There Is No South

The culture of the South does not exist. From the frontier cowboys to the modern Texas rancher, there has been a long campaign of propaganda that has continued from folk stories, through film and now via country music. With all its southern charm and southern hospitality, with its southern belles and southern cuisine – none of it is real. As I explain further, I would urge you to draw parallels to our current time. As a poet, I usually stay away from using sources and rely heavily on intuition and feeling, but for the purposes of this important point, I have sought the direct quotations of General Grant, the revered hero of the Civil War and the 18^th president of the United States. There are many criticisms of the man himself and of his presidency, but I will leave those aside the for the expediency of this argument. Grant had a unique perspective of the south, and more so Texas, from before it was a state to when it seceded from the very union that supported it. Grant was stationed with the Army in the Texas territory before America declared war on Mexico in 1846, only 15 years before the American Civil war broke out in 1861.

As some may already know, the cowboy culture that is celebrated today actually originated in Mexico and is traced all the way back to the 1500s. Those images of bucking broncos, sitting beneath the stars in the prairies and deserts, lassoing livestock – none of these are uniquely American. They are the result of Hollywood productions, popularized by John Wayne and other actors. However, the Indian, the cowboy counterpart, is very real, and very American, but not in the way that people like to admit.

As people drifted down from the Atlantic states, the government of Mexico actually allowed the early Texans to reside there, almost acting as stewards of the land. But as Grant explains, "Texas was originally a state belonging to the republic of Mexico… An empire in territory, it had but a very sparse population, until settled by Americans who had received authority from Mexico to colonize. These colonists paid very little attention to the supreme government, and introduced slavery into the state almost from the start, though the constitution of Mexico did not, nor does it now, sanction that institution. Soon they set up an independent government of their own, and war existed, between Texas and Mexico, in name from that time until 1836, when active hostilities very nearly ceased upon the capture of Santa Anna, the Mexican President. Before long, however, the same people – who with permission of Mexico had colonized Texas, and afterwards set up slavery there, and then seceded as soon as they felt strong enough to do so – offered themselves and the State to the United States, and in 1845 their offer was accepted. The occupation, separation and annexation were, from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.”

In other words, Texas was designed as a slave state and was rebellious from its inception, having disregarded all the laws of Mexico which allowed it to exist and to thrive. A few years later, it would further its rebellion and secede from the Union that first came to its defense, expending soldiers and resources, then further bought the land from Mexico. Grant said simply, “The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war.”

He explained more eloquently, “Texas and the territory brought into the Union in consequence of annexation, were purchased with both blood and treasure ; and Texas, with a domain greater than that of any European state except Russia, was permitted to retain as state property all the public lands within its borders. It would have been ingratitude and injustice of the most flagrant sort for this State to withdraw from the Union after all that had been spent and done to introduce her…”

When the Civil War broke out, and Grant and the other soldiers were tasked with suppressing the rebellion, a new identity of the Southern states emerged: slave states. The slave-owners, while small in number, had the majority of the wealth and the political power. They would preach States' Rights in their rebellious cause, but the hypocrisy was always apparent.

“The South claimed the sovereignty of States,” Grant stated. “But claimed the right to coerce into their confederation such States as they wanted, that is, all the States where slavery existed. They did not seem to think this course inconsistent. The fact is, the Southern slave-owners believed that, in some way, the ownership of slaves conferred a sort of patent of nobility—a right to govern independent of the interest or wishes of those who did not hold such property. They convinced themselves, first, of the divine origin of the institution and, next, that that particular institution was not safe in the hands of any body of legislators but themselves.”

But the slave-owners were not doing the fighting themselves. The average Confederate soldier was a common man, from a poorer background, who couldn't afford slaves at all. Grant made the provocative statement that they needed emancipated themselves. He said, “The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre—what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation. Under the old regime they were looked down upon by those who controlled all the affairs in the interest of slave-owners, as poor white trash who were allowed the ballot so long as they cast it according to direction.”

Looked down upon by the wealthy and used as a means to uphold the institution that granted them their great wealth… Sound familiar?

“…The South was a military camp,” Grant observed, “And there were very few people of a suitable age to be in the army who were not in it.” This was their identity as a people. The divine institution of Slavery was their cause.

After Grant defeated Lee, the rest of the Southern Generals surrendered in 1865. In the years that followed, the racist roots of slavery remained embedded in the South, from Reconstruction and Jim Crow, through the Civil Rights movement, to the modern-day MAGA invasion of American politics. The rest is history, as they say.

And what about that southern charm? The famous phrase, “Bless your heart!” is known to be condescending in nature. It neither expresses sincere concern nor invokes God's blessing at all. It's a sly remark to conceal condemnation. Southern sarcasm, if you will. And as for southern belle, that term comes from the plantation class of the Antebellum south. The word belle is literally French for “beautiful” and the word was only evoked for white women belonging to the landowning class. And speaking of French, we know that their food is heavily inspired by the French, along with all the influences of the nearby Caribbean isles.

So, the imagery of the cowboy, the rebellious hero, the southern belle – it isn't real. There's a reason the country music and the football culture feels empty. It's because it is. The true culture of the South is much darker. The South is insolent, lawless, treacherous, ungrateful, self-righteous, haughty, generationally poor, proudly uneducated, racist, and worse.

And yes, it's true that some of these things can be said about the original colonies of the United States, but what's also true is that these states have outgrown these things over time. The South, in fact, has remained proud of these labels. This is evident in their favorite saying, “The South will rise again.” The South is a lost cause, not because of injustices set upon them, but because of their ignorance and inability to evolve. They will never rise again, but now they seem to have settled on something else entirely: they want to drag the country, and the rest of us, down with them.