Essay on "The Irrepressible Conflict"
by Robert W. Watson
(15 September 2001)

The most controversial and notable historian of the twentieth century was Professor Frank Lawrence Owsley. But as to be expected, Owsley is unknown, because he does not conform to the elite's historical worldview. As a professor of history at Vanderbilt University and the University of Alabama, Owsley challenged the accepted American myths about the War for Southern Independence and about Southern history in general.

Acknowledged as his greatest piece of research, Owsley wrote Plain Folk of the Old South in 1949 and caused no small stir within the hermitage of academics. This book proves that the antebellum South was composed primarily of non-slave-holding yeoman farmers, whom the New England historians call "poor white trash." Owsley argues that these plain people played a major role by helping to shape the culture of the South that endures today. Other books by Owsley about the War for Southern Independence, including States Rights in the Confederacy and King Cotton Diplomacy, remain unchallenged by later research. According to Virginia Rock in her biographical sketch about the historian, Professor Owsley had the qualities of a great storyteller as well as a historian: "The best historians have been characterized as storytellers, men of letters who go beyond the mere analysis of fact....In practice and philosophy, Owsley as historian belongs to the humanities." Such a statement would normally be considered redundant, because history has always belonged to the humanities. However, with the shift that made history more "scientific" in the early twentieth century, Owsley refused to follow the trend, and he remains solidly in the tradition of Gibbons and Carlyle, who wrote history for the common man, and not for scholarly journals.

Professor Owsley grew up on a farm in Alabama. With this early contact with the soil, Owsley understood the advantages of agrarianism. As a storytelling historian, Owsley embraced the tenets of the agrarian life, because according to him, agrarianism encourages "art, music, and literature [to] emerge from the dark cramped holes where industrial insecurity and industrial insensitiveness have often driven them." Thus, Owsley's contribution to I'll Take My Stand, "The Irrepressible Conflict," is a people's essay with arguments that are easy to follow, yet irrefutable in logic. Owsley declares that the irrepressible conflict is the struggle between two civilisations. One civilisation seeks to build autonomous communities without outside interference, while the other demands standardisation in political, economic, and social spheres of life and is marked by intolerance and zealotry.

Owsley points out that there had been two conquests of the Confederate States of America. The first conquest had two phases: one of war and the other of peace. The invasion of the Southern nation was bad enough, but Owsley states that the peace was even worse. In fact, the conquered South experienced a "peace" that has never been duplicated in the history of the world: "There was no generosity." Unlike other conquered nations, the Confederate States of America was not allowed to rebuild. Well after the shooting stopped, Southern homes were still being burned to the ground under the instigation of Northern abolitionists. Disarmed and disenfranchised, the Southern people were plundered and abused by opportunists and hateful "do-gooders." Agents for the Freedmen's Bureau, Northern schoolmarms, and Northern preachers incited the former slaves against white Southerners. What the invading armies did not destroy or steal, the carpetbaggers and scalawags gleaned.

But the second conquest was more insidious. Owsley says that, even though the Southern people were humiliated beyond belief, there was yet something else that had to be conquered: the Southern mind. New Englanders like James Russell Lowell were convinced that all Southerners were barbarians and needed to be taught the rudiments of "civilised" society. The elite was certain that the old guard of Confederates was beyond redemption. Since it offered little if any threat, the Old South remnant was to be ignored. It was not worth the effort to uproot these folks; they were to be left alone, like the stump that the farmer ignores when he ploughs around it. Thus, the target group to receive "education" was the younger generation, who would be taught under Yankee terms using a Yankee history. After a few short years, Northern schoolmarms exceeded even the imagination of the most crazed abolitionist. The freedmen hated the white Southerner, and the few children that attended the common schools were thoroughly ashamed of their parents and culture. Owsley explains, "One would judge from the average history text and from the recitations conducted by the Northern schoolma'am that the Puritans and Pilgrim fathers were the ancestors of every self-respecting American." All references to the Southern role in developing the United States of America were effectively eliminated.

The reason that the second conquest was so successful is that the intellectual life of the South disappeared for over thirty years after the war. This is understandable. The defeat of the Confederacy was so complete and so humiliating, that hundreds of talented writers, thinkers, and leaders retreated into a self-imposed exile in order to maintain the appearance of living. Many of these men and women even refused to read newspapers, because these became the organs of Northern propaganda and a constant reminder of the ongoing pillaging of the Southern culture and morals.

But Owsley reminds us that "a people cannot live under condemnation and upon the philosophy of their conquerors." Oddly, Columbia University in New York can be regarded as the renewal of a true Southern history. Professor William Archibald Dunning did a remarkable job when he attracted several Southern students to research the War between the States and the South's reconstruction. The graduate students successfully challenged the myths of Yankee moral superiority and smugness with works like Fleming's Documentary History of Reconstruction and Sequel of Appomattox and Hamilton's Reconstruction of North Carolina. Later Southern writers like Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren joined the fray. However, Owsley concludes, "The South, confused, ill informed because taught by an alien doctrine so long, unconsciously accepts portions of the Northern legend and philosophy; sullenly and without knowing why, it rejects other portions, and withal knows not where to turn." Therefore, the stated thesis of Owsley is his desire to have Southerners become re-orientated by his helping "to point out the untruth of the self-righteous Northern legend which makes the South the war criminal."

