Down memory lane: nostalgia for the Old South in Post-Civil War plantation reminiscences.

NOSTALGIA, AS A FORM OF MEMORY, IS AN INTEGRAL PART OF OUR everyday world; its presence is indisputable. But like memory, nostalgia is an evasive concept of often-ambiguous meanings. Perhaps we should begin by asking: What exactly is nostalgia? Or maybe the first question really should be: What exactly was nostalgia? Are we nostalgic for people, places, specific points in time, or simply the past as precedent? Questions of this sort invite historical study, but they have, at best, aroused only limited interest. Such a stance is curious given that a detailed examination of nostalgia could advance understanding of the history of memory and the ways individuals have used historical material to define and understand themselves, issues that have been the vanguard of recent research in southern history.

With its Greek roots--nostos (a longing to return home) and algos (pain)--nostalgia sounds so familiar to us that we may forget that it is a relatively new word. It was used first by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer, who in 1688 described a lethal malady among Swiss mercenaries serving abroad. Desperate to return home, the soldiers became apathetic and weak, lost both sleep and their appetites, and then, crestfallen, died. The "emotional upheaval" of serving abroad was "related to the workings of memory" and was reckoned to be "'a disorder of the imagination."' In effect, the stricken Swiss opted out of the seventeenth century by screening out the world around them. By the nineteenth century, however, nostalgia began to shed its medical connotations and became less a bodily and more a psychological condition. (2) It also went from being a treatable illness to a terminal condition of the mind, its new meaning suggestive of a long-ago but half-remembered time as opposed to a yearning to return to a specific place. (3)

Moreover, the nostalgically remembered past stood against me present and thus invited comparison. The former was made into a spectacle that was beautiful, bearing little or no relation to the ugly latter. In effect, nostalgia makes the past feel "safe from the unexpected and the untoward"--in other words, making it so very unlike the present. (4) Rather than remembering precisely what was, we tend to make the past comprehensible in relation to the present conditions of the here and now. "Memory is the great organizer of consciousness," writes Susanne K. Langer. Memories of people, scenes, and events that were previously vague or conflicted metamorphose into obvious and consistent recollections. Memory, continues Langer, "simplifies and composes our perceptions...." (5) Essentially memory may operate to alter the past we have known and experienced into an imagined past that is a stranger to us and nothing more than a might-have-been.

For a brief theoretical formulation on this point of view we might turn to the sociologist Fred Davis. In Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, Davis argues that nostalgia is unlike other types of recollection because of the "'special' past" that it envelops. Happy memories are placed on a pedestal whereas unhappy memories are knocked off theirs, and we think hard before picking them up, dusting them down, and putting them back again. This has, according to Davis, an insidious effect because the diversity of the past is thus suppressed. However, although nostalgia draws its strength from the past, it is unmistakably a product of the present. (6) Nostalgia, contends Davis, always appears against the backdrop of "massive identity dislocations," in periods of "'rude transitions rendered by history," in times of fear in the face of electrifying change, and at those transitional points in life when anxiety or, as Svetlana Boym calls it, a "hypochondria of the heart," is felt. (7)

Any "untoward historic events" that tear into the fabric of a society, disrupt its taken-for-granted attitudes and practices, and cut short the very "lungs of culture" in which "people ... breathe the air of significance" place that society's connection with its history under pressure. (8) Confronted with these "explosive upheavals," we are "driven like tumbleweed before the buffeting winds of change and upheaval." (9) Hence, the desire "to preserve [a] thread of continuity is ... crucial.... [E]verything contradictory threatens to undermine what has been so patiently built up." Nostalgia looks to alleviate this condition by exploiting "the past ... in specially reconstructed ways." In doing so, nostalgia "cultivate[s]" an "appreciative" stance toward "former selves," it "acts to restore ... a sense of sociohistoric continuity," and it allows "time for ... change to be assimilated," restoring confidence and imparting meaningful links with the past. (10) In other words, nostalgia sweetens history with sentiment, its iconography of praise is constant, and it is accustomed to remember more romantically than historically.

Taking my cue from Davis's emphasis and a recent essay by Peter Fritzsche, this essay will argue that nostalgia occurs most forcibly after a profound split in remembered events and experiences. (11) To frame my argument. I will concentrate largely on that "remarkable literature" of postbellum memoirs and on the use of autobiographical writing as a kind of trip down memory lane, literary strategies that reveal a potent change in elite white southern consciousness after the Civil War. (12) By acknowledging the fundamental reality of difference--of instability and discontinuity in their experience--white southern elites posited themselves in a constant state of flux. Indeed, continuity itself had become unintelligible in a postwar world that was deemed permanently out of sorts. It was, however, the very impurities of memory--its fallibility, its fragility, and its proclivity for mythmaking--that proved, paradoxically, to be redemptive by permitting the literary assertion of a nostalgic continuity back to an amaranthine Old South and by allowing southern memoirists to use that setting to form their own individual and collective sense of identity in a new era. (13)

Well-known figures such as Susan Dabney Smedes, James Battle Avirett, Virginia Clay-Clopton, and several other elite white southerners flooded the literary market with autobiographical literature in which they recorded memories of prewar plenty through wartime privation to postwar ruin. Early memoirs were usually written as keepsakes for family members and were published privately. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, plantation reminiscences had assumed regional, national, and even international popularity. (14) Nostalgic pages of flowery prose revealed a lavish Old South of immense wealth, self-sufficiency, honor, hospitality, happy master-slave relations, and, incredibly, the scents and sounds of innocent plantation upbringings remembered in old age. Nostalgia was so compelling in this regard because the wholeness of a blissful antebellum past was denied to the wretched postbellum present. "In other words," writes Fritzsche, "nostalgia constitutes what it cannot possess and defines itself by its inability to approach its subject, a paradox that is the essence of nostalgia's melancholia." Although memories of the Old South were treasured and its passing lamented, there was no hope that it was retrievable in any tangible sense--except through nostalgic recollection. "Dead and yet to memory dear," mourned James B. Avirett. "But the heart in the old life," he continued, "shall never fade away." (15) Echoing Avirett's vision of a Peter Pan South, one that was forever young, Georgian Edward J. Thomas took comfort in the fact that "the home plantation ... will always have a warm place in my memory." Thomas pined for yesterday: "As time passes how vividly is reflected from Memory's mirror the stirring events of those historic years," he wrote. However illusory Thomas's plantation experience actually was, it was latched onto and nostalgically recalled in memory. The far-reaching process of devastation wrought by the Civil War served only to cruelly emphasize an ever-widening chasm between the past and present. (16)

The summer of 1865 was the South's moment of fundamental historical disjuncture. Thrust into an alien, unpredictable world, southerners felt a loss of historical continuity--a loss of sameness and wholeness--as the price of defeat. (17) Only through an awareness of this discontinuity of experience, in which past and present were conspicuous by their differences, could nostalgia express itself. A profound sense of discontinuity beleaguered Mary Boykin Chesnut's world. According to a biographer, she told a story predominantly "of grief, anguish, pessimism, and anxiety." Mary spent the last three months of the war "as a refugee ... in makeshift quarters first at Lincolnton, North Carolina, then at Chester, South Carolina." Together with her husband James, she returned to the family plantation, Mulberry, in May 1865 only to discover the estate pillaged, with the mills, gins, and cotton all burned, the house a vacant shell, the furniture smashed, all of the doors and many of the windows broken, and the family's books, papers, and letters blown about the road for miles. Reconciling in her mind the circumstances of the world in which she now lived, Mary wrote her friend Virginia Clay, "there are nights here with the moonlight cold & ghastly, & the whippoorwills, & the screech owls alone disturbing the silence when I could tear my hair & cry aloud for all that is past & gone." (18)

To be sure, one should not gainsay the cataclysmic impact of the Civil War on southern perceptions of historical continuity. Experiences were often recalled in highly personal terms that served to emphasize, if emphasis was needed, the individual effects of malevolent historical forces. (19) History, in effect, was regarded as a complete disaster. (20) Elizabeth Pendleton Hardin of Kentucky expressed "hope [that] I may never again love anything as I loved the cause that is lost." Leaving Eatonton, Georgia, to return to Kentucky in early June 1865, Hardin and her family shouted "Hurrah for Jeff Davis and the Southern Confederacy" as they waved good-bye to their Georgian friends. "We had been there two years and a hall, watching with unfaltering hope our struggle for independence and life," wrote Hardin in her diary, "and now that our hopes had all come to naught, we returned to our homes with sad hearts, feeling we had left the brightest part of our lives behind us." (21)

Indeed, what set apart postwar southern society, as Suzanne Nash notes about post-revolutionary France in ways that resonate with the nineteenth-century South, was that southerners viewed the region in terms of "what it ha[d] lost" as well as "in terms of the solidity of its foundations." (22) In this light, writing a memoir clearly meant not just recalling individual lives but also re-evaluating what those lives had meant in wider contexts. Although a thick air of haughtiness and self-importance tends to surround these memoirs and reminiscences, they nevertheless returned their authors to the vibrant days of the Old South while simultaneously recognizing that the lives being described would have been completely different in the absence of the war. Something immense had happened: the passing of a cherished civilization and the passing of the certainty of what it meant to be southern. "Who am I?" is, after all, one of our most emotional expressions of identity.

