It is not only the myths of the pre-Revolutionary South and the ante-bellum South that have been so sharply assailed. The Southwest’s legends of the cowboy have been worked over too. The frontiersmen of Tennessee and Kentucky, on examination, prove to be something less than godlike men. The Creole stories of New Orleans, the richly embroidered legends of the War of ’61-’65, the tales of Reconstruction hardships, even the twentieth-century chronicle of Jim Crow, have been cracked by the academic refineries--but no catalyst ever seems wholly effective. As soft as Spanish moss, and almost as insubstantial, legends subtly dominate the Southern mind. And it is not a bad thing. Legend is born of truth, however remote and obscure the fatherhood may be, and legend has a way of siring truths stamped in ancestral molds. The hospitality of the plantation, as a universal pastime, may not bear too strong a light; but “Southern hospitality,” its descendant, is a working truth today. Not all the colonists were Cavaliers, and not all the Cavaliers, we may reasonably assume, were mannered men; but a Southern manner, born of the Cavalier myth, persists in our own time. It is the Virginian’s “Sir,” the Texan’s “Ma’am.” To the Southerner, in Burke’s phrase, manners are always more important than law. Deference to women, principles of personal honor, the payment of a gentleman’s debts--these are operative aspects of the “Southern Way of Life.” Objections of “unreality” are put to one side. * * * * * But, may it please the court, there is the Southerner as Realist too. It is the weight that balances. Cash wrote of the tendency in New England, in the Reconstruction period, for men to turn increasingly to science and technology, and increasingly away from the customary forms of religion. “But in the South,” he said, “the movement was to the opposite quarter. For invariably when men anywhere have come upon times of great stress, when they have labored under the sense of suffering unbearable and unjust ill and there was doubt of deliverance through their own unaided effort, they have clung more closely to God and ardently reaffirmed their belief. Invariably they have tended to repudiate innovation, to cast off accretion, to return upon the more primitive faith of the past as representing a purer dispensation and a safer fortress. And if I have represented our Southerners as determined to have the mastery, yet it must be said that terror was continually threatening to seize the ascendancy, that there was in their thought a huge vein of gloomy foreboding, which trembled constantly on the verge of despair.”