Transcriber's Note:
Transliteration has been added to Greek text .
THE CREED OF
THE OLD SOUTH
1865-1915
BY
BASIL L. GILDERSLEEVE
BALTIMORE
THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS
1915
1865
1915
Copyright, 1915,
BY
THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS
CONTENTS
PREFACE
In the last score of years I have often been urged by friends andsympathizers to bring out as a separate issue my article, The Creed ofthe Old South, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly of January, 1892,and which attracted wider attention than anything I have ever written.As this is the jubilee of the great year 1865, the memories of thatdistant time come thronging back to the actors in the momentousstruggle, and I am prompted to publish in more accessible form my recordof views and impressions that may seem strange even to the survivors ofthe conflict, now rapidly passing away. To this paper I have added anessay on a cognate theme—A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War—whichwas published in the Atlantic Monthly of September, 1897, and which hasbeen accepted by the eminent historian, Mr. Rhodes, as an historicaldocument. These[Pg 6] specimens of what I call my Sargasso work ("Weeds fromthe Atlantic") are reproduced by the kind permission of the HoughtonMifflin Company. A few slips of pen and type have been corrected, and afew notes out of the mass of literature evoked by the first essay, orakin to it, have been added for the benefit of the third generation.
The Johns Hopkins University,
June, 1915.
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH
This article was prepared (in 1891) at the instance of Mr.Horace Scudder, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who had projected aseries of papers to be written by men who by virtue of education,intellectual endowment and social position were supposed to be high andlifted up above vulgar passion and prejudice. The business of theseelect gentlemen was to set forth the motives that urged them to anactive participation in so rude an affair as war. After publication inthe Atlantic, the essays were to be gathered into a book an