SOURCE: Ridgely, J. V. “The Confederacy and the Martyred South.” In Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature, pp. 77-88. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1980.

In the following essay, Ridgely studies the literature of a culturally-isolated South during the Reconstruction era.

Hath not the morning dawned with added light? And shall not evening call another star Out of the infinite regions of the night, To mark this day in Heaven? At last, we are A nation among nations; and the world Shall soon behold in many a distant port                     Another flag unfurled! 

The lines are from “Ethnogenesis,” by Henry Timrod, the Charleston poet who set them down as the first Confederate Congress met in Montgomery in February 1861. The mood was exultant as the realization swept over the South: “A nation among nations.” As the geologist Joseph Le Conte later recalled in his Autobiography, he had at first opposed the secession movement...