But there was a very hard current running through the South as well, perhaps best seen though Herbert Storing’s essay which hints at how Lockean theory leaves a few cracks open for racialist slavery to run in, and how the deep theory surely says (my paraphrase) “well, men will grab what advantages they can, especially against those outside the contract”. You see what Taney did on that score, reading blacks out of the American People, a bad reading nonetheless true to what a lot of white Americans North and South then (and sometimes still) believe, and upon sound enough Lockean reasoning. And of course there is Jefferson’s own shameful example of later development away from his (Lincolnian) denunciation of slavery in the name of natural rights liberty into his (anti-Washington) stance in favor of shoring up the institution, (or at the least) in favor of making it harder to manumit slaves than it was when George did it. And I seem to recall a lot of hard calculating types revealed in Faulkner, etc.

I love the Winthropian echo heard in Sam Adams’ call for a “Christian Sparta,” even if I’m not a Sam fan. I love what Tocqueville and Bryce found at work in the New England townships, which Jefferson in one of his better moments sought to bring Southwards. So no way am I going to cede all of the “alternative” or “polis/aristocracy” elements of the American tradition to Southerners. Especially to those whining Southerners who sound like bitter Russians, ever blaming some monolith called the West or Liberalism for everything that went wrong, and especially since even if all of the North had fallen into the sea circa 1840, or all of the West had fallen into the sea prior to Peter the Great, the South and Russia would still have had to eventually deal with all the modern craziness.

And Robert, to pick up where we left off below, maybe an Abigail Adams (if not a New England woman of the 1870s) would have gone off after justice like Mattie did, but maybe she would have been Christian enough to hesitate more than Mattie does, who lands in a pit.

A key to ‘fleshing’ out the democratic-aristocratic inclinations of the South may lie in their (white Southerners of means/land owners/yeomen) self understanding as members of the so-called ‘country’ party which dates back before the revolutionary period. From Clyde Wilson’s essay, “Citizen or Subject,” we have, “..the “country party” which sought to defend and preserve the community.” The country party, was an eloquent defender of (American) republicanism and an opponent of the “court party” that sought to centralize political power.

Now, this is a political phenomenon, and I have no desire to follow the thread forward into the Big War but rather to show that the pre-bellum, agrarian South tends to be focused on republicanism (out of necessity), while the North is moving toward centralization of political power (Leviathon) to institute any number of programs that may actually weaken the idea of liberty, at least as that term is understood by the founding generation.

Any analysis of the idea of the Southern democratic-aristocrat requires a thorough understanding of the social forces acting on these gentlemen. The Southern man was the product of a culture that sought to establish a coterie of men who reflected the virtues of the Platonic-Aristotelian mature man (spoudaioi) who intuitively understands the obligation to defend the honor, not only of his family, but of his community as well, against the pressures of social decay, or the invasion of an enemy.

In fact, there are those who might argue the spiritual, social, and technological experiences of the North following the founding period, indicate a society entering a state of ‘kinesis’ (a feverish movement of society) that would, within just a few decades, precipitate the Big War.

I believe the South’s democratic-aristocrat (“the order of a polis is courage”) were, very much, aware of the social disorder occurring north of the Ohio River. The South did not share in this ‘morbus animi’ (disease of the mind) because of it’s agrarian, religious, and political inclinations and to its credit it rejected (generally speaking) it’s more egregious elements.