Again and again, southern elites articulated the unprecedented force of events between 1861 and 1865. "[I]t was a time of great anxiety and pressure upon us all," noted John Jones, a Georgia planter, in a letter to his sister. "[A]ll that we were seemed to be passing away," he remarked. Condemned to brood over her reversal of fortune and reflect on "what if" questions, Sarah Lois Wadley felt she now inhabited a life devoid of meaning. "[I] woke this morning very sorrowful," she wrote unhappily in November 1865, "to find that my vivid dreams were only dreams of the past which can never return." (23) But dreams die hard; we hold on to them in our hands long after they have turned to dust. "The props that held society up are broken," wrote Eliza Frances Andrews in her War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl. She constantly reiterated: "Everything is in a state of disorganization and tumult.... We are in a transition state from war to subjugation, and it is far worse than was the transition from peace to war. The suspense and anxiety in which we live are terrible." (24)

Few have provided a more evocative portrayal of the aftermath of the Civil War than Mary Jones, the widow of a prominent Presbyterian minister of Liberty County, Georgia. As the former plantation matriarch pondered the ruined grandeur of the family plantation, Montevideo, she was filled with ominous forebodings regarding an uncertain future. Jones contrasted the plantation she had known with the plantation Montevideo had become. "The pall of death is ... over our once cheerful and happy home," she mourned. "Not a living creature stirs in garden or yard, on the plain or in the grove. Nature wears a funereal aspect ... a requiem to departed days." (25) In those distressing days, alone and recovering from the ordeal of a Union raid, Jones sought solace in recalling a happier past to defy time's destroyer. "Memory's buried stones lie all exhumed before my eye," she lamented. She found consolation only in the great trees that survived. "These living memorials remain, but the hands that placed them there are moldering where 'no work nor device is found.' ... The servants that used so faithfully and pleasantly to wait around us are (many of them) dead or scattered or sadly and willfully changed. All things are altered." (26)

What is most evident in Jones's memory upon her return to Montevideo is a nostalgia not only for a particular time and place but also for a particular kind of memory, one that would allow her to re-establish a sense of continuity with a discontinuous past. It was just insofar that these memories were forever fenced off that they beckoned so emotively and so forcefully to her contemporary self. It was not insignificant, then, that she treasured her memories; they spoke powerfully to her for a sorrow that was profound, chronic, and all but unbearably distressing. The South had breathed its last fearing the worst: Eden had become Hell.

"All things are altered" could well serve as the signature phrase of the postwar South. "To me it seems as if I had been in two worlds, and two existences," sighed E. Spann Hammond, "the old and the new, and to those knowing only the latter, the old will appear almost like mythology and romance, so thorough has been the upheaval and obliteration of the methods and surroundings of the past." (27) Like Hammond, Virginian Sara A. Pryor expressed, behind fears of historical displacement after the war, a haunting nostalgia that drove deep into the mists of a vanished world. "We found it almost impossible to take up our lives again," she wailed. "All the cords binding us to the past were severed, beyond the hope of reunion. We sat silently looking out on a landscape marked here and there by chimneys standing sentinel over blackened heaps, where our neighbors bad made happy homes." Edward J. Thomas's nostalgia served as a counterweight to bewildering change. "I may say I lived in two distinct periods of our Southern history, for this war completely severed the grand old plantation life, with all its peculiar interests and demands, from the stirring and striving conditions that followed." The Georgian awoke each morning to the irresistible serenade of the sweet sounds from the past only to be snatched back by the disrespectful roar from the ominous present. "The first was a life complete in all things to foster intelligence and honor; the second simply, for me, a constant struggle and a hard fight to keep the proverbial wolf from the door." (28)

What these southerners expressed was nostalgia for the old given the reality of the new. With the passing of the Old South the history of their region was increasingly examined as two eras, forever separated by the Civil War. Like Sara Pryor and Mary Jones, John Randolph Tucker was no longer synchronous with his time. Expressing his worries to the 1887 graduating class of South Carolina College, he declared: "You look to a future--a new future; I to the past--the old past. Have they no nexus? Is the New South cut off from the Old South? Is the past of our Southern land to be buried, and the new era to forget and wholly discard its memories, its ideas, and its principles?" (29)

Tucker's fears were not mere dramatic flourish; indeed the only thing he looked forward to was the past. His burial theme was fitting for it encapsulated a tangible awareness of the distance between then and now. As all from the war generation knew, that mighty conflict taught the lesson well. The editor Walter Hines Page wrote in his pseudonymous novel The Southerner that the war gave every survivor of it "the intensest experience of his life, and ever afterwards he referred every other experience to this. Thus it stopped the thought of most of them as an earthquake stops a clock. The fierce blow of battle paralyzed the mind." Mark Twain sarcastically noted the obsession as well. "In the South," he opined in Life on the Mississippi, "the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it." (30)

To be sure, the Civil War served to emphasize feelings of discontinuity. "Lines of rupture preoccupied the Western imagination," writes Fritzsche, "to such an extent that the past turned into a problem of knowledge and became a source of disquiet, a nagging, unmasterable presence of absence." This "memory crisis," to use Richard Terdiman's provocative phrase, indicated a deep-seated heartache over the disappearance of the past. For postwar white southern elites this "memory crisis" manifested itself with a rapidly growing resolve to recall the Old South through memory. Even though the grace and finery of antebellum times had passed, the era could at least be represented through nostalgic recall; a phoenix had been found for the flames. "The old South was ploughed under," wrote Henry Miller in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. "But the ashes are still warm." (31)

Certainly by the 1880s, southern memoirs and reminiscences began to make their impact on the literary market. Obligatory was a suitable preamble to the reading public to justify their publication. To that end, most postwar reminiscences began with a common strategy; a warning to future generations against the dangers of forgetting or misremembering the past. Mrs. N. B. De Saussure of South Carolina, writing in 1909, expressed it clearly in a memoir published for her granddaughter. "The South as I knew it has disappeared," she admitted solemnly. "You can only know the New South. but there is a generation, now passing away, which holds in loving memory the South as it used to be." Pleading with her granddaughter, she continued: "Those memories are a legacy to the new generation from the old, and it behooves the old to hand them down to the new." In contrasting the Old South with the New--"the happy plantation days, the recollection of which causes my heart to throb again with youthful pleasure" against "the dreadful days, of war and fire and famine"--the author chose to bequeath to her grandchild the "spirit of those early days." (32)

During a stay with her sister Emmeline Dabney Greene soon after their father's death, Mississippian Susan Dabney Smedes "conceived the idea of writing a memorial" to him. "[B]owed down" with grief, she "was so possessed with the love of his memory" that she decided to preserve it, for "his life should not pass away from his grandchildren, many of whom are yet too young to appreciate his character." (33) "They [the grandchildren] will hear much of the wickedness of slavery and of slave-owners," bemoaned Smedes. "I wish them to learn of a good master: of one who cared for his servants affectionately.., and with a full sense of his responsibility. There were many like him." Thomas Smith Gregory Dabney, progressive in the way he ran his plantation and in the way he treated his bondpeople by encouraging them to learn to read and write, was a model planter, the form from whom legends are made; by throwing "a kindly light on Southern masters," such a legend was primed. (34)

Smedes published Memorials of a Southern Planter in 1887, and it won immediate favor with the reading public. (35) The volume afforded a new generation of southerners a firsthand glimpse of their antebellum civilization in all its crystalline purity. A distant relative of John d'Aubigne, a Huguenot whose own descendants exceeded six thousand, Thomas Dabney was a cousin to most of the Old Dominion aristocrats of the period. Smedes recalled her father's early life at his ancestral Tidewater estate, Elmington, in Gloucester County, Virginia. His existence there "was the ideal life of a Virginia gentleman." The plantation house "was of red brick, quaint and old-fashioned in design" and was built "near the water's edge." "The lapping of the waves of the incoming tide was a sweet lullaby to the quiet scene, as the eye rested on the greensward of the lawn, or took in the bend of the river that made a broad sweep just below the Elmington garden." Gloucester County, we are told, "had been settled by the best class of English people" who "brought to their homes in the New World the customs and manners of the Old." Everybody there "kept open house," and "entertaining was a matter of course, anything and everything was made the occasion of a dinner-party." (36) Dabney's lifestyle bespoke elegance. He was "never an early riser" and "maintained that it did not so much matter when a man got up as what he did after he was up. "(37)

The Dabney family felt very close to their slaves and had "great affection" for the household servants, a feeling that was "warmly returned by the negroes." So "sacred" was the "bond between master and servant," insisted Smedes, that they were as "close as the tie of blood." Thus, before the Dabneys moved to Hinds County, Mississippi (some forty miles east of Vicksburg), Thomas called his slaves together, told them of his plans, and explained that he did not wish "to take one unwilling servant with him." Nor did he propose to break up any marriages. "Everything should be made to yield to the important consideration of keeping families together," he asserted. "Without an exception," Smedes wrote, "the negroes determined to follow their beloved master and mistress." Echoing the works of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, Smedes left it to the redoubtable Mammy Harriet to offer comment on the move: "Master was good all de time. He do all he could to comfort he people. When he was gittin' ready to move ... he call "era all up, an' tell 'era dat he did not want anybody to foller him who was not willin'.... Ebery one o' he own, and all who b'long to de odder members o' de fambly who was wid him, say dey want to loller him,.... Our people say, '... Ef you got a good marster, foller him."' (38) Smedes effectively presented a glowing portrait of the Old South that gave her readers an understanding of plantation life that contrasted with the imagery of the slaveholder popularized by such works as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation.

John S. Wise, representative from Virginia, understood the impact of the Civil War on southern conceptions of historical continuity. "Thus passed away the happy days of childhood," he reflected, "days unlike those which come to any boy anywhere nowadays; days belonging to a phase of civilization and a manner of life which are as extinct as if they had never existed. Yet in those times, but nine years before war and emancipation came, there was no thought that either was near at hand. " (39) Wise, who participated in the Battle of New Market during the Civil War and subsequently became a lieutenant in the Confederate army, carved out a political career for himself in Virginia. Not surprisingly, his memoir, The End of an Era, glorified the Confederacy. "One who loves you wrote this story," he wrote, "one who was your comrade in the fight we lost; one who has no word of blame for you, but, on the contrary, believes that we had every provocation to fight; one who, as long as he lives, will glory in the way we fought, and is proud of his own scars, and teaches his children to believe that the record of Confederate valor is a priceless heritage." (40)

Wise's sentiments would find many an echo. As a dedicated guardian of the Old South's memory, he carefully described the paternalistic qualities of the old planter class: "Were not the negroes perfectly content and happy? Had I not often talked to them on the subject? Had not every one of them told me repeatedly that they loved 'old Marster' better than anybody in the world, and would not have freedom if he offered it to them?.... Of course they had," answered Wise, in a sentiment that may also be found in the soul-searching recollections of other memoirists. Wise's story--of course--ended unhappily when he realized he was chronicling "the death of that era--a death which begun with my birth, and was complete before 1 attained manhood." But Wise surely had to recognize of that old way of life that, as novelist Nigel Dennis reminds us in a different context, "A whole world lived in relation to it. Millions knew who they were by reference to it. Hundreds of thousands look back to it, and not only grieve for its passing but still depend on it ... to tell them who they are. Thousands who never knew it are taught ... to cherish its memory and to believe that without it no man will be able to tell his whereabouts again." (41)

Like John Wise's writings, the distinguishing tone of the Reverend Robert Q. Mallard's 1892 memoir, Plantation Life before Emancipation, is melancholic, waving farewell to the departed days of yesteryear. Mallard, son-in-law of the Reverend Charles Colcock Jones of Liberty County, Georgia, was a stalwart supporter of the slave regime who penned his memoir "for a fuller vindication of the memory of our ancestors." His objectives were "to portray a civilization now obsolete" and to highlight a relationship "of mutual attachment and kindness" that "bound together master and servant." He hoped this would give "future generations some correct idea of the noble work done by Southern masters and mistresses of all denominations for the salvation of the slave." (42) Indeed, Mallard found his "memories of that connection" to be "of almost unmixed pleasure." Satisfied that his "representation will be recognized by the well-informed as a fair average picture of the conduct of the entire South," Mallard often mixed a feeling of pride in with his mournful apologia, showing the delight of having taken part and lived in the antebellum South "of the grand old moss-covered live oaks, for which that region was and is noted." (43) With an ever-present affectionate leave-taking of the Old South, postwar white southerners continued in their nostalgic pageant of a discontinued past.

