ear that Cash sees this mindset as self-serving, insular, and moribund.
What Cash writes about is the Southern zeitgeist of his era, the first half of this century. Cash wants to show how this zeitgeist came to be. He looks first to the agricultural society of the South prior to the Civil War. Cash notes that before the American Revolution, the South played little part in American history. The agrarian culture of the South would develop over time and would be very different from the culture of the industrial North, and this fact would be a source of dissension between the two regions. In one sense, the South is the South precisely because the North exists for contrast. The roots of separation between the North and the South can be traced back to the early colonial period. The cleavages were embodied in the developing Federalist Party representing the mercantile interests of the North and the Republican Party representing the agrarian interests of the South. The two regions had different philosophies of government. Originally, the coastal region wanted little government interference, while the people of the interior wanted government protection. These philosophies shifted with time until the South was the region opposing government interference and the North was more willing to seek government control and protection.
The South would develop as it did because of the nature of the land, the climate, the sorts of agricultural products that could be grown, and the need for a certain level of labor that wa answered by the slave system. Much of America was shaped by its sense of the frontier, and in the South the frontier played an important role. More properly, it was the idea of the frontier that shaped American society. American history involves a mixture of histories, cultures, and national backgrounds brought together in what was truly the New World when it was discovered by European settlers. At the time, there we...