The Self-Inflicted Wound: Southern Politics in the Nineteenth Century

The essentially tragic political fate of the American South in the nineteenth century resulted from what Robert F. Durden calls a "self-inflicted wound"—the gradual surrender of the white majority to the pride, fears, and hates of racism. In this gracefully written and closely reasoned study, Durden traces the course of southern political life from the predominantly optimistic, nationalistic Jeffersonian era to the sullenly sectional, chronically defensive decades following the Civil War.

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