| Popis: |
ALTHOUGH much attention has been given to the events leading to the Civil War and to the question of its irrepressibility, one of the most haunting aspects of the struggle, the psychological conditioning for civil war, has been left comparatively untouched. In the range of Northern antebellum opinion of the South, the extremes, both for and against, are better known today than the measured, less partisan view. Yet it is this latter view which reveals how relentlessly the sense of cultural difference prepared Northern minds for the grim logic of the battlefield. In reviewing Northern attitudes toward the South one must determine the nature of the day-by-day coverage of things Southern which was available to the general reader of a wellcirculated, reputedly reliable Northern newspaper. To follow the running account of the South in the pages of the New York Evening Post during the middle third of the nineteenth century is to recreate a current point of view and to realize more fully the complexity of the antagonisms which led finally to Civil War. The New York Evening Post gave its readers an exceptionally full and reliable presentation of news about the South. No paper of its time in America could boast a more distinguished staff than that of the Post. By the time of the Civil War, William Cullen Bryant had been its editor for over thirty years. During this period he had become a public figure whose prestige and influence were unsurpassed in America. He had acquired an extensive first-hand knowledge of the South under conditions of slow, arduous travel, journeying through Kentucky, Virginia, and Maryland in 1932, through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida in 1843, and |
