Henry Adams Quotes
The Southerner has no mind; he has temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of even admitting two; but in life, one could get along very well without ideas, if one only had the social instincts.
This quotation from one of America’s great historians illustrates the cultural divide that existed between the North and South just prior to the Civil War. While it was true that the quality of education in the South was far inferior to that of the North (a disparity that would take almost 150 years to dissipate), there was a snobbishness and social intolerance that existed and persisted into the 21st Millennium. It was virtually impossible to debate the slavery issue between Northerners and Southerners as the two did not even recognize the same kind of logic and analytic methods.
Henry Adams, 1838-1918, Politician, Historian & Writer, ~1855
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This editorial from an Alabama newspaper in 1856 is a wonderful illustration of the animosity held by many in the South towards the North. It also shows the major difference in egalitarianism between the North and the South at that time. The only Southerners who could read were the upper class who were terribly fearful of the effects of upward mobility of whites in a slave free industrial democracy. “Mechanics” at the time referred to all skilled craftsmen.
Henry Brooks Adams was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. Presidents.