In 1895 Letitia M. Burwell published A Girl's Life in Virginia before the War for her nieces in order to counteract the negative imagery "applied to their ancestors." She felt her young relatives would "naturally recoil with horror" from such opprobrious epithets as "cruel slave-owners," "inhuman wretches," "southern taskmasters," and "dealers in human souls." "My own life," admitted the Virginian, "would have been embittered had I believed myself to be descended from such monsters." The product of some nine generations of Virginians who owned plantations, Burwell wished "to leave a record of plantation life as it was." Realizing that the times she recorded had "passed" and the "old homes [were] long deserted," the author found it difficult "[t]o recall these scenes" that "so blinds my eyes with tears that I cannot write of them. Some griefs leave the heart dumb." Indeed, her tender memories of Grove Plantation were tempered by "the shadows [that] began to fall dark and chill upon this once bright and happy home." To emphasize what had come and gone, "pleasant reminiscences [with ex-slaves] were generally concluded with: 'Ah! young misses, you'll nuver see sich times. No more postilions! No more coach an' four! And niggers drives now widout white gloves. Ah! no, young misses, you'll nuver see nothin'! Nuver in your time.'" "With these melancholy predictions," Burwell wrote, the faithful servant would "shake his head, and sigh that the days of glory had departed." Burwell had seen the Old South slain before her very eyes. "[T]he forms of dusky friends," she mourned, "who once shared our homes, our fireside, our affections" were "in the past, never more." (44) Burwell's writing exhibits an intense pathos, for she inhabited a world whose people appear to have known only one emotion--an all-consuming sense of loss. In those distressing days during the war, when "Another and still another of these noble youths fell after deeds of heroic valor," Burwell recalled her father's transgression into a happier past. "[S]hattered by grief," he "continued day after day, for several years, to sit in the vine-covered porch, gazing wistfully out, imagining sometimes that he saw in the distance the manly forms of his sons, returning home, mounted on their favorite horses, in the gray uniforms worn the day they went off." Burwell too found solace in summoning a happier past before the war. "Confined exclusively to a Virginia plantation during my earliest childhood," she wrote, "I believed the world one vast plantation bounded by negro quarters." This, she continued, "formed the only pictures familiar to my childhood." Burwell's Old South was a region of romance, remembered as a world of laughter, music, dancing, parties, and weddings. Slaves "[a]ll were merry-hearted, and among them I never saw a discontented face." "All plantation reminiscences resemble a certain patchwork.., of bright pieces joined with black squares," she noted. "The black squares were not pretty, but if left out the character of the quilt was lost. And so with the black faces--if left out of our home pictures of the past, the character of the picture is destroyed." Readers of Burwell's memoir could join her in recalling with fondness a nostalgic southern past of easy race relations. "What I have written," reflected the author, "is a simple record of facts in my experience, without an imaginary scene or character .... The pictures are strictly true; and should it be thought by any that the brightest have alone been selected, I can only say I knew no others." (45) Nostalgia had waved a magic wand over Hell; the lost world of Eden began to remake itself.

Viewed collectively, these portrayals invoked the past in terms of dignity and greatness. Belle Kearney, future suffragist, state legislator, and Mississippi temperance reformer, was born "The 6th of March [1863] ... on the plantation at Vernon.... just two months and six days too late for me to be a Constitutional slaveholder." (46) Kearney grew up at Vernon Heights, the family's sumptuous Greek Revival home in Madison County, Mississippi, and often took annual trips to the Gulf Coast that were, according to Kearney, "heralded by outriders blowing bugles to announce the family's approach." The Civil War financially ruined Kearney's parents however, neither of them knowing "how to work, nor how to manage so as to make a dollar....(47) Much of the plantation was lost, and as a result of the familial reversal of fortune Kearney had to quit school because her father could not afford to pay the five dollars per month for tuition. (48)

As things went from bad to worse, Kearney saw Mississippi "dismantled and dishonored" then insulted with the "attendant terrors" of Reconstruction. (49) Planters were in "throes of readjustment": "uncertain" times indeed. "The land which had been celebrated for its prosperity was the habitation of wrecks of human being and ruins of fortunes." The orderly society of the Old South was devastated, and "[c]rime swept like a prairie fire over communities," mourned Kearney. "All Southern hearts were smitten with desolation and gripped with the horror of despair.... All this and far more-unutterable...." (50) Kearney faced a stark choice--to be rooted in a valued past or perched in a worthless present. In fact, there was no choice at all; without the noble past of old, the present was nothing more than a meaningless void.

In her memoir, published in 1900 under the title A Slaveholder's Daughter, Kearney's opening epigraph repeated the lines of the Lost Cause poet, Father Abram J. Ryan: "A land without ruins is a land without memories ... a land without memories is a land without history." Given to mournful apologia with Gothic excess and clinging valiantly to the rural idyll, Kearney salvaged a history from the wreck of a world she did not inhabit. However, by summoning from her imagination to supplement memory, Kearney evoked a South "in its glory." Dixie before the war, relates Kearney, was an orderly society compared with the heinous aberration that followed the conflict: "Its social structure was simple, homogeneous," we are told. The "vast landed estates" were "owned by ten or twelve families.... The majority of his [Belle's father] neighbors were his relatives, the rest were personal friends. These constituted a congenial and delightful society." (51) In describing what she was able to glean from her parents' recollections, Kearney defined southern life in terms of finesse and sumptuousness, offering a meditation on the importance of retaining a living past, indeed of a certain obligation to do so. (52)

For Kearney, the gay society of the Old South offered inspiration as she sought to refashion her past into something altogether more suitable. Her father, for example, appears to have come straight out of Thomas Nelson Page's romanticized renderings of the Old South: "Father was a fine type of Southern gentleman of the old regime; in person, tall, slender, well-proportioned, blue-eyed, brown-haired, with delicate, clear cut features, and noble expression; cultured, high-bred, courtly; full of an intense family pride--brave, generous, chivalrous." Similarly, Kearney cherished fond memories of her mother and depicted her and other southern women as examples of beauty, grace, and learning. "Ladies of wealth and position," we are told, "were surrounded by refinements and luxury. They had their maids and coachmen and a retinue of other servants. " (53) Strict ceremonies governed the social and cultural life on the plantation: "There was a time-honored social routine from which they seldom varied; a decorous exchange of visits, elaborate dinings and other interchanges of dignified courtesies." Moreover, "[e]very entertainment was punctilious, strongly suggestive of colonial gatherings." (54) Kearney succeeded in returning the reader to a static past unchanged by the passage of time.

Postwar white southern elites faced a Herculean task of reproducing their world from the scattered fragments of a shattered past. The New South would require a new past. Take, for example, Thomas Nelson Page's silver-tongued panegyric to the Old South, an essay entitled "Social Life in Old Virginia before the War." His essay begins with an account of Oakland, his childhood plantation home, which exuded an aura "enthroned in perpetual tranquillity." Through the dazzling magnetism of his idyllic descriptions, every one of which developed the same theme--faithful slaves selflessly saving their masters from a Yankee onslaught--Page had his readers drunk on his every word, until they too shared his nostalgic intoxication. He needed no tutorials on defining the South: for him, it was crystal clear. The Old South was a civilization of "the purest, sweetest life ever lived." "It has passed from the earth," mourned Page, "but it has left its benignant influence behind it to sweeten and sustain its children. The ivory palaces have been destroyed, but myrrh, aloes, and cassia still breathe amid their dismantled ruins." (55)

On these margins, nostalgic memories flowed. The nostalgic current in James Battle Avirett's The Old Plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin Before the Welt', published in 1901, is one of obvious poignancy as he guides us through the South in order "to rescue from oblivion the story of the old plantation life." With forever the backward glance, he warned that "It is now to many people very nebulous, and will soon become so very misty as to be mythical." Avirett hoped that if the mists were blown away a clear vision of the South would prevail. "We older Southern people are proud of and thankful for the blessed days of the old South," he noted. "We will endeavor to teach our offspring to cherish the memories and emulate the virtues of the antebellum civilization. Full well we know that no portion of human history has been more ignorantly misunderstood or painfully misjudged than the slaveholding era of the South." (56)

Avirett dedicated his memoir "to the memory of the old planter and his wife," and the former Confederate clergyman told of his life on his family's turpentine plantation in Onslow County, North Carolina, during the 1850s. In painting a pastoral life for himself, his family, and their slaves, Avirett could claim that he lived in the "happy social conditions" that "existed in the old South on the old plantation" and nonetheless feel he was not distorting the truth too much. "The old South was essentially a people of plantations," he said. It was "the most attractive feature of our life--the strength and the charm were in the country." Appropriately aggrandized and romanticized by a sense of loss, Avirett's plantation ideal supported the notion of historical discontinuity. "Alas, alas, these blessed lights have gone out forever, and the darkness following is so great as to blind with tears the eyes, rapidly misting over, of the author as he pens these lines. Hail and farewell, blessed ones of the past! Hail and farewell!" (57)

