Queen of the Confederacy
I want to look at Southerners going back to Europe long after the roots were planted, especially in the period before the second War of Independence began in 1861. The reason for looking at this is what it tells us about Southerners. One of the things it tells us is that we Southerners were a people. Our relationship to Europe had not much in common with that of those other people, the troublesome ones building their City upon a Hill up in Massachusetts. More than one Southerner encountering Yankees in Europe first began to realize that we were not the same people.
By the 1830s if not before Americans had perceived the eminence of the German universities and begun to frequent them. When Johnston Pettigrew arrived from Charleston to enter the University of Berlin in 1850, there were about 20 Americans there pursuing advanced studies of one sort or another. With only a few exceptions they were from Massachusetts and South Carolina, and in the unfamiliar environment it was obvious that there were two different national characters present under one citizenship. Their goals, motives, and habits, and especially their personal virtues were distinct. Pettigrew wrote that the Yankees were studious and stingy, the Southerners generous and sociable.
He added that the Yankees made themselves disagreeable by constant boasting about the superiority of the United States, except for the South, of course, which they relentlessly slandered to any foreigner who would listen.
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