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repeatedly heard women say, “God is on our side.” When she asked, “Why?” the response came, “Of course, He hates Yankees! You’ll think that well of Him.” 41
    On the eve of secession, a sense of distinctiveness, apprehension over the future of slavery and racial tranquility, and the persistence of folk culture added a dynamic quality to the ideology of the planters and transformed Southern sectionalism into Southern nationalism. This much is background, the “prehistory” of the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy’s official history began in Montgomery, Alabama, where cause became nation.
    1 James E. Walmsley, “Preston Smith Brooks,” in Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone (eds.),
Dictionary of American Biography
(New York, 1929); Alvy L. King,
Louis T.
Wigfall: Southern Fire-eater
(Baton Rouge, La., 1970), pp. 25–34.
    2
Alleged Assault upon Senator Sumner
(House Report, No. 182, 34 Congress, I Session); David Donald,
Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War
(New York, 1960), pp. 289–296; Robert L. Meriwether (ed.), “Preston S. Brooks on the Caning of Charles Sumner,”
South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine,
XII (1951), 2–3.
    3
Ibid.
    4 The Warren quote is cited in Albert Murray,
South to a Very Old Place
(New York, 1971), p. 22, in the context of a discussion of the concrete in the Southern mind.
    5 W. J. Cash,
Mind of the South
(New York, 1941) p. 44. Other southern “Mind” studies include William R. Taylor,
Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American
National Character
(New York, 1961); Clement Eaton,
The Growth of Southern Civilization
(New York, 1961), chapter 13, and
The Mind of the Old South,
revised edition (Baton Rouge, La., 1967); and Rollin G. Osterweis,
Romanticism and Nationalsim in the Old
South
(New Haven, Conn., 1949).
    6 Charles S. Sydnor, “The Southerner and the Laws,
“ Journal of Southern History,
VI (1940), 3–23.
    7 David M. Potter, “The Enigma of the South,”
Yale Review,
LI (1961), 142–151, and David Bertelson,
The Lazy South
(New York, 1967) deal with the primacy of individual, as opposed to corporate, identity from opposite points of view; both scholars, however, acknowledge the central importance of personalism in the South.
    8 The classic statement on Southern violence is John Hope Franklin,
The Militant
South
(Cambridge, Mass., 1956). See also Cash,
Mind of the South,
pp. 44–45.
    9 See the essay of Charles G. Sellers, Jr., in “The Tragic Southerner” in his
The Southerner as American
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960).
    10 Clement Eaton,
A History of the Old South: The Emergence of a Reluctant Nation,
3rd edition (New York, 1975), pp. 451–461; W. W. Sweet,
The Story of Religion in America
(New York, 1939), pp. 322–447; Eaton,
Mind of the Old South,
pp. 200–223; Clement Eaton,
The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South,
revised and enlarged edition (New York, 1964), pp. 300–334.
    11 Eaton,
History of the Old South,
p. 378; Cash,
Mind of the South,
pp. 82–84. See also Ernest T. Thompson,
Presbyterians in the South, 1607–1861
(Richmond, Va., 1963); William W. Sweet (ed.),
Religion on the American Frontier: The Baptists, 1783–1830
(New York, 1931), and Donald G. Mathews,
Religion in the Old South
(Chicago, 1977).
    12 Cash,
Mind of the South,
pp. 55–60.
    13 For a case-study comparison of Northern and Southern religious attitudes toward reform, see Eaton,
Mind of the Old South,
pp. 205–209.
    14 See Osterweis,
Romanticism and Nationalism;
Anne Firor Scott,
The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics
(Chicago, 1970); Emory M. Thomas,
The American War and Peace, 1860–1877
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), pp. 37–38; and especially Raimondo Luraghi,
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South
(New York, 1978), pp. 15–82.
    15 On Southern writers in general, see, Jay B. Hubbell,
The South in American Literature, 1607–1900
(Durham, N.C., 1954); and Vernon Louis Parrington,
Main Currents in American Thought,
II,
The