Avirett's pathos was clearly exaggerated. In this instance, however, the Civil War was not responsible for the disintegration of his plantation world. A suspicious fire destroyed the plantation house in 1851, and six years later, in serious financial difficulties, Avirett's father was forced to sell his land. It was but a short step to grieve at the plantation's passing. Although Avirett's "old plantation life, as stored away in the cells of memory," was a mendacity, he pulled back into this southern Arcadia to shake his fist at the destiny that fortune had dealt him. (58) "All that is left" of the old days, he mourned, "is for the most part sadly reminiscent." Appealing to a deep nostalgia nourished by an overwhelming sense of loss, Avirett wept for "the actors in those charming scenes" who "have passed off the stage." He took comfort from the fact that "only a very few of us are left to chafe under the unhappy changes which a hybrid civilization has brought on. Eating no dirt, spitting no fire, we still hold our colors firmly in our hand, and are yet enabled to cry out: 'Let fate do her worst, there are relics of joy, / Bright dreams of the past, which she cannot destroy."' (59

But if whole years were to be lost in the blink of an eye, then the vanished civilization worshipped by Avirett and his ilk was not to be forgotten. Indeed, by the time Virginia Clay-Clopton of Alabama published A Belle of the Fifties in 1905, the volume was simply bolstering standard Old South plantation mythology. Born into an elite southern family and married to influential Alabama senator Clement C. Clay Jr., Virginia Clay inhabited the highest political and social echelons of Washington in the 1850s. In describing the almost bacchanalian festivities in the capital during the decade before the war, the narrative chronicles antebellum times through secession and war to the immediate aftermath of defeat. Unsurprisingly, mention of the plantation South features prominently. "My memories would be incomplete," she penned, "were I to fail to include in them a description of plantation life that may be taken as a type of the beautiful homes of the South in that long ago before the Civil War." During the closing months of the Civil War, Virginia spent some time at Redcliffe, the magnificent estate of James H. Hammond of South Carolina. Redcliffe, we are told, grew not only cotton but also corn, wool, grapes, and other fruits. (60)

Virginia's nostalgic prose also emphasized a strong sense of continuity. "From Maryland to Louisiana there had reigned, since colonial times, an undisturbed, peaceful, prosperous democracy, based upon an institution beneficial alike to master and servant." The perceived destruction of that life in 1865 caused plantation romancers to compensate for its loss by describing it in terms even more unreal. "To paraphrase the nursery rhyme," mused Virginia, "the planter was in his counting-house counting out his money: his wife was in the parlour eating bread and honey: the man servant was by his master's side, the maid with her mistress, the meat-cook at his spit and the bread-cook at the marble block where the delicious beaten biscuit were made in plenty. (61) Such nostalgic overtones pervade her memoir.

Virginia's love for the region was unreserved, which emphasized her nostalgia and, perhaps, posed the problem of how to handle any biographical facts that might run counter to an unrelentingly positive depiction. In a glorified view of her family's past, for example, most pleasing was Walter Scott's reference in Marmion to "Brian Tunstall, stainless knight" in the company of the English gentry at Flodden Field, Northumberland, where invading Scots were defeated by the English in 1513; the Tunstalls of Virginia, to whom Virginia was related, were understood to be the progeny of Scott's "stainless knight." (62) As Aneurin Bevan warned us in In Place of Fear, however, ancestor worship of this sort is "the most conservative of all religions." (63) It certainly invited Virginia Clay-Clopton to take a sentimentally heroic view of her family's ancestors. Nevertheless, this kind of hand-clapping approach to genealogy was a prominent obsession in postwar memoirs and reminiscences, offering pride in the achievements (actual or imagined) of distant relations.

In 1904 Sara Rice Pryor published Reminiscences of Peace and War, a memoir similar in subject matter to A Belle of the Fifties. Sara's second memoir, My Day: Reminiscences of a Long Life, was published in 1909. Her friend LaSalle Corbell Pickett said that in these books Pryor gave "to the reading world beautiful pictures of the lights and shadows that had fallen over her life." (64) As a self-confessed "babbler of Reminiscences," Pryor particularly delighted in recalling her enchanting Virginia girlhood at Cedar Grove and Shrubbery Hill. (65) "Writers of Reminiscences are interested," noted Pryor, "in recalling their earliest sensations, and through them determining at what age they had 'found themselves'; i.e. become conscious of their own personality and relation to the world they had entered." It seems that for Pryor this was the case with her idyllic childhood where "in the early hot summer," she could remember being "sent forth to breathe the cool air of the morning. What a paradise of sweets met my senses!" The war, however, rudely interrupted. "Alas!" she wailed, "neither you nor I can ever again--except in fancy--cool our lips with the dew-washed fruits of an 'old Virginia' garden." (66) Indeed, among burning memories of defeat and loss happy-ever-after rarely happens. "I am afraid the evening is at hand," wrote Pryor in Reminiscences of Peace and War, "when we must bid adieu to the bright days.... The setting sun of such a day should pillow itself on golden clouds, bright harbingers of a morning of beauty and happiness. Alas, alas! 'whom the gods destroy they first infatuate."' (67) Pryor's ruined South was inescapable, and it served to remind her and her fellow southerners of the rift between the past and the present, of the widespread feelings of discontinuity that were a result of defeat after the Civil War.

Howard M. Hamill, adrift in a New South that was poles apart from the Old, also felt exiled in another time. "Here and there mansions of the old order of Southern aristocracy are standing in picturesque and melancholy ruin, as reminders of the splendor and luxury of the antebellum planter," he observed, in a comment similar to the flavor of many memoirs. As the unclear future hovered menacingly on the horizon, he looked back to an old familiar landscape and feared that the comforts of the past were vanishing before his very eyes. "A few months ago," he penned, "'I looked upon the partly dismantled columns of a once noble home of the Old South, about which there clustered thickly the memories of a great name and family which for generations had received the homage of the South.... As I looked and brooded over this ruin of a long-famous home, its glory all gone, its light and laughter dim and silent, I paid tribute to an aristocracy of wealth, pleasure-loving indeed ... one which, having freely received, freely gave of its abundance in a hospitality eclipsing that of any people whom the world has known." (68) His Old South was not dead, only sleeping. In a tangible sense, Hamill's memories ensured a life controlled by nostalgia.

In effect, Hamill's nostalgia encouraged him to gloss over any variant memories he may have had in order to fashion a more aesthetically complete and satisfying recollection of the Old South. Other elite southerners did the same. Elizabeth Lyle Saxon, for instance, acknowledged that her memory seemed distant and removed from her present self: "My memory seems a complete tangle of events .... and I can scarcely untangle the threads so crossed ..., and rendered dim by time." In her desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past, Mrs. T. P. O'Connor found that she could not rely on her "sieve-like memory." In a vein of quaint humor Caroline E. Merrick, a former plantation mistress from East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, recalled her father's proverbial wisdom, "Yes, I have a very bad memory--I remember what should be forgotten." (69) However, they all overcame these concerns and glossed over any imperfect recollections that there may have been.

O'Connor's "sieve-like memory" comment hints at a significant facet of nostalgic mythmaking: even when memories are clear and compelling there is still no warranty on the accuracy of recall. (70) Unbearable loss, then, painful as it may be, was thus transformed by nostalgic recollection into a beautiful form. Saluting the dead hand of the past, Charles Henry Smith wrote: "Oh, these memories, how sweet they haunt us." Never entirely free from the paralyzing touch of the past, the Georgia humorist knew it to be true that "The memories of the past grow sweeter as the years roll on.... [T]he treasure of age is memory." (71) In their memoirs and reminiscences white southern elites salvaged from remnants of the Old South only those elements that would best serve to form both individual and collective identities in the present. (72) Why dwell on a painful present when one can dwell on a painless past instead?

Mary Norcott Bryan, wife of Henry Ravenscroft Bryan, an attorney and judge in New Bern, North Carolina, published an account of the Tar Heel State from "the dear old Dixie days" through "the awful war and its attending miseries" to the "disgusting Reconstruction period." (73) Entitled A Grandmother's Recollection of Dixie, the forty-three-page memoir was written for the author's children. Mary urged her children to embrace the past and with it a sense of continuity that would stretch across generations. "First stands out in bold relief the delightful plantation life at Woodlawn," wrote Mary. "This phase of society is a thing of the past, and I grieve that you will never know the tender tie that existed between mistress and servant." Although her memoir included detailed insights into the past, they were decidedly discriminatory and tended to evade potentially damaging self-critique. Moreover, a deep-seated sadness prevailed. Upon returning to Woodlawn at war's end, Mary "found our beautiful and valued farm an abandoned plantation. even the cedar trees that divided the fields, had been cut down, the nice comfortable negro cabins had been dismantled, as also the barns and outhouses, the old Colonial brick dwelling, made of bricks from England, was razed to the ground. Horses, cattle, sheep, of course, gone, and an apple orchard of choice apples destroyed." (74) In among the ruins, however, the memories offered by Mary gave a central place to the myth of the plantation and the Old South. This blending of a manipulated historical memory and the nostalgia resulting from the collapse of the Old South caused the picture of the southern past to undergo spectacular reconstructions.

In her nostalgia-fueled return to paradise, Louise Wigfall Wright, the daughter of a former Confederate senator, "[i]n gathering the sad and happy memories" of a fallen world, recognized that the Old South contained something needed here and now. "Richmond has always been famed for its lovely women," Wright bragged. "but I venture to assert that there has never been a larger assembly of beauties than that collected at Miss Pegram's School during the war." It was not easy, we are told, to concentrate on one's lessons when "such 'beaux soldats" were marching, with drums beating, and banners flying, by our very doors." (75) Eliza Ripley, in her nostalgic reminiscence of the heroic hotspurs and bodacious belles of antebellum Louisiana, recalled that as a schoolchild the "Valentines poured in to us: under doors and over fences they rained." But that was "all of the dead past"; all the belles and beaux were "gone now. Only the sweet memory of them comes to me in my solitary day-dreams." (76)

Mary Polk Branch published Memoirs of a Southern Woman "Within the Lines" and a Genealogical Record in 1912 on a promise to represent "faithfully life in the South as it was in ante-bellum times, and afterward in her mourning vestments...." (77) Like many postbellum southerners, Branch liked to visit the past on her travels. She was a denizen of graveyards, especially the ones that held what remained of her own family and other "[g]enerations of those who died earlier... representatives of the old-time South." Upon a visit to a cemetery "of many memories," Branch found confirmation of her own recollections and of her very own story of herself. In the process she retrieved forgotten memories and participated in their return through nostalgia. "The ideal Southern gentleman, with his courtesy and chivalry, the gracious gray-haired matron, their surroundings as well as their heredity developed their characteristics of loyalty, truthfulness, courtesy and courage"--all returned to mind as Branch recalled the "innocent and ideal life" that the cemetery represented. Like others before her, Branch saw little in the postwar South to sustain hope. Although she extolled the virtues of antebellum southern society, she did not believe that they had survived to carry southerners through the postwar years. As Branch stood in the churchyard she found that the present crowded out the past. "But in the distance is heard the sound of the automobile and the roll of heavy wagons upon the pike, and we realize the brightness of the world without and the busy life which surrounds the old church with its story of the past." (78) It was this rift between memories of the antebellum past and the unceremonious reality of the postbellum present that spawned Branch's widespread feelings of discontinuity.

