Richard M. Weaver - Weaver's Old South

Weaver's Old South

The Southern Tradition at Bay, the title under which Weaver's 1943 doctoral dissertation was published in 1968 after his death, surveyed the post-Appomatox literature of the states that were part of the Confederacy. He revealed what he considered its continuities with the ante-bellum era. Weaver also discussed certain Southerners who dissented from this tradition, such as Walter Hines Page, George Washington Cable, and Henry W. Grady, whom he termed "Southern liberals."

Weaver identified four traditional Southern characteristics: "a feudal theory of society, a code of chivalry, the ancient concept of the gentleman, and a noncreedal faith" (Young 78). According to him, the Southern feudal system was centered on the legitimate pride a family line derived from linking its name to a piece of land (Young 81). For Weaver, land ownership gave the individual a much needed "stability, responsibility, dignity, and sentiment" (Scotchie 25).

Yet in his Ideas Have Consequences, he downplayed the materialistic notion of ownership. He asserted that private property was "the last metaphysical right" of the individual (Nash 100). Southern chivalry and gentlemen's behavior, on the other hand, emphasized a paternalistic personal honor, and decorum over competition and cleverness (Young 83). Weaver claimed that women preferred the romanticized soldier to the materialistic businessman (Scotchie 36).

The noncreedal faith Weaver advocated grew out of what he termed the South's "older religiousness" (Young 84). This "religion" focused on a respect for tradition and nature, and for the Anglican/Episcopal church (Young 84-85), the established church in Virginia and south during the colonial era. Weaver agreed with the traditional Christian notion that external science and technology could not save man, who is born a sinner in need of redemption (Scotchie 21). Although he was a non-practicing Protestant, he showed admiration for religious tradition through his reverence for the written word as a grounding force in a morally unstable society (Young 86).

Weaver claimed that the South was the "last non-materialist civilization in the Western World" (Scotchie 17). Weaver came to advocate a revival of Southern traditions as the only cure for a commodity-based capitalism. He believed it was a way to combat the social degradation he witnessed while living in Chicago.

Ironically, Weaver's ancestral region, Asheville, North Carolina, was not typical of the American South whose virtues he came to revere and extol. It is instead part of the Appalachian upland, settled mainly by persons of Scots-Irish ancestry and evangelical Presbyterian affiliation. Slavery was almost unknown there, because the soil and climate were not suited to cotton or any other plantation agriculture. Instead, the main economic activity was subsistence farming on small freeholds, with many families living in serious poverty. North Carolina's decision to secede from the Union in 1861 was far from unanimous, and many Appalachian men refused to fight for the Confederacy during the Civil War. The westernmost Congressional district of North Carolina, which includes Asheville, has mostly voted Republican since the Civil War.