No one is being manipulated here. We simply never gave a dam about that sort of thing. That’s why the the North was a bustle of commercial and industrial activity before the war, and the south, generally, was not.
If you read Sewards letters from his travels across the South, it drives him crazy. The dilapidated buildings, the poor roads, the general lack of investment in civil infrastructure. He couldn’t understand why the poor, backwards, bastards, seemed so content with their lot.
This quote captures the attitude in Richmond in the years before the war.
“We, who once swayed the councils of the Union, find our power gone, and our influence on the wane,” mourned one member of Virginia’s traditional elite in 1852. “As the other States accumulate the means of material greatness, and glide past us on the road to wealth and empire, we slight the warnings of statistics, and drive lazily along the fields of ancient customs.” - Culture of Defeat
The speaker was acutely aware of his peoples indifference to development, and appreciated the consequences. But that was the culture, the culture that had created him, and the culture that he loved.
Culture of Defeat has an interesting consideration of the two visions of America, the Northern and Southern version, and how the South internalized defeat.
Herman Melville, Henry Adams, and Henry James were all among the losers in the victor’s camp. In the prevailing climate after 1865, they all felt, in Adams’s words, as lost as “the Indians or the buffalo who had been decimated by our ancestors.” None of these three men had been particularly interested in the South, let alone had sympathized with it. All had deplored slavery. Nonetheless, in their works they used Southerners as mouthpieces for criticizing their times and as a representatives of the “other” America. In all three cases, the heroes are former Confederate officers who message differs starkly from that of the Yankee bridegrooms of plantation romances: not the optimistic belief in progress but a critique of the decadent civilization, not the elevation of the South of plantation s and belles to the economic and ideological level of the North but the reverse - a profound questioning of the North’s industrial and commercial triumph and a reminder that that there were values other than that of the almighty dollar."