There were some, of course, who were glad to see the past disappear over the horizon; the New South was what mattered, and there was to be no more bowing or curtsying to the Old. "We must begin at the beginning again. We must make a new start," opined Ben Allston of South Carolina. (79) Likewise, Benjamin Harvey Hill foresaw the dawn of a new age. In an address to the alumni association of the University of Georgia he claimed that "[t]hought is the Hercules of this age" and encouraged his audience to start "cleaning out the Augean stables of accumulated social errors." There was no point in reviving previous "theories and systems" that had been "swept down by the moving avalanche of actual events," declared Hill. Southerners could "live neither in nor by the defeated past." Tears for yesterday were a pointless gesture. New South southerners, cautioned Hill, stood at a crossroads in time; they had to determine not what they had been in the previous world, "but whether and what they shall determine to be; not what their fathers were, but whether and what their children shall be." (80) William Darrah Kelley, a congressman and industrialist from Pennsylvania who journeyed throughout the postwar South advising the war-torn region, certainly was not sympathetic to the plight of the defeated Confederacy. Kelley charged that those who endorsed the antiquated ways of the Old South were "darkening the minds" of the South's labor force, which in turn ensured the protection of "her borders from innovations of every kind...." Even worse, fumed Kelley, was the fact that the "fatally vicious economic and agricultural theories" of the Old South had survived into the New. (81) Like Kelley, the northerner Alexander K. McClure was hardly rendered immobile by a paroxysm of grief. McClure, who wholeheartedly approved of a New South of business and commerce, declared coldly: "The Old South is dead. It has passed away: it is buried; it is forgotten...." (82)

But even the architects of the New South creed could not escape paying homage to the Old South that had passed. Henry W. Grady, for example, found that the New South was "simply the Old South under new conditions." Grady, deemed by many to be the principal creator of the New South movement, often made mention of the Old South in his speeches. He knew that without a noble past, "the New South would be dumb and motionless." (83) Similarly, Richard Hathaway Edmonds urged upon his addressees the mythic view of the antebellum South. He pleaded with his fellow southerners "to hold in tenderest reverence the memory of this Southern land; never forget to give all honor to men and women of ante-bellum days. Remember ... that the old South produced a race of men and women whose virtues and whose attainments are worthy to be enshrined not only in every Southern, but in every American heart." (84)

Although we may be tempted to dismiss nostalgia as memory that is romanticized and somewhat self-indulgent, an examination of nostalgia is in fact a particularly useful way to explore how elite white southerners narrated their experiences after the Civil War. To triumph over defeat these southerners relied on nostalgic memories that were related, reflected upon, and recognized in the memoir literature of the late nineteenth century. That the delightful life "befo' de wah" became a standard cliche suggests how commonplace narratives of nostalgia became. Nostalgia was a vital ingredient to this literature because it fed upon a prevailing sense of discontinuity. Through nostalgic memories, however, an Edenic Old South was created to re-establish a sense of continuity with the splintered past. As historians of the South continue to explore how the region has remembered its past, a worthwhile point of departure might well include an examination of nostalgia.

Let me end by citing a passage from "Ode to the Confederate Dead," a poem written by Allen Tate. The narrator stands by monuments raised to those killed fighting for the South during the Civil War, reflecting upon modern man's inability to relate to the past.

   Autumn is desolation in the plot
   Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
   From the inexhaustible bodies that are not
   Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.
   Think of the autumns that have come and gone!--(85)

It was indeed a question of a world that had "come and gone," a world vanished in the shadows of "where these memories grow," a spot to which nostalgia beckoned elite white southerners after the Civil War. The seeker for clues to the essence of their past can discover in their memoirs and autobiographies a deep-seated, heartfelt, romantic longing for the Dixie of yesterday that was gone but, as the song reminds us, not forgotten. No goodbyes, just good memories.

(1) The most obvious recent use of nostalgia as an analytical category is Tara McPherson's complex and well-written Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender. and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, 2003). McPherson engages with several themes that enlarge upon what we might call "new" southern studies. She raises important questions about the role nostalgia plays in the formation of southerners' self-perceptions. In McPherson's view, nostalgia emerges as a powerful emotional register in a present-day South desperate to feel southern. Throughout his work on Civil War memory and American race relations, David W. Blight has also acknowledged the power of nostalgia. See Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 211. 286-87, 323, 355; and Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst, Mass., 2002), 192-93, 200. Similarly, in his study of the psychiatric issues surrounding casualties in both the Civil War and the Vietnam War, Eric T. Dean Jr. has profited from an examination of the concept. See Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 115-34, 284n26. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, the preeminent scholar of memory in southern history, has cautioned against the obfuscating effect of nostalgia. In "No Deed but Memory," Brundage's introduction to his edited work Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, (Chapel Hill, 20(10), 1-28. he notes that "much good almost certainly will come from ongoing contests over southern memory" provided "southerners do not succumb to nostalgia and do not idealize an imagined past when a single collective memory prevailed" (quotations on p. 20). For other studies that hint at the possibilities a detailed examination of nostalgia might provide, see Josephine King Evans, "Nostalgia for a Nickel: The Confederate Veteran," Tennesee Historical Quarterly, 48 (Winter 1989), 238-44; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory; The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), 4, 294-95,533; Susan Key. "'Sound and Sentimentality: Nostalgia in the Songs of Stephen Foster," American Music, 13 (Summer 1995), 145-66: and Lee Glazer and Susan Key, "Carry Me Back: Nostalgia liar the Old South in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture," Journal of American Studies, 30 (April 1996), 1-24. I would like to thank Joseph Boskin, Catherine Clinton, James C. Cobb, David R. Goldfield, Michael O'Brien, Anthony W. Parker, John Shelton Reed, Jack Roper. Clyde N. Wilson. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Karen Cullen, Megan Ferguson. Alex Kane, Lesley Lindsay, Claire Swan, and the anonymous referees for the Journal of Southern History for their thoughtful comments, criticisms, and counsel on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to acknowledge the Arts and Humanities Research Board for its financial support of nay research and writing.

(2) Jean Starobinski, "The Idea of Nostalgia," Diogenes, no. 54 (Summer 1966), 81-103 (quotations on pp. 89-90, 87). For an English translation of Hofer's thesis, see Carolyn Kiser Anspach, "Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia by Johannes Hofer, 1688," Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, 2 (August 1934). 376-91. In Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting. and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (New York. 2001). Nicholas Dames suggests that when nostalgia was "[d]ebunked as a disease," it also lost "its dignity as a mode of memory" (quotations on pp. 73-74). Svetlana Boym disputes this concept of nostalgia's loss of its pathological aspects. Quite the reverse, the Romantic age saw "its transformation from a curable disease into an incurable condition." Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York. 2001), xviii.

(3) Starobinski, "Idea of Nostalgia," 99-100. On nostalgia as a medical phenomenon see Willis H. McCann. "'Nostalgia: A Review of the Literature." Psychological Bulletin, 38 (March 1941). 165-82; and Michael S. Roth. "Dying of the Past: Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth-Century France." History and Memory, 3 (Spring 1991). 5-29. On nostalgia as a psychological phenomenon see Nandor Fodor, "Varieties of Nostalgia," Psychoanalytic Review, 37 (January 1950). 25-38; George Rosen, "Nostalgia: A 'Forgotten' Psychological Disorder." Clio Medica, Ill (April 1975), 29-51; James Phillips, "'Distance, Absence, and Nostalgia," in Don Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman, eds., Descriptions (Albany. N.Y., 1985). 64-75; and Renato Rosaldo. "Imperialist Nostalgia," Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989). 107-22. For a comprehensive summary of thought on the concept of nostalgia from Hofer to the mid-twentieth century that pulls together medical and psychological explanations, see Charles A. A. Zwingmann. "'Heimweh' or 'Nostalgic Reaction': A Conceptual Analysis and Interpretation of a MedicoPsychological Phenomenon" (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1959).

(4) David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, Eng., 1985), 62. For an elaboration on this theme in a wider American context see Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York, 1992).

(5) Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (New York, 1953), 263. David Lowenthal has mused eloquently on these, among other, ideas in "'Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory," Geographical Review, 65 (January 1975), 1-36.

(6) Fred Davis. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York, 1979), 13-16 (quotation on p. 13). As David Lowenthal, in "Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn't," in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase, eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester, Eng., 1989), has commented: "Significantly, one thing absent from this imagined past is nostalgia--no one then looked back in yearning.... What we are nostalgic for is not the past as it was or even as we wish it were: but for the condition of having been, with a concomitant integration and completeness lacking in any present" (quotation on p. 29). Nostalgia deems the present to be fundamentally flawed in some way, the cure for which is to simply turn toward the past: "In yesterday we find what we miss today." Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Count(v. 49.

(7) Davis, Yearning for Yesterday. 105 (first quotation). 49 (second quotation), 35. 11; Boym, Future of Nostalgia, xviii (third quotation). See also Fred Davis, "Nostalgia, Identity and the Current Nostalgia Wave," Journal of Popular Culture, II (Fall 1977), 414-24, for a condensed version of his argument.

(8) Davis. Yearning for Yesterday, 102 (first quotation); George Allan, The Importances of the Past: A Meditation on the Authority of Tradition (Albany, N.Y., 1986). 81 (second and third quotations).

(9) Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982), 17 (first quotation): Arthur P. Dudden, "Nostalgia and the American," Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 (October December 1961). 517 (second quotation).

(10) Peter Marris. Loss and Change (New York, 1974), 17 (first quotation): Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 10-11 (second quotation), 36 (third, fourth, and fifth quotations), 104 (sixth and seventh quotations).