Owsley reviews many explanations that are used to pinpoint the cause of the War between the States. The rote answers by historians like Rhodes and MacMaster that it was a war of good against evil fails to be satisfactory. Slavery with its expansion into Western territories, tariffs, doctrine of states rights, and the annexation of Texas have "too long been the red herring dragged across the trail." Indeed, if the irrepressible conflict is viewed as only one of these issues, then those who espouse such positions have no understanding of the depth of the conflict. According to Owsley, two civilisations collided and remain irreconcilable even to this day. The Confederate soldier fought and died for a society that centred its being in the "cottage and the villa, not the factory." It was a civilisation that valued the development of a culture and personal relationships. In order to justify their chosen way of life, the Southern academies prepared their students in the Greek and Latin languages, because the Greeks and the early Romans epitomised the agrarian life. The classics were studied and adapted to the Southern culture.

For whatever reasons, the North rejected the agrarian way of life in order to develop a society based on commercialism and industry. In the seventeenth century, New England opted for its schools to be centres of vocational and social training. Studies in Latin and Greek were abandoned, and room was made for mathematics, surveying, and even fort-building. The Northern interests did not mesh well with the agrarian South at all. Thus the political conflict was manifested in the halls of Congress such that the two sections tried to gain control of the central government. A balance of power prevailed for a short time, but when the industrial party of the North carried the election in 1860, the deep South refused to play the game any longer.

Owsley correctly observes that the Republican Party sought programs and legislation that had doubtful constitutionality. The Republican platform included a subsidy to shipping concerns (centred in New England), internal improvements (centred in New England) to move manufactured goods to exploit the Western and Southern markets, a government-controlled bank (centred in New England), and a high protective tariff to help American industry (centred in New England). All of these positions were opposed by the South, because they were unconstitutional and were contrary to the self-interest of Southerners. Politically, the conflict pitted the Northern activism against the Southern resistance to keep the central government within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution.

In his essay, Owsley offers an excellent synopsis about the issue of slavery in the antebellum United States. Owsley argues that with the profitability of cotton, the Northern industrialists became upset as they saw their interests being threatened (i.e., diminishing bottom lines on the balance sheets). Owsley remarks that slavery, while a part of the agrarian system, was not an essential one. We must remember that the few plantations were not the sole producers of cotton. Thousands of yeoman farmers also grew the crop, and all of Southern society benefited from "King Cotton." Up until 1831, slavery did not divide the regions, because the North realised that the South was a "victim" of the system, rather than the creator of it. But this gentlemen's agreement came to an end.

Slavery now became a test of fellowship after William Lloyd Garrison declared slavery to be criminal. Through the ridiculous charges by Garrison and with the aid of Northern Congregationalist preachers, the South was quickly branded as a "black brothel." Since the institution of slavery was now attacked as immoral, the reaction of Southerners was to go to the Bible and justify slavery as not only moral, but as a blessing for the African. The result of this flurry of studying the Bible caused the South to embrace a literal understanding of the Scriptures, which paved the way for the revivals that spread through the Confederate camps years later. Meanwhile, since the Northern preachers were unable to counter the Scriptures, they rejected the Biblical teachings argued by the South, turned to rationalism, and fell into apostasy by having greater faith in man's wisdom, rather than having faith in God's word. The result was the Southern culture embraced orthodox Christianity and the New England culture adopted humanism and transcendentalism; thus, not only a political wedge, but a spiritual one was now driven between the regions as well.

According to Owsley, the agrarian way of life is also marked by an aversion to centralisation, whether in government, schools, or churches. This aversion is popularly called "state rights," a doctrine that was well developed in the early nineteenth century. While it is often incorrectly asserted that state rights was merely a mechanism to protect the states from the central government's intruding into the slavery issue, Owsley insists that the doctrine has greater significance: "It was the doctrine of an agrarian society meant in the first place to protect the South as a whole against the encroachments of the industrial and commercial North….It would also protect one part of the South against another." The latter part of this argument is often overlooked in any discussion about state rights. In any nation there are countless minority interests involved; therefore, state rights did not stop at the state level. Even within a state, such as Georgia, agrarian interests can conflict with urban interests. In order that a majority of one interest does not overpower the others, state rights recognise the primary unit of government is at the county level where interests are less apt to collide. But if they do, then the local community can work it out among the citizens. Such a view of politics avoids an activist role of creating positive law from the top, but promotes an inactive role by leaving communities alone, to work out their own destiny and to create their own solutions as neighbours.

The event that caused the unnecessary deaths of so many people in New York was set in motion in 1861 by New England's lust for money, for centralisation in politics and in economics, and for empire. As Owsley says, "The South had to be crushed out; it was in the way; it impeded the progress of the machine." After the South was conquered, occupied, and humiliated, there has been no check upon the central government's misguided ambition that has created formidable and implacable enemies across the world. The central government with its standing army has waged a relentless war against alien nations, nations who do not appreciate any American inter-meddling. The central government's attitude has been the same as it was in 1861: those who refuse to submit to its august will must be crushed.

It is high time for the citizens of the American empire to re-evaluate Owsley's "The Irrepressible Conflict." The central government even with its massive budget for "defence" has proven itself incapable of defending a single citizen from foreign violence. The agrarian solution is simple. The worshippers of the American juggernaut need to stop sacrificing themselves beneath the wheels of its cart. Industrialism and militarism fail to benefit anyone, but only has brought untold misery to millions of peace-loving people. If the American empire will set the example of decentralising its institutions and of minding its own business at home, then, and only then, will its citizens finally have something worthy to be exported to the rest of the world: FREEDOM.

May we read the works of Frank Lawrence Owsley with new insight and urgency, and may God help us all to see the error of our ways.