajo. One of the bitter ironies of it was how the Confederate plan for the Navajo (enslave them) was much more merciful than the Union plan (stick them on a reservation to die of famine).
Literary-wise, if you're unfamiliar with Southern dissent,
The Free State of Jones is a masterpiece movie of Jones County, Mississippi's Unionist insurgency.
Cold Mountain is, like everything written by Charles Frazier, a deeply nuanced and academic-level understanding of the Old South; it's about a Confederate deserter trying to make his way home to the Appalachian Mountains (has a sort of anthology-like structure with side characters being the point of it).
Gone With the Wind is a genuine masterpiece of psychologically-focused writing, and it's a very rich depiction of the master class from someone who was sympathetic to it.
Flags on the Bayou annoyed me (among other things, with its magical Negroes), but it digs heavily into the class hatred aspect of the planters vs the crackers. If you didn't know, most anything I say about Appalachians can apply to Cajuns. Cajuns were a totally different ethnic group than the Plantation French in Louisiana; they were people who had settled Nova Scotia (Acadiana) first, were expelled by the British in colonial times and came to settle in Louisiana's bayous as refugees. They never became great plantation-owning people but were fishermen. Big thing with Louisiana French in general was that they weren't real fired up to fight for what was effectively an Anglo-Southern nationalist movement - they didn't really identify with "Dixie" as a concept, although it ironically came from their language - and for the Cajun yeomanry that went double so. They basically just rolled over and played dead when the Union invaded, put up no resistance, did not give a fuck, did not aid or abet them either. Louisiana and Tennessee were both allowed to vote in 1864.
Outside of stuff I've actually read (have backlogged), I know that
The Fall of the House of Dixie is supposed to be a deep study of the planter class from a mostly negative perspective,
The Mind of the Master Class from a much more old-fashioned and evenhanded one.
One thing that really stood out to me was, one day, I get to thinking: Dixie itself is a product of the period. That word wasn't in the English language before the 1800s. It's not intentionally contrived like "Southron," but it's one of those expressions that is pretty truly tied directly to King Cotton. On that whole theme of Jefferson, it's something I've brooded over a lot. I used to be a Neo-Confederate back in high school and most of college and the habit died real hard even on into graduate school. But at some point I came to an understanding that not only was the CSA wrong (because it was not the limited government tax revolt that libertarian ideologues had bullshitted me into believing it was), but it was, in substance, the antithesis of everything Jefferson stood for. And the sad irony is that many of its own people didn't realize that in the moment.
That kind of four step process I described, evil-necessary evil-positive good-Fire Eater insanity? You could find people in the South pretty much in agreement with any of the last three. Evil, too, there were people like the Grimke Sisters, German immigrants in Texas and North Carolina and various free thinkers here and there. What it's come down to is that society's understanding of what the Confederacy was about has sort of shifted around. For much of the 20th Century we thought it was the Necessary Evil stage, and that was what was still taught, more or less, in my region when I grew up. Then there came to be this libshit insanity where they both "Nazify" the Confederacy and try to conflate it with the Founding Fathers, basically demonize slavery first and then use that as a rhetorical cudgel against the country as a whole.
Thing is, the average person was somewhere between necessary evil (especially in the Mountains) and positive good. But the Fire Eaters, even when they weren't running the show they had sort of hijacked the society in the same manner that these lunatics we have today have hijacked society. They were in the driving seat headed for a cliff. That's all Dixie was. Founding Fathers identified with their state, or with the Union. "The South" had yet to develop a national consciousness, really. You can tell stories all day, as I do, about ethnic origins and distinctive cultural features and what not, but nobody in those days thought that way, they weren't aware of it. Early on, maybe a different course of history would have changed it. I certainly think that if Appalachia had been part of free states peopled with Midwesterners we'd maybe think that - even with the churches and accents and all being the same - that Appalachians are Northern. But the idea of a South as something a personal might die over, or describe as a home, just didn't mean anything until King Cotton, and ever since then it's been slowly dying out. I've come to a point where I finally think that might just be good. Despite the New England-centric popular memory of the Revolution, the early republic was Virginia's baby (there's a book on that theme, although a little weak and filled with Confederate apologia, called
Virginia First:
The 1607 Project) and in a way the South is "becoming America" again, from the music of the 20th Century to the rise of Atlanta and Dallas as insane metropolises to the industry to legacies like the Manhattan Project (Oak Ridge) and Apollo Program (Huntsville).
In all that sense, it's for the best there is no Dixie. And as much as I like Jefferson, I think that in some regards I may lean more to Henry Clay now, who was a Kentuckian and, like fellow Kentuckian and his protege Lincoln, felt strongly about avoiding sectional factions. Chuckwagon referred to the leadership being batshit crazy compared to Davis. Same is true of Lincoln and the Republicans, the hardcore ones were much more vindictive, nasty and corrupt than Lincoln was. Lincoln isn't really a Yankee at all, but he had attached himself to a horrible little party.
There's a passage I'll send to you all. I don't want to post it here. But it comes from an old school Southern Democrat, 20th Century, and I found it beautifully captured my own thinking about the War in rich prose.
Edit:
A Disease in the Public Mind for the batshit crazy in both sides; it’s weighted towards bitching about abolitionist crazies.
