Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Southern Literary Studies) 1st Edition

by Ritchie Devon Watson Jr. (Author)

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ISBN-13: 978-0807133125

ISBN-10: 0807133124

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When Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely caned Senator Charles Sumner Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 21, 1856, southerners viewed the attack as a triumphant affirmation of southern chivalry, northerners as a confirmation of southern barbarity. Public opinion was similarly divided nearly three-and-a-half years later after abolitionist John Brown’s raid on the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, with northerners crowning John Brown as a martyr to the cause of freedom as southerners excoriated him as a consciousness fanatic. These events opened American minds to the possibility that North and South might be incompatible societies, but some of Dixie’s defenders were willing to go one step further―to propose that northerners and southerners represented not just a “divided people” but two scientifically distinct races. In Normans and Saxons, Ritchie Watson, Jr., explores the complex racial mythology created by the upper classes of the antebellum South in the wake of these divisive events to justify secession and, eventually, the Civil War.

This mythology cast southerners as descendants of the Normans of eleventh-century England and thus also of the Cavaliers of the seventeenth century, some of whom had come to the New World and populated the southern colonies. These Normans were opposed, in mythic terms, by Saxons―Englishmen of German descent―some of whose descendants made up the Puritans who settled New England and later fanned out to populate the rest of the North. The myth drew on nineteenth-century science and other sources to portray these as two separate, warring “races,” the aristocratic and dashing Normans versus the common and venal Saxons. According to Watson, southern polemical writers employed this racial mythology as a justification of slavery, countering the northern argument that the South’s peculiar institution had combined with its Norman racial composition to produce an arrogant and brutal land of oligarchs with a second-rate culture. Watson finds evidence for this argument in both prose and poetry, from the literary influence of Sir Walter Scott, De Bow’s Review, and other antebellum southern magazines, to fiction by George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, and William Alexander Caruthers and northern and southern poetry during the Civil War, especially in the works of Walt Whitman. Watson also traces the continuing impact of the Norman versus Saxon myth in “Lost Cause” thought and how the myth has affected ideas about southern sectionalism of today.

Normans and Saxons provides a thorough analysis of the ways in which myth ultimately helped to convince Americans that regional differences over the issue of slavery were manifestations of deeper and more profound differences in racial temperament―differences that made civil war inevitable.

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Editorial Reviews

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Sophisticated, well written, and timely . . . a work of considerable scholarship and acute insight. Watson's Normans and Saxons is possibly the best literary approach to the sectional conflict since Bill Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee. (Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of Honor and Violence in the Old South)

About the Author

Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., is a professor of English at Randolph-Macon College, in Ashland, Virginia. He is the author of The Cavalier in Virginia Fiction and Yeoman Versus Cavalier.

Product details

Publisher : LSU Press; 1st edition (May 1, 2008)
Language : English
Hardcover : 296 pages
ISBN-10 : 0807133124
ISBN-13 : 978-0807133125
Item Weight : 1.27 pounds
Dimensions : 6.2 x 1 x 9.34 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,740,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,949 in American Literature (Books)
- #5,733 in American Literature Criticism
- #8,197 in United States History (Books)

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Sarah Lane

Normans and Saxons

Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2008

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This book is very compelling and informative, as well as well-researched and documented. It specifically describes the way a mythology was created in the pre-Civil War era, to appeal to the cultural identity of people of Norman versus Saxon heritage; however, the reader can't help noticing the similarity of the tactics used then to those used today to influence and control the minds of the populace. Today's all-pervasive media constantly bombards the masses with mind-shaping messages, so the need to be on guard against propaganda is even more critical in the modern age. This book shows how the pervasive racism that persists today in our society originated - ironically, using a reverse sort of racism which played the cultural identity of one group of people against that of another to justify the exploitation of yet another group. This book is a valuable tool to help us sort through and see through the power of relentless media messages aimed at shaping our opinions. Democracy can't work if we don't educate our citizens to become informed, thinking, responsible voters, and this book goes a long way toward achieving that by showing candid examples of how the media appealed to and conditioned the various factions of our citizenry, thus producing the landscape for the Civil War and its aftermath. You can't read this book without realizing how much of human history has been manipulated by creating a "we" versus "they" mentality.

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Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Southern Literary Studies) 1st Edition

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