Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/415

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WILLIAM PETERFIELD TRENT
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civilization of the tidewater, but he wears upon his forehead, whether he dwell on hill or plain, that "freedom of the mountaineer" of which Wordsworth sang. His fathers, whether they owned slaves or not, never ceased to be democrats, and so he is a democrat through and through, of a less unpretending type than the North Carolinian. Through the valor and the exertions of those fathers he has a wide and fair domain in which to choose his dwelling place, but whether he has his abode among the mineral treasures of his mountains, or in the blue-grass plains, or amid the low-lying fields that whiten with the cotton boll, he is always and everywhere the open-handed, self-reliant, easily excited son of equality and freedom that Wellington's regulars went down before in the fatal trenches of New Orleans. In fact, the Tennesseean is not, strictly speaking, a Southerner at all. The basis of his character is Western, and though his sympathies were divided in the Civil War, and though he helps to make up the "Solid South," he has really as little affiliation with the Southerners of the Atlantic coast as Andrew Jackson had with John C. Calhoun. He has not, indeed, the murderous intentions of his great hero and idol, but when he counts himself as being of the Southern people he ought to change his preposition and say that he is with them.

The other Southwestern states naturally have more distinctively Southern features than Tennessee, but we need hardly go into particulars. Arkansas and Texas are as yet too new to have stood for much in the history of Southern culture, and save in certain localities they are still in the transition stage common to pioneer states. When their various strains of population have been fused and their immense territory has been really settled, the emerging civilization will be almost inevitably Western in tone. It will not be Western in exactly the same way that the civilization of Wisconsin and Illinois is Western, but then the civilization of the latter states differs from that of