An Altered Stand

The Legacy of the Civil War, by Robert Penn Warren. Random House, $2.75 The Legacy of the Civil War is a curious book to come from an author who began his career with John Brown: the Making of a Martyr and followed this with one of the most eloquent essays in the symposium I’ll Take My Stand. A first impression could be that he had deserted what he knows (because no man, with the possible exception of Faulkner, has the South more in his bones than Robert Penn Warren) for the superficialities of modern Liberalism. This reviewer was amazed to find passages sounding almost like Mrs. Roosevelt: “Everyone agrees that the chronic poverty and social retardation of the South, have, in fact, been a national liability….” Again, there is sarcastic reference to the “constitutional theorizing” of a Southern governor. These things we expect from the more imperceptive leftwing journals; We do not expect them from a writer who was able to create the complexity that is Willie Stark and present the tangle of motivation that appears in Brother to Dragons.

Not all of the book is thus suggestive of the current crusade against the South. The author explores the theme of common guilt as expressed in the facts occurring both before and after the great military collision. But when he sums up the South’s sin as reliance upon the “Great Alibi” and the North’s as belief in its “Treasury of Virtue,” we are back in the language of journalistic formulation. Moreover, the fact is hardly unique; no defeated people can go on living without an explanation of that defeat; and without a theory that virtue was on its side, no victorious people can well avail itself of the fruits of the victory. The real nature of the legacy of the Civil War is therefore still to seek; but a fault of the book is that it may tend to freeze discussion at this level.

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Richard M. Weaver

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The Legacy of the Civil War, by Robert Penn Warren. Random House, $2.75 The Legacy of the Civil War is a curious book to come from an author who began his career with John Brown: the Making of a Martyr and followed this with one of the most eloquent essays in the symposium I’ll Take My Stand. A first impression could be that he had deserted what he knows (because no man, with the possible exception of Faulkner, has the South more in his bones than Robert Penn Warren) for the superficialities of modern Liberalism. This reviewer was amazed to find passages sounding almost like Mrs. Roosevelt: “Everyone agrees that the chronic poverty and social retardation of the South, have, in fact, been a national liability….” Again, there is sarcastic reference to the “constitutional theorizing” of a Southern governor. These things we expect from the more imperceptive leftwing journals; We do not expect them from a writer who was able to create the complexity that is Willie Stark and present the tangle of motivation that appears in Brother to Dragons.

Not all of the book is thus suggestive of the current crusade against the South. The author explores the theme of common guilt as expressed in the facts occurring both before and after the great military collision. But when he sums up the South’s sin as reliance upon the “Great Alibi” and the North’s as belief in its “Treasury of Virtue,” we are back in the language of journalistic formulation. Moreover, the fact is hardly unique; no defeated people can go on living without an explanation of that defeat; and without a theory that virtue was on its side, no victorious people can well avail itself of the fruits of the victory. The real nature of the legacy of the Civil War is therefore still to seek; but a fault of the book is that it may tend to freeze discussion at this level.