Saturday, August 15, 2015

A Clear-Eyed Look at the Old South

 chicora woods

Now that a third Reconstruction is very much underway in the South, it is more needful than ever to know and understand her history and her ways of living. Thankfully, Mrs. Elizabeth Allston Pringle, a South Carolina plantation owner and rice planter (1845-1921), has left us a valuable guidebook for doing such things in her written account of her family’s life in South Carolina, Chronicles of Chicora Wood (Atlanta, Ga.: Cherokee Publishing Company, 1950 [1976 reprint]).

As the plantation class was the ideal most in the Old South aspired to, the views of Mrs Pringle and her family may be taken more or less for those of Southerners as a whole at that time.

Since it is foremost on the minds of many right now in the debate over Confederate symbols, let us first mention slavery. Mrs. Pringle also brings up this subject early on in her narrative, saying,

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