‘A Sense of the Sacred in the South’

 

My father is fond of telling the story of his great-grandfather’s War sword.  As a boy, he was in his grandfather John Riley Boyd’s house in Rogers, Arkansas.  Resting above the hearth in a place of honor was the sword his grandfather’s father, a soldier in Tennessee, had carried with him in battle during the War of Northern Aggression.  His grandfather saw him looking at it, so he took it down and placed it in my father’s hands.  My father said it was like holding, in his words, ‘the holy grail.’

This story of my father’s represents an attitude that is widespread across Dixie, an attitude of reverence for people and things that are thought to possess and transmit a special energy of some kind, usually of the sort that heightens remembrance of a person or event.

This is expressed in different ways, sometimes publicly, sometimes privately.  The family of Jefferson Davis provides some examples of the latter, similar to the one given about my father and the War sword.

-Mr. Davis’s wife Varina, writing to her mother about John C. Calhoun’s funeral (1850):  ‘I will bring you a piece of his [Calhoun’s] hair when I come home’ (Jefferson Davis: Private Letters 1823-1889, Hudson Strode, edr., New York, Da Capo Press, 1995, p. 60).

-Mrs. Davis to her father, after the death of her son Samuel (1854):  ‘When I can I will send you some hair and a miniature of Sam’ (p. 79).

-Mrs. Davis to Mr. Davis (1866):  ‘Your dear letter enclosing your hair reached me safely upon my arrival here and cheered me at the threshold even more than the loving reception of my dear friends the Cobbs’ (pgs. 232-3).

A poem of Henry Timrod’s beautifully describes a public, communal expression of the South’s numinous sense.  It his ‘Ode,’ for the decoration of Confederate soldiers’ graves in Charleston, South Carolina, 1867:

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The rest is at https://southernorthodox.org/a-sense-of-the-sacred-in-the-south/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!