To understand the South is to feel the pathos in its history. This aura of pathos is more than a delusion of historians, more than the vague sensation one gets when looking down an avenue of somber, moss-draped live oaks leading to stately ruins or to nothing at all. For Southerners live in the shadow of a real tragedy; they know, better than most other Americans, that little ironies fill the history of mankind, and that large disasters from time to time unexpectedly help to shape its course.

Their tragedy did not begin with the ordeal of Reconstruction, or with the agony of the civil war, but with the growth of a “peculiar institution” (as they called it) in ante-bellum days, whose spiritual stresses and unremitting social tensions became an inescapable part of life in the Old South.