(11) Peter Fritzsche, "Specters of History: On Nostalgia. Exile, and Modernity," American Historical Review, 106 (December 2001), 1587-1618. Fritzsche's primary concern is with the French Revolution, but my debt to his essay in the subsequent paragraphs will be obvious to those who are familiar with it.

(12) Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York, 1962). ix (quotation). The notion of using this material is hardly original, of course. For examples of others who have blazed previous trails see Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought, edited by George Core and M. E. Bradford (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1968); John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972); George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana, 1989); Drew Gilpin Faust, "Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War," Journal of American History, 76 (March 1990), 1200-1228; Marilyn Mayer Culpepper, Trials and Triumphs: The Women of the American Civil War (East Lansing, Mich., 1991); Culpepper, All Things Altered: Women in the Wake of Civil War and Reconstruction (Jefferson, N.C., 2002); Culpepper, comp., Women of the Civil War South: Personal Accounts from Diaries, Letters, and Postwar Reminiscences (Jefferson, N.C., 2004); Catherine Clinton, Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the Plantation Legend (New York, 1995); Clinton, Civil War Stories (Athens, Ca., 1998); Peggy W. Prensbaw, "The True Happenings of My Life: Reading Southern Women Autobiographers," in Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, eds., Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (Charlottesville, 1997). 443-63; James Marten, The Children's Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1998); and Walter Sullivan, "Civil War Diaries and Memoirs," in Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks, eds., The History of Southern Women's Literature (Baton Rouge, 2002). 109-18. Most recent is Sarah E. Gardner's fine study, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937 (Chapel Hill, 2004).

(13) Historians of the South have been preoccupied for several years by the issues of continuity and discontinuity in the post-Civil War era, and, unsurprisingly, viewpoints vary widely. A so-called continuarian like W. J. Cash, who argued that "the extent of the change and of the break between the Old South that was and the South of our time has been vastly exaggerated," presents an Old South flowing so effortlessly from the nineteenth century into the twentieth that it makes the blanket designation "New South" null and void. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York, 1941), x. C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), however, "reigns as the [primary] text of discontinuity. The Civil War and Reconstruction meant a sharp break in [southern history, Woodward argue[d]. Defeat ... destroyed one society and gave birth to a new one." James L. Roark, "'So Much for the Civil War': Cash and Continuity in Southern History," in Charles W. Eagles, ed., The Mind of the South: Fifty Years Later (Jackson, Miss., 1992), 86. Both Cash and Woodward were in the same boat; they were simply rowing in different directions--the former toward the oncoming hoofbeats of J. E. B. Stuart's legendary cavalrymen; the latter so far away from them that "Not one ghostly echo of a gallop" could be heard. Woodward, "The Elusive Mind of the South," in Woodward, American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston, 1971), 282. It was left to George B. Tindall to offer the most compelling view: "I would say I have a tendency to come down on the side of both continuity and change.... I think after so long a time the debate over continuity and discontinuity becomes kind of fruitless because I don't see how you can come down totally on the side of one to the exclusion of the other." Elizabeth Jacoway, Dan T. Carter, and Robert C. McMath Jr., "Interview with George Brown Tindall," in Elizabeth Jacoway et al., eds., The Adaptable South: Essays in Honor of George Brown Tindall (Baton Rouge, 1991), 285-86. In this study, I stress both continuity and discontinuity, though I am aware of the differing circumstances that separate the various scholars and writers with whose work we are all familiar. My method is, I hope, made legitimate by the nature of the topic I am studying. For other works relevant to the debate see Robert S. Cotterill. "The Old South to the New," Journal of Southern History, 15 (February 1949), 3-8; Frank Jackson Huffman Jr., "Old South, New South: Continuity and Change in a Georgia County. 1850-1880" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University. 1974): Timothy Curtis Jacobson. "Tradition and Change in the New South, 1865-1910" (Ph.D. dissertation. Vanderbilt University. 1974); Carl N. Degler, Place Over Time: The Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness (Baton Rouge, 1977); James Tice Moore. "Redeemers Reconsidered: Change and Continuity in the Democratic South, 1870-1900," Journal of Sourthern History, 44 (August 1978), 357-78; Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 (Baton Rouge, 1978); Dwight B. Billings Jr., Planters and the Making of a "New South": Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill, 1979); Dan T. Carter, "From the Old South to the New; Another Look at the Theme of Change and Continuity," in Walter J. Fraser Jr. and Winfred B. Moore Jr., eds., From the Old South to the New: Essays on the Transitional South (Westport, Conn., 1981), 23-32: C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge, 1986), 63-64, 70-79; Lewis N. Wynne. The Continuity of Cotton: Planter Politics in Georgia, 1865-1892 (Macon, Ga., 1986); Harold D. Woodman, "Economic Reconstruction and the Rise of the New South, 1865-1900," in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, eds., Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Ronge, 1987). 254-307; Michael Wayne. The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860-1880 (Baton Rouge, 1983); James C. Cobb, "Beyond Planters and Industrialists: A New Perspective on the New South," Journal of Southern History, 54 (February 1988). 45-68; Roark. "'So Much for the Civil War,'" 85-101; and Jonathan M. Bryant, How Curious a Land: Conflict and Change in Greene County, Georgia, 1850-1885 (Chapel Hill, 1996).

(14) Indeed, published works of reminiscence were so popular by 1900 that genuine fears were raised regarding the oversaturation of the literary market. On this point, among others, see Gardner, Blood and Irony, 128-31, 169-81. One should also note in passing the popularity of Civil War histories. The success of James Ford Rhodes's early histories of the conflict, for example, was in part, according to his biographer, because the historian "dealt with a period with which many of his readers were personally familiar. For them he recreated the days of childhood and youth, awakened nostalgic memories of the past; rapport with such an audience was established easily and effectively." Robert Cruden, James Ford Rhodes: The Man, the Historian, and His Work (Cleveland, Ohio, 1961), 46. See also Alice Fahs. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South. 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, 2001), chap. 9.

(15) Fritzsche, "Specters of History," 1595; James Battle Avirett, The Old Plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin Before the War (New York, 1901), 200.

(16) Edward J. Thomas, Memoirs of a Southerner. 1840-1923 (Savannah, Ga., 1923), 21, 63. As Guy A. Cardwell, "The Plantation House: An Analogical Image," Southern Literary Journal, 2 (Fall 1969), 3-21, has explained, the plantation represented an "idea of agrarian orderliness and the redemption of a turbulent society." It was "the natural basis for a social order, the natural support for a moral order" and came to be perceived as "a little world, a way of life, an epitomizing of cherished values that were to be defended at all costs" (quotations on pp. 7. 15-16).

(17) Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1890s (Chapel Hill, 2001) has argued that there were three "levels of response to failure in war"; "first, the initial shock when confronting the hopelessness of further action; second, the discovery of home conditions upon return; and third, the long-term problems of readjustment" (quotations on p. 233). On southern reactions to defeat see Paul H. Buck, The Road to Reunion. 1865-1900 (Boston, 1937), chap. 2; E. Merton Coulter, The South During Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (Baton Rouge, 1947), chaps. 1-2; Robert L. Harris, "The South in Defeat: 1865" (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1956), chap. 1; Marjorie Howell Cook, "Restoration and Innovation: Alabamians Adjust to Defeat, 1865-1867" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alabama, 1968); Clement Eaton, The Waning of the Old South Civilization. 1860-1880's (Athens, Ga., 1968), chap. 5: Hodding Carter, Their Words Were Bullets: The Southern Press in War, Reconstruction, and Peace (Athens, Ga., 1969), chap. 3; Nancy T. Kondert, "The Romance and Reality of Defeat: Southern Women in 1865," Journal of Mississippi History, 35 (May 1973), 141-52; James L. Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 1977), 111-209; Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865-1867 (Baton Rouge, 1985), chap. 1: Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York, 1987), chaps. 1-2; Rable, Civil Wars, chap. 11; Jane E. Schultz, "Mute Fury: Southern Women's Diaries of Sherman's March to the Sea, 1864-1865," in Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Anslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier, eds., Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill, 1989), 59-79; Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 229-35; Daniel E. Sutherland, Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865 (New York, 1995); Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1996), 248-54; Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), chap. 4: Eugene D. Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens, Ga., 1998), 63-71; Daniel W. Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877 (New York, 1998). chap. 2; Marli F. Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-80 (Urbana, 1998), chaps. 9-10: Michael Golay. A Ruined Land: The End of the Civil War (New York, 1999); Laura F. Edwards. Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (Urbana, 2000), chaps. 7-9: Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month that Saved America (New York, 2001); Ash, A Year in the South; Four Lives in 1865 (New York, 2002): Carl H. Moneyhon, The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on Arkansas: Persistence in the Midst of Ruin (Baton Rouge, 1994), chap. 9; Giselle Roberts, The Confederate Belle (Columbia, Mo., 2003), 165-80: William Kauffman Scarborough. Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South (Baton Rouge, 2003), chap. 10: and W. Scott Poole, Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina Upcountry (Athens, Ga., 2004), chap. 1. On the concept of defeat in general, readers should consult the beautifully realized study of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, translated by Jefferson Chase (2001; translated ed., New York, 2003), 1-35. According to Schivelbusch, prior to the Civil War the Cavalier South saw itself as a "Walter Scottland," in opposition to the Roundhead North in ways similar to the Scots against the English. (It was Hamilton James Eckenrode in his "Sir Walter Scott and the South," North American Review, 206 [October 1917], 595-603, who originally conceived the South as a "Walter Scottland" [p. 601] given Scott's supposed influence upon the region.) For the South the Civil War, unhappily, resulted in defeat, but the region set about reinventing itself through the Lost Cause. By the 1880s the legend of the Old South had become "a part of the escapist dream factory that would ultimately appropriate all periods of human history and that would later he known as Hollywood." See Schivelbusch, Culture of Defeat, 37-101 (quotation on p. 97). I am grateful to Harry L. Watson for bringing this book to my attention.

(18) Mary Boykin Chesnut, May 7, 1865, in C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut's Civil War (New Haven, 1981), xl-xli (first two quotations), 802-3; Mary Boykin Chesnut to Virginia Caroline Tunstall Clay, ca. April 1866, in Allie Patricia Wall. "The Letters of Mary Boykin Chesnut" (M.A. thesis, University of South Carolina, 1977), 73 (third quotation).

