‘Two Ships’ That Launched Incompatible Strands of American Culture

‘If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.’ — attributed to Rudyard KiplingBecause the Civil War’s embers are as cold as winter, it is safe, and as fun as summer, to revisit Northern and Southern cultural antagonisms that once shattered national tranquility. So, if you read only one American history book this summer, shame on you, but make it David S. Reynolds’s “Two Ships.” It will, among other things, inoculate you against the mischievous novels of Walter Scott.Mr. Reynolds, a City University of New York historian, uses his subtitle — “Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America” — to assert this: The White Lion, the ship that first brought slaves to Virginia, and the Mayflower, which brought to New England Puritans in flight from monarchical absolutism and Anglican bossiness, incubated two ultimately incompatible American futures. Mr. Reynolds’s powerful demonstration is that his story — the symbolism of the two ships — is not his. It was ubiquitous in American political rhetoric until, happily, it no longer was, as the nation transcended old categories.Like any binary applied to a complex society, the two-ships division always obscured and distorted much. Still, Southerners, not without reason, came to regard the “Puritan North” as zealots persecuting heretics, conducting witch trials, regulating personal behavior, and celebrating Oliver Cromwell’s beheading of King Charles I, while lecturing the South on its (obvious) sins. Northerners came to disdain the “Cavalier South” for having imported the English aristocracy’s preferences for social hierarchy, the Church of England rituals, and dissolute living associated with leisure, gambling, lavish entertaining, dueling, and other attributes of a society obsessed with feudal notions of chivalry and “honor.”Only small minorities in both regions, especially the 300 or so FFVs (First Families of Virginia), exemplified these traits. History’s trajectory is, however, disproportionately influenced by such minorities.Mr. Reynolds says the Cavalier culture rooted in Virginia had “virtually died out” by 1776, when the Revolution temporarily brought North and South together. Distinctly non-Cavalier Virginians (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others not notably religious) played leading roles. Yet in 1820, the Missouri Compromise embedded slavery and sectionalism in the center of politics. Mr. Reynolds says two centuries of “Cavalier values of hierarchy and subordination” then reasserted themselves. And “the momentous juxtaposition of the two ships in antislavery speeches and writings” began anew. “Distortion,” Mr. Reynolds writes, “is intrinsic to cultural memory.” Southerners remembered the Mayflower as laden with fanaticisms, including abolitionism.A Missourian responded, diagnosing “the Sir Walter disease.” Mark Twain blamed the Scottish writer Walter Scott, whose romantic re-creations of the past (“Ivanhoe” and such) permeated Southern culture. Twain thought the “sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society” made Southerners cherish “bogus decorations” and ranks, doing “more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.”He exaggerated somewhat. But many others chimed in. Abraham Lincoln’s Navy secretary, Gideon Welles, blamed the Civil War on Southerners who “studied Scott’s novels, and fancied themselves cavaliers” and “a superior and better race.”Lincoln, to whom the nation was always a house undivided, avoided the Puritan-versus-Cavalier dichotomy. Many others embraced it. The New York Herald, the nation’s most popular newspaper, said “the Puritan and the Cavalier … will always fight when they meet. There is nothing in common between them but hate.”Cavaliers, nourished by myths, disdained the materialistic North. Fortunately, they were ground down by the North’s material strength. There is much to be said for materialism undergirding a noble cause.Much later, the South — and, regrettably, the nation — experienced yet another resurrection of Cavalier-cum-Walter-Scott sentimentality. In 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s magnolia-scented novel “Gone with the Wind” became an instant sensation. This was one year after a Cavalier in spirit, the Virginian editor Douglas Southall Freeman, published, to critical acclaim and commercial success, another slab of Southern sympathy: the final two volumes of his Pulitzer Prize-winning four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee.Then, as now, and as ever, the nation needed one of Mark Twain’s inoculations against nonsense. The antebellum South, like slavery itself, was in essence monarchical — the divine right of some to rule others. And Huckleberry Finn understood: “All kings is mostly rapscallions.”Reynolds’s two ships, whose voyages though the nation’s memory lasted more than two centuries, have sailed far over history’s horizon. Good riddance. One measure of our national progress is that both have been supplanted as national emblems by a raft on a river, carrying neither a Puritan nor a Cavalier, just Huck and Jim.The Washington Post

‘Two Ships’ That Launched Incompatible Strands of American Culture

‘Two Ships’ That Launched Incompatible Strands of American Culture

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