SOURCE: Simpson, Lewis P. “The Southern Novelist and Southern Nationalism.” In The Man of Letters in New England and the South: Essays on the History of the Literary Vocation in America, pp. 201-28. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

In the following essay, Simpson considers the development of the myth of the Old South as a spiritually redemptive community.

The Civil War, Richard M. Weaver says in his essay entitled “The South and the American Union,” confirmed in the South “the feeling that it was in spirit and needs a separate nation.” Weaver continues: “It [the South] might be viewed as an American Ireland, Poland, or Armenia, not indeed unified by a different religious allegiance from its invader, but different in its way of life, different in the values it ascribed to things by reason of its world outlook. … The South has in a way made a religion...