Book Review

Canada and the United States

This insightful study traces southern attitudes about and influence on U.S. foreign affairs. Capitalizