should…provide any reason for change’. 238 These reunions therefore allowed the ‘Old South’ way of life to continue. Gary Gallagher agrees with this idea. Whilst providing varying views in his book of compiled essays he agrees that by keeping the ways of the Old South alive it allowed Southerners to justify their way of life, continuously stating that the ‘Confederacy had gone to war over the issue of state’s rights’ and not on a matter of slavery, an issue that they believed was intrinsic to ‘the traditional picture of planation life’. 239 This strong need to keep the Old ways of South alive through memory, doesn’t just end with the generations who saw it however. In many Southern schools ‘schoolbooks and educational curricular [were] carefully guard[ing] the old memories’ which allowed the myth of the Old South to be converted to history rather than myth. 240 By allowing the next generation to ‘connect with the past’ in this way led to the reality of the Old South and the New South becoming blurred, making it difficult to separate the two. 241 This rapid spread of Southern mythology was necessary however in allowing the idea of the South to remain standing and to not become sucked in to the new ideas of the North. Richard Hathaway Edmunds, who was among the most versatile of the 238 John Hope Franklin, Myth and Southern History: The New South , ed, Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1989) p.109. 239 Gallagher, p.95. Patrick Gerster ad Nicholas Cords, Myth and Southern History: The New South, ed, Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1989) p.52. 240 Paul M. Gaston, Myth and Southern History: The New South , ed, Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1989) p.21. 241 Gallagher, p.123.
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