SOURCE: Eaton, Clement. “What Happened to Culture in the Confederacy.” In The Waning of the Old South Civilization, 1860-1880's, pp. 79-109. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968.

In the following essay, Eaton evaluates the impact of the Civil War on Southern culture.

The founding of the Southern Confederacy, young Sidney Lanier predicted, would inaugurate a new and glorious era of culture in the Southern states. Having freed themselves from the galling bondage of the old Union, the Southern states would experience a rejuvenation, a sudden burst of prosperity and culture. Macon, Georgia, his birthplace, would become an art center, its streets lined with marble statues like those of classical Athens. This vision of the creation of a great cavalier republic was not simply the fantasy of an imaginative young Southerner; ten years before, the mature statesman Langdon Cheves in a speech at the Nashville Convention urging the Southern...