The Politically Incorrect Guide to The South (and Why It Will Rise Again)

By Clint Johnson
Sidebars, bibliography, index, softcover, 262 pp., 2006. Regnery Publishing Inc., One Massachusetts Ave., Washington, D. C. 20001, $19.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: John F. Marszalek
John F. Marszalek is Giles Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Mississippi State University and author of numerous books including Sherman, A Soldier's Passion for Order (1993), republished in a new paperback edition by Southern Illinois University Press in the fall of 2007.

Review:
Reading this book is a trip back to a past when Southern authors wrote about a United States in which virtue, truth and light existed only below the Mason-Dixon Line, and crassness and greed existed north of it. In these publications, the South was the center of all good in American society, while an evil or near-evil North brutally kept the South from its rightful place of national leadership.

Southerners (i.e. white Southerners), the argument ran, had brought civilization to the nation and defended it against the hordes of barbarians inhabiting northern climes. Southern loss in the Civil War (referred to as the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression, or the War for Southern Independence) was a disaster not just for the South but for the nation as a whole. The only hope for salvation was for the South to rise again and restore its proper dominance.

All it takes to see how this modern book reflects such long discredited notions is to scan the table of contents. The Introduction is entitled "Slamming the South" and Chapter 1 is "Southern by the Grace of God: What Other Regions Ain't Got but Sure Wish They Did."

Later on, Chapter 6 states: "The South Starts and Wins the [American] Revolution." Not to be outdone, Chapter 15 is entitled 'The South Saves the World," with sub-titles "Southerners won World War II in the Pacific Theater" and Southerners won the European Theater." And the clincher is "The Nation Should Thank God for the South."

As for the Civil War, this conflict is explained in Chapter 11 as "Total War versus Noble War," while in an earlier chapter, a heading trumpets "The War wasn't about slavery: it was about states' rights."

Chapter 12 informs the reader that the Union army, led by Grant and Sherman, was racist, while the South "paid black Confederates the same wages, gave them free uniforms and rations, and allowed them to march side by side with the rest of the Confederate army." Then, though admitting that no black regiments were authorized until the war was almost over, the author argues that there were Confederate soldiers throughout the Southern army.

The Union army, he continues, was "disproportionately an immigrant army, while the Confederate Army was almost entirely native born." Union generals were horrible, while Confederate officers were praiseworthy. And, of course, the author insists, Lincoln, the man universally considered the nation's greatest president, was actually a despicable racist tyrant.

There is not enough space in any review to list all the inaccuracies that jump off the pages of this book, selective prose masquerading as history. In an age when professional historians no longer write from a sectionally biased perspective, this book is indeed unfortunate, demonstrating no familiarity with the huge body of historical work that does not fit its preconceived notions.

This book is not "Politically Incorrect," as the title puts it, it is "Historically Inaccurate."

[Editor's Note: This volume is the ninth book in Regnery's "Politically Incorrect" series.]