ABSTRACT
The fathers of the Southern Confederacy saw their secession as an attempt to preserve a precious heritage, a known and agreed upon social, cultural, and political arrangement developed in an unbroken continuum from reverenced antecedents, a regime in the best sense of the term. A still larger group do not care for questions of meaning, so long as the familiar trough is full when the time for swill comes round. Yet even though some of our most reputable scholars labor to persuade us otherwise, there were few Americans in the previous century who were indifferent to the patrimonial revolutionary model. Some of inflammatory language deserves very careful examination. Instead of the Rights of Man, the American Revolution had as its issue the “right of the Englishman to constitutional representative government”.
