Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National CharacterWilliam Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee was one of the most famous works of American history written in the 1960s. The book is an intellectual history of the South before the Civil War, the perception of it in the North, and the effect it had upon the nation in the years from 1800 to 1860. First published in 1961 and out of print for several years, Taylor's classic study remains essential to the study of the pre-Civil War South. |
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Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character William Robert Taylor Limited preview - 1993 |
Common terms and phrases
Adams American appeared aristocratic became become Beverley Tucker Boston Caruthers Cavalier century character Charleston civilization colonial cultural Dabney Carr Dangerfield Daniel Webster democratic England English Europe feelings felt fiction finally forced George Ticknor George Tucker Hale's Hamlet Harriet Harvey Birch Henry's hero historical Ibid ideal intellectual James James Kirke Paulding Jefferson John John Pendleton Kennedy Kennedy kind later Legaré legend Letters literary literature lived moral natural Negro never North Northern Northwood novel novelists Partisan Patrick Henry patriotism Paulding Paulding's plantation planter political Porgy portrayed problem provincial Randolph Revolution Revolutionary Rhett Romilly Roundhead Sarah Hale Sarah Josepha Hale seemed sense sentimental Simms's sketches slave slavery social society South Carolina Southern gentleman story Stowe Swallow Barn thirties Tidewater tion traits transcendent Yankee Uncle Uncle Tom's Cabin Virginia Washington West Whig William Gilmore Simms Wirt's women writing wrote York young
Popular passages
Page 328 - Beat! beat! drums!— blow! bugles! blow! Make no parley— stop for no expostulation, Mind not the timid— mind not the weeper or prayer, Mind not the old man beseeching the young man, Let not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties, Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses, So strong you thump O terrible drums— so loud you bugles blow.
Page 67 - ... doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature ; out of terrible Druids...
Page 113 - But, Sir, if it be imagined that by this mutual quotation and commendation ; if it be supposed that, by casting the characters of the drama, assigning to each his part, to one the attack, to another the cry of onset...
Page 111 - ... best known to himself, to strike the South through me, the most unworthy of her servants. He has crossed the border, he has invaded the State of South Carolina, is making war upon her citizens, and endeavoring to overthrow her principles and her institutions. Sir, when the gentleman provokes me to such a conflict, I meet him at the threshold. I will struggle while I have life, for our altars and our fire-sides, and if God gives me strength, I will drive back the invader discomfited.
Page 28 - I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the really good and wise. In some instances, wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them; but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society.
Page 328 - Will you hazard so desperate a, step while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you fly from have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from — will you risk the commission of so fearful a mistake ? All profess to be content in the Union, if all constitutional rights can be maintained.
Page 359 - I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears ; and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other.
Page 95 - This, one suspects, is true of all "national characters," or (as I would prefer to call them) national identities — so true, in fact that one may begin rather than end with the proposition that a nation's identity is derived from the ways in which history has, as it were, counterpointed certain opposite potentialities; the ways in which it lifts this counterpoint to a unique style of civilization, or lets it disintegrate into mere contradiction.