Things About the Southern Lifestyle

1. Confederate Fruit Cake. A must to try! If you don't get it right the first time, try it again!
2. Southern Food
   • as an expression of affection;
   • Grits: a commentary
3. On the Civil War: Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote. (Below)
4. How Southern gentlemen view ladies. (Below)

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"For the Civil War is not a closed chapter in our dusty past. It is one of the great datum points in American history; a place from which we can properly measure the dimensions of almost everything that has happened to us since. With its lights and its shadows, its rights and its wrongs, its heroic highlights and its tragic overtones - it was not an ending but a beginning. It was not something that we painfully worked our way to, but something from which we made a fresh start. It opened an era instead of closing one; and it left us, fianlly, not with something completed, but with a bit of unfinished business which is of very lively concern after all of us have been gathered to our fathers. Forget the swords-and-roses aspect, the deep sentimental implications, the gloss of romance; here was something to be studied, to be prayed over, and at last to be lived up to." -- Bruce Catton, America Goes to War, the Civil War and Its Meaning in American Culture

"Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean REALLY based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement with the European wars, beginning with the first World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us - what we are, and it opened to us what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the 20th century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the 19th century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads."
-- Shelby Foote, in the Ken Burns PBS series.
[Italics mine]

• "Southern Women see no contradiction in mixing strength with gentleness."  S. McKern

• "The friend asked why the rebel army had continued to fight when they knew defeat was certain. Senator Williams said the Confederate soldiers were simply afraid to quit and go home because of the women."  G. Cotton

• "When I was growing up in the South, it was expected by polite society that one be faithful to God and beauty."  R.F. Dew

• "The men, the surgeon said, were dying, and the ladies looked pityingly down at them, and tried to help them, though they did wear blue coats, and none of their own were there to weep over or help them."
  Cornelia McDonald, A Diary with Reminescenses of the War, 1934  [Italics mine]