(19) There comes to mind in this connection C. Vann Woodward's frequently cited essay "The Irony of Southern History." Alluding to the fact that the South throughout the later part of its history had "known the bitter taste of defeat and humiliation," the historian noted that the region "had repeatedly met with frustration and failure." The irony stemmed from the fact that in losing the Civil War southerners had experienced what other Americans had not, for the national experience was one of satisfaction, success, and victory. Defeat provided for the South "its full share of illusions, fantasies, and pretensions.... But the illusion that 'history is something unpleasant that happens to other people' is certainly not one of them not in the face of accumulated evidence and memory to the contrary." See Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (3rd ed.: Baton Rouge, 1993), 187-211 (quotations on pp. 189 and 190).

(20) Interestingly, however, in later years many southerners began to view history itself as an authoritative device that might reverse this notion. One thinks here of the various postwar organizations, such as the memorial and ceremonial associations, the Southern Historical Society, the United Confederate Veterans, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, along with various individuals--notably S. A. Cunningham, Mildred Lewis Rutherford, and Jubal A. Early--who collectively strove to refashion the history of their region into an altogether-more-acceptable representation for future generations. On the historiography of the period--a historiography alert to memory's shadows--see the following articles by Fred Arthur Bailey: "Free Speech and the 'Lost Cause' in Arkansas," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 55 (Summer 1996), 143-66; "Free Speech and the Lost Cause in the Old Dominion," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 103 (April 1995), 237-66; "Free Speech and the 'Lost Cause' in Texas: A Study of Social Control in the New South," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 97 (January 1994), 452-77; and "The Textbooks of the 'Lost Cause': Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 75 (Fall 1991), 507-33. See also Fred Hobson, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge, 1983), 85-128; Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South. 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill, 1982), chap. 1; John David Smith. An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography. 1865-1918 (Westport, Conn., 1985); Wendell Holmes Stephenson, Southern History in the Making: Pioneer Historians of the South (Baton Rouge, 1964); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, "White Women and the Politics of Historical Memory in the New South, 1880-1920." in Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, eds., Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton, 2000), 115-39; and Charles Reagan Wilson, "The Invention of Southern Tradition: The Writing and Ritualization of Southern History, 1880-1940," in Lothar Honnighausen and Valeria Gennaro Lerda, eds., Rewriting the South: History and Fiction (Tubingen, Germany, 1993), 3-21. Regarding the founding and the work of the early memorial associations see Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 38-45; LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (Athens, Ga., 1995), 160-98; Whites, "'Stand by Your Man": The Ladies Memorial Association and the Reconstruction of Southern White Manhood," in Christie Anne Farnham, ed., Women of the American South: A Multicultural Reader (New York, 1997), 133-49; Anastatia Sims, The Power of Femininity in the New South: Women's Organizations and Politics in North Carolina, 1880-1930 (Columbia, S.C., 1997), 13-14, 204n26; Catherine W. Bisher, "'A Strong Force of Ladies'; Women, Politics, and Confederate Memorial Associations in Nineteenth-Century Raleigh," North Carolina Historical Review, 77 (October 2000), 455-91; Antoinette G. van Zelm, "Virginia Women as Public Citizens: Emancipation Day Celebrations and Lost Cause Commemorations, 1863-1890," in Janet L. Coryell et al., eds., Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhood: Dealing with the Powers That Be (Columbia, Mo., 2000), 71-88; Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 (Baton Rouge, 2003), 191-203, 206, 218, 275-76, 278; and Poole, Never Surrender, 67-70. On the Southern Historical Society see Harold Eugene Mahan, "The Final Battle: The Southern Historical Society and Confederate Hopes for History," Southern Historian, 5 (Spring 1984), 27-37; and Richard D. Starnes, "Forever Faithful: The Southern Historical Society and Confederate Historical Memory," Southern Cultures, 2 (Winter 1996), 177-94. On the United Confederate Veterans see William W. White, The Confederate Veteran (Tusculoosa, 1962): Herman Hattaway. "Clio's Southern Soldiers: The United Confederate Veterans and History," Louisiana History, 12 (Summer 1971). 213-42; Hattaway, "The United Confederate Veterans in Louisiana," Louisiana History, 16 (Winter 1975), 5-37; John A. Simpson, "The Cult of the "Lost Cause," Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 34 (Winter 1975), 350-61; Vance R. Skarstedt, "The Confederate Veteran Movement and National Reunification" (Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University, 1993); and Larry M. Logue, To Appomattox and Beyond: The Civil War Soldier in War and Peace (Chicago, 1996), chap. 6. On the United Daughters of the Confederacy see Angle Parrott, "'Love Makes Memory Eternal': The United Daughters of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, 1897-1920," in Edward L. Ayers and John C. Willis, eds., The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth-Century Virginia (Charlottesville, 1991), 219-38; and Karen L. Cox. Dixie's Daughter: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville, 2003). On Cunningham see John A. Simpson, S. A. Cunningham and the Confederate Heritage (Athens, Ga., 1994) and Simpson, Edith D. Pope and Her Nashville Friends: Guardians of the Lost Cause in the Confederate Veteran (Knoxville, 2003). On Rutherford's importance to the Lost Cause see Fred Arthur Bailey, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford and the Patrician Cult of the Old South," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 78 (Fall 1994), 509-35; Grace Elizabeth Hale, Some Women Have Never Been Reconstructed'; Mildred Lewis Rutherford, Lucy M. Stanton, and the Racial Politics of White Southern Womanhood. 1900-1930," in John C. Inscoe, ed., Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in the Race Relations of a Southern State, 1865-1950 (Athens. Ga., 1994), 173-201; and Sarah H. Case, "The Historical Ideology of Mildred Lewis Rutherford: A Confederate Historian's New South Creed," Journal of Southern History, 68 (August 2002), 599-628. On General Early see Charles C. Osborne, Jubal, The Life and Times of General Jubal A. Early, CSA, Defender of the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill, 1992) and Gary W. Gallagher, Jubal A. Early, the Lost Cause, and Civil War History: A Persistent Legacy (Milwaukee, 1995).

(21) Elizabeth Pendleton Hardin, May 3, 1865, and June 3, 1865, in G. Glenn Cliff, ed., The Private War of Lizzie Hardin: A Kentucky Confederate Girl's Diary of the Civil War in Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia (Frankfort, Ky., 1963). 241 (first quotation), 254 (other quotations).

(22) Suzanne Nash, "Introduction," in Nash, ed., Home and Its Dislocations in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany, N.Y., 1993), 5.

(23) Rev. John Jones to Mrs. Mary Jones, Refuge, July 26, 1865, in Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1282; Wadley quoted in Roberts. Confederate Belle, 177. In a sense, reflections such as these hint at history as the might-have-been; their ambit is not history as reality, but history as possibility. For many war-ravaged southerners if became the largest word in the dictionary. On our being unable to resist imagining alternative scenarios, see Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London, 1997); Robert Cowley, ed., More What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (2001: reprint, London, 2002); and Richard J. Evans, "Telling It Like It Wasn't," BBC History Magazine, 3 (December 2002). 22-25.

(24) Eliza Frances Andrews, The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865 (New York, 1908). 198.

(25) Mary Jones, in her journal, Montevideo, January 7, 1865, in Myers, ed., Children of Pride, 1242.

(26) Mary Jones, in her journal, March 1865, ibid., 1427-28.

(27) Quoted in [Virginia Clay-Clopton]. A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, covering Social and Political Life in Washington and the South, 1853-66. Put into narrative form by Ada Sterling (New York, 1905), 212.

(28) Mrs. Roger [Sara] A. Pryor, My Day: Reminiscences of a Long Life (New York, 1909), 273; Thomas, Memoirs of a Southerner, 5.

(29) John Randolph Tucker, The Old and the New South: Baccalaureate Address before the South Carolina College ... (Columbia, S.C., 1887), 3. For a similar espousal of lament at things past see Charles C. Jones Jr., Georgians during the War between the States: An Address Delivered before the Confederate Survivors' Association ... (Augusta, Ga., 1889), 23-27. For a discussion of Jones's writings see Michael M. Cass, "Charles C. Jones, Jr. and the "Lost Cause,'" Georgia Historical Quarterly, 55 (Summer 1971), 222-33.

(30) [Walter Hines Page], The Southerner: A Novel, Being the Autobiography of Nicholas Worth (New York, 1909), 46; Mark Twain. Life on the Mississippi (1883; reprint, New York, 1996), 454.

(31) Fritzsche, "Specters of History." 1588' Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), 3-4; Henry Miller. "The Southland." in Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (New York, 1945), 288.

(32) Mrs. N. B. De Saussure, Old Plantation Days: Being Recollections of Southern Life before the Civil War (New York, 1909), 9-10.

(33) Emmeline Dabney Walker, Sketch of Susan Dabney Smedes (Demopolis, Ala., 1929), 11 (first three quotations): Susan Dabney Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter (Baltimore, 1887), 3 (fourth quotation).

(34) Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter, 3 (quotations), 79-80.

(35) [S]econd and third editions were published in 1888.... In 1890 James Potts and Company published a fourth edition under the title A Southern Planter" that contained a facsimile letter from William E. Gladstone to Smedes in which he asked permission to bring out an English edition of Memorials of a Southern Planter. "Ports published fifth, sixth, and seventh editions in the 1890's, and a final one in 1914." In 1965 the memoir was reprinted by Alfred A. Knopf in an edition that was edited, with notes and an introduction, by Fletcher M. Green. See pp. xix-xx of the New York, 1965, edition for quotations.

(36) Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter, 7-10, 34-35 (quotations).

(37) Ibid., 117.

(38) Ibid., 47-48. On the recurrent use of an ex-slave as memorialist, often narrated in the dialect of some crude Uncle Remus--type character, see Lucinda H. MacKethan. "Black Boy and Ex-Coloured Man: Version and Inversion of the Slave Narrator's Quest for Voice," CLA Journal. 32 (December 1988), 123-7: and Richard Gray. Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge, Eng., 1986), 90-91. On the mythologizing of Mammy see Cheryl Thurber, "The Development of the Mammy Image and Mythology," in Virginia Bernhard et al., eds., Southern Women: Histories and Identities (Columbia, Mo., 1992). 87-108.

