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.