Reason vs romanticism

The American South? You don’t know the half of it

Stand by. I am going to explain the American South, a subject that makes the quantum theory seem like child’s play. The first thing you must understand is that there is no South — there are two. One is the Upper South of horses, tobacco and Episcopalians; and the other is the Deep South of mules, cotton and Baptists. The second thing is that there is no mid-South. It’s a geographical term with no sociological undercurrents, used by climatologists and weather reporters to locate their own brand of undercurrents.

The Upper South in its purest form consists of Maryland and Virginia. Maryland is now described by weather reporters and political bean counters as ‘mid-Atlantic’ but it wasn’t always thus. She was once a land of huge tobacco plantations, and what Lincoln’s secretary of state called a ‘hot bed of Secesh’ that probably would have seceded had Lincoln not ringed Baltimore with cannon. His action led a Confederate sympathiser to write her state song, ‘Maryland, my Maryland’, played as background music in Gone With the Wind and containing lyrics now unofficially banned, e.g.: ‘From shore to shore, from creek to creek, Potomac calls to Chesapeake/ ’Tis time to give the Rebel shriek/ Maryland, my Maryland!’ Another verse contains a reference to Lincoln and another call to arms: ‘The despot’s heel is on thy shore/ Be the battle queen of yore!’ Topping it all off is the final verse containing the line, ‘Huzzah! She spurns the Northern scum!’ If to be Southern is to be politically incorrect, Maryland beats all other Southern states hands down.