The passing of the patrician South

National Review, April 21, 1997 by Reid Buckley

AMONG the characteristics of a patrician society are reverence for tradition, a prickly sense of honor, pride of family, disdain for riches, and a tolerance for -- a glorying in -- eccentricity.

On these five counts the sorrowful conclusion must be that the South is becoming less itself with each passing day.

The difference between the Yankee and Southern nations used to be as dramatic as stopping at a gas station in the Alleghenies and again for a fill-up somewhere below Baltimore; between the greasy-locked lout across the Susquehanna who churlishly stuffed pump nozzle into gas funnel without deigning a spoken grunt beyond "Fill 'er up?" and the affable Chesapeake Bay native who chatted while the gas pelted into the tank, "Fine evenin, ain't it? You folks travelin far? My, that's a fine-lookin . . . that's a caniche, ain't it? My ont had one. Smart! That dog could tell you when the mailbox was full and when it warn't wuth the trouble to look inside." And so forth until the cap was screwed carefully back on, change made, and many thanks and wishes for a safe journey extended.

A self-service pump stands there today.

For the past quarter-century I have called Camden, South Carolina, my home. Our family ties to the town go back nearly three-score years. Camden is the oldest inland city in the state, the head of navigation, rich in its Revolutionary, Mexican, and Civil War history. Founded in 1737 by Col. James Kershaw, the hamlet prospered and, though populated by as tough and resilient a frontier breed as any in the lore of this New World, grew in civility. Some attribute this civility to the influence of the French planter sons from Charleston, but it is as easily attributable to an innate gentility that continues to distinguish 10th- and 11th-generation descendants of the pioneer Boykins, Canteys, Langs, and Whitakers. Traditions were quick in accreting and were at once cherished. Equal in importance to upholding the honor of name and family were good manners and a good-humored disdain for life and property. The second they held cheap, the first dear, and so risked it in deadly contests of honor.

Dueling was frequent. The story is told in the privately published Historic Camden, by Thomas J. Kirkland and Robert M. Kennedy (1926), of a meeting on the field of honor between Colonel James P. Dickinson and Major John Smart, described as crack shots. According to Kirkland - Kennedy, "Two fires were exchanged and neither hit. [Major] Smart being the challenger was therefore asked according to code rules: 'Are you satisfied?' 'Disgusted,' he replied -- a response," the authors note, "whose jocularity . . . ended hostility."

A duel devastating to the town took place in 1881 between Colonels Cash and Shannon, the much-beloved Shannon being killed. The outcry induced the South Carolina legislature to incriminate dueling, which was probably a good thing, but the town of Camden was nevertheless sundered sixty years in the aftermath of the Cash -Shannon meeting, descendants of the two families declining to appear under the same roof until the wedding of my eldest sister, Aloise, in 1941.

TO a Northerner, such ancient rifts are the stuff of cheap theater. Southerners are indeed open to the criticism of nurturing in the soul un-Christian antagonisms. We are narrow, provincial, and uncommonly prone to violence, and for these vices we are frequently despised.

Our long memories of the Civil War are similarly ridiculed by sophisticated folk, to whom the emotional attachment to a dryrotted lost cause is incomprehensible. But this is because there is no Yankee breed surviving from that bloody conflict in the sense that there exists still a Southern breed. No Yankee ever subsisted on chickenhead soup, nor, had he, would the alien inheritors of his sacrifice remember, or care. Waves of immigration have largely replaced the Northern stock of the 1860s. Not many New Yorkers or New Englanders or even, I venture, Ohioans claim descent from the Army of the Potomac, but seed of those who fought with Lee and Jackson in the Army of Northern Virginia abound. But this is passing.

There is a sharpening controversy in South Carolina over the flying of the Stars and Bars above the capitol dome. It has been simmering for at least 12 years and is now at boil. Blacks declare that to them the Stars and Bars is the banner of oppression. Remarkable about this dispute is -- first -- the ignorance of Southerners, white and black. Only in the past two or three years has the distinction been drawn on television and in the press between the Stars and Bars, the battle stand-ard of the Confederacy, and the Confederacy's true emblem, the Bonnie Blue Flag. A primitive redneck element has captured the Stars and Bars and elevated it less in remembrance of the valor of the men who fought under its colors than in blatant display of their (the rednecks') desperate bigotry.

The second remarkable thing about the controversy is the diehard reluctance to take the flag down on the part of even educated white South Carolinians, betraying a loss of the aristocratic instinct. The dispute -- it seems to me -- is settled as simply as this. If I put up a sign that my neighbor finds offensive, common courtesy requires that I oblige his sensibilities.