(39) John S. Wise, The End of an Era (Boston, 1899), 48.

(40) Ibid., 88.

(41) Ibid., 74 (first and second quotations), 32 (third quotation); Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity (New York, 1955), 119.

(42) R. Q. Mallard, Plantation Life before Emancipation (Richmond. 1892), vi.

(43) Ibid, 8 (first and second quotations), 29 (third quotation), 12 (fourth quotation). See also Mallard's later reminiscence Montevideo--Maybank." Some Memoirs of a Southern Christian Household in the Olden Time ... (Richmond, 1898). It is interesting to note that Mallard places much emphasis on reunion between North and South in this later memoir. See, for example, pages 60-72. Other works that discuss reunion and reconciliation in a variety of contexts include Buck, Road to Reunion: Huber W. Ellingsworth, "Southern Reconciliation Orators in the North, 18681899" (Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University. 1955): Joyce Appleby, "Reconciliation and the Northern Novelist, 1865-1880," Civil War History, 10 (June 1964), 117-29: Howard Dorgan. "A Case Study in Reconciliation: General John B. Gin-don and 'The Last Days of the Confederacy,'" Quarterly Journal of Speech, 60 (February 1974), 83-91: Kathleen Diffey, Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861-1876 (Athens, Ga., 1992), chap. 2: John C. Inscoe. "The Confederate Home Front Sanitized: Joel Chandler Harris' On the Plantation and Sectional Reconciliation." Georgia Historical Quarterly, 76 (Fall 1992), 652-74: Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South. 1865 1900 (Chapel Hill, 1993): Jane Turner Censer, "Reimagining the North-South Reunion: Southern Women Novelists and the Intersectional Romance, 1876 1900," Southern Cultures, 5 (Summer 1999), 64-91: Blight. Race and Reunion. especially chaps. 4, 7, and 10: Blight, Beyond the Battlefield, especially chaps. 6 and 8: and Edward J. Blum, "The Crucible of Disease: Trauma, Memory. and National Reconciliation during the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878," Journal of Southern History. 69 (November 2003), 791 820.

(44) Letitia M. Burwell, A Girl's Life in Virginia before the War (New York. 1895), dedication page (first nine quotations), 1, 184 (tenth and eleventh quotations), 88 (twelfth and thirteenth quotations). 87 (fourteenth quotation), 13 (fifteenth and sixteenth quotations). 14 (seventeenth quotation), 79 (eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth quotations).

(45) Ibid., 87 (first quotation). 88 (second and third quotations), 1 (fourth and fifth quotations). 2 (sixth quotation), 3 (seventh quotation), 206 (eighth through eleventh quotations).

(46) Belle Kearney, A Slaveholder's Daughter (St. Louis, 1900). 8-9.

(47) Nancy Carol Tipton, "It Is My Duty: The Public Career of Belle Kearney" (M.A. thesis, University of Mississippi, 1975), 3 (first quotation): Kearney, Slaveholder's Daughter, 21 (second quotation).

(48) Ibid., 20-32, 39, 74-83. Kearney became a teacher in an effort to earn some extra money for the stricken family.

(49) Ibid., 11 (first quotation). 15 (second quotation).

(50) Ibid., 11-12.

(51) Ibid., 1 (first, second, and third quotations), 4 (fourth and fifth quotations).

(52) While Kearney in later years became active in politics, she nonetheless remained profoundly rooted in her past. Indeed, "the New South spokesmen understood instructively that no program of reform could do violence to a universally cherished past and hope to succeed." Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York, 1970), 153. See also Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York. 1993), chap. 2: and Judith N. McArthur. Creating the New Woman: The Rise of Southern Women's Progressive Culture in Texas. 18931918 (Urbana. 1998), 3.

(53) Kearney, Slaveholder's Daughter, 5 (first quotation). 2 (second and third quotations).

(54) Ibid., 2.

(55) Thomas Nelson Page. "Social Life in Old Virginia before the War," in Page, The Old South: Essays Social and Political (New York. 1892). 143-85 (first quotation on p. 151: second quotation on p. 184; third and fourth quotations on p. 185). As Elizabeth Young has noted, such depictions were by no means limited to white southerners. "Like the openly reactionary nostalgia of white Southerners," she writes. "the historical amnesia of white Northerners functioned not only to whitewash the memory of the Civil War hut also to thwart contemporary African-American struggles for survival and equality." Young, Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War (Chicago, 1999). 195.

(56) Avirett. Old Plantation. 7-8.

(57) Ibid., iii (first quotation), 7 (second and third quotations), 13 (fourth and fifth quotations), 110 (sixth quotation).

(58) Ibid., 127 (quotation); David R. Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge. 2002), 21. For more information on Avirett and his family's plantation see David S. Cecelski, "Oldest Living Confederate Chaplain Tells All? Or, James B. Avirett and the Rise and Fall of the Rich Lands," Southern Cultures, 3 (Winter 1997), 5-24.

(59) Avirett, Old Plantation, 171.

(61) [Clay-Clopton], Belle of the Fifties, 211 (quotations). 213-15.

(61) Ibid., 211.

(62) [Clay-Clopton], Belle of the Fifties, 10; Walter Scott, Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field (New York, 1811), 168. Scott subsequently refers to "stainless Tunstall's banner" (p. 170). For studies of Virginia Clay and the Clay family see Frank L. Owsley, "The Clays in Early Alabama History," Alabama Review, 2 (October 1949), 243 68: Ruth Ketring Nuermberger. The Clays of Alabama: A Planter-Lawyer-Politician Family (Lexington, Ky., 1958): Bell Irvin Wiley. Confederate Women (1975: reprint, New York, 1994), 39-81: and Carol Bleser and Frederick M. Heath. "The Clays of Alabama: The Impact of the Civil War on a Southern Marriage." in Carol Bleser, ed., In Joy and in Sorrow: Women. Family. and Marriage in the Victorian South (New York, 1991). 135-53.

(63) Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear (1952: reprint, New York. 1964). 26.

(64) Mrs. Roger A. [Sara] Pryor, Reminicences of Peace and War (1904: rev. and enlarged ed., New York, 1905); LaSalle Corbell Pickett, Across My Path: Memories of People I Have Known (New York, 1916), 142 (quotation).

(65) Pryor, My Day, 1.

(66) Ibid., 2 (first quotation), 11 (second quotation), 12 (third quotation).

(67) Pryor, Reminiscences of Peace and War. 119. For a fuller discussion on how the impact of the war and its aftermath affected the Pryors, see John C. Waugh. Surviving,., the Confederacy: Rebellion, Ruin, and Recovery--Roger and Sara Pryor During the Civil War (New York, 2002), chaps. 20-22.

(68) H. M. Hamill, The Old South: k Monograph (Nashville, 1904). 21-23.

(69) Mrs. Elizabeth Lyle Saxon, A Southern Woman's War Time Reminiscences (Memphis, 1905), 41: Mrs. T. P. O'Connor, My Beloved South (New York, 1913), 374; Caroline E. Merrick, Old Times in Dixie Land: A Southern Matron's Memories (New York, 1901), 7.

(70) On this theme see the various essays in Daniel L. Schacter, ed., Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains. and Societies Reconstruct the Past (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). As Edward E. Baptist has shown us in Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2002), even distorted memories can develop into a perfect past.

(71) Bill Arp [Charles Henry Smith], From the Uncivil War to Date. 1861-1903 (Atlanta, 1903), 328 (first quotation), 332 (second quotation). For a lucid account of Smith's role as a spokesman for the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, see David B. Parker, Alias Bill Arp: Charles Henry Smith and the South's "'Goodly Heritage" (Athens, Ga., 1991).

(72) At the same time, late-nineteenth-century southerners strove to secure their identification as southerners with whiteness. On these themes, among others, see Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York, 1984), especially part 2: and Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York, 1998), chap. 2.

(73) Mary Norcott Bryan, A Grandmother's Recollection of Dixie (New Bern, N.C., [1912]), 11 (first quotation), 43 (second quotation), 34 (third quotation).

(74) Ibid., 3 (first and second quotations), 25-26 (third quotation).

(75) Mrs. D. Giraud Wright, A Southern Girl in ***61: The War Time Memories of a Confederate Senator's Daughter(New York, 1905), 3 (first quotation), 77 (second through fourth quotations).

(76) Eliza Ripley, Social Life in Old New Orleans: Being Recollection of My Girlhood (New York, 1912), 21 (first quotation), 86 (second quotation), 208 (third quotation).

(77) Mary Polk Branch, Memoirs of a Southern Woman "Within the Lines" and a Genealogical Record (Chicago, 1912), 6.

(78) Ibid., 106 (first three quotations), 19 (fourth quotation), 107 (fifth quotation). The sense of being in some kind of suspended animation between the Old South and the New was a theme captured by future memorialists. See, for example, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "'Open Secrets: Memory. Imagination, and the Refashioning of Southern Identity," American Quarterly, 50 (March 1998), 109-24: Hall, "'You Must Remember This': Autobiography as Social Critique," Journal of American History, 85 (September 1998), 439-65; and Darlene O'Dell, Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin. Lillian Smith. and Pauli Murray (Charlottesville. 2001).

(79) Quoted in Gaston, New South Creed. 23.

(80) Benjamin H. Hill Jr., Senator Benjamin H. Hill Georgia: His Life. Speeches and Writings (Atlanta, 1891), 335-36.

(81) William D. Kelley, The Old South and the New: A Series of Letters (New York, 1888), 159 (first and second quotations), 121 (third quotation).

(82) A. K. McClure. The South: Its Industrial. Financial, and Political Condition (Philadelphia. 1886), 31.

(83) Henry W. Grady, The New South (New York, 1890), 146 (first quotation), 147 (second quotation).

(84) Richard H. Edmonds, The Old South and the New: An Address Delivered at the Commencement of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, June 10, 1903 (n.p., 1903), 11. For more on the efforts of the New South boosters to harmonize the competing legacies of the Old South and the New South see Don H. Doyle, New Men. New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville. Charleston, Mobile. [phone] (Chapel Hill, 1990).

(85) Allen Tate, "Ode to the Confederate Dead," in Edward Francisco, Robert Vaughan, and Linda Francisco, eds., The South in Perspective: An Anthology of Southern Literature (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2001), 597 99 (quotation on p. 598).

MR. ANDERSON is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Dundee, Scotland.