The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought.

* All books struggle to be born; a few refuse to die. Richard Weaver's The Southern Tradition at Bay: A Historry of Postbellum Thought first appeared in 1968, although the core of the work, in the form of an unpublished dissertation, had been attracting a scholarly audience since 1943. A manuscript version of the book was rejected by a university press, and remained unpublished for twenty years. Regnery Gateway has just reissued the book (400 pp., $21.95) after a decade out of print. Its retum is welcome, especially to a Buckeye like me, who grew up never hearing a good word spoken about the Old South, which was, in Weaver's words, "right without realizing the grounds of its rightness." That statement was written with authority, yet it embraces the author's recognition of paradox.

Reviewing the first edition for NR, Jeffrey Hart wrote"The contradictions encountered in experience generate ideas, and without contradictions, without problems, it would be difficult to imagine how there could be any ideas at all."

For many Northerners, the contradictions of Southern history are too many, too damning, and Weaver's treatment of the South's "peculiar institution" may leave many conservative Yankees (and not a few Confederates) uneasy. Weaver is hardly pro-slavery; he simply gives antebellum attitudes their due-no revisionist historiography here. But if the view of blacks in The Southern Tradition at Bay, which is hard to pin down (and is, perhaps, irrelevant), can seem at times, well . . . perverse, it is because the modem ear is unused to the sound of the South's true voices. When Weaver writes about a "Negro character," he is not speaking as an anthropologist, psychologist, or geneticist, but as an historian concerned with the reality of postbellum perceptions-black and white-not with our currently inflamed sensitivities.

Weaver believed that the Old South was "the last non-materialist civilization in the Western World"; that its rightness was worth defending, and remains our bulwark against scientific modernism and the untempered state. Even in the shadow of slavery, it indeed may well have been "a hall hung with splendid tapestries in which no one would care to live; but from them we can learn something of how to live."