Cool Brains

Nicholas Guyatt

  • Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South by Michael O’Brien
    North Carolina, 1354 pp, £64.95, March 2004, ISBN 0 8078 2800 9

The Founding Fathers of the United States were mainly Southerners: between them, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison can take credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, winning the Revolutionary War, and preserving America’s independence through its turbulent early decades. The republic was governed by Southern presidents for 40 of its first 48 years, a period of dominance interrupted only by the single-term administrations of John Adams and his son John Quincy. Conversely, 24 years after Andrew Jackson of Tennessee left the White House in 1837, the next generation of Southerners led 11 states out of the Union, founding a Southern Confederacy to preserve the institution of slavery from the meddling of Abraham Lincoln. As a result, the United States was temporarily dissolved, and the North embarked on a war of unprecedented destructiveness to correct the South’s mistakes.

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[*] ‘Orpheus Turning: The Present State of Southern History’, in The State of US History, edited by Melvyn Stokes (Berg, 448 pp., £17.99, March 2003, 1 85973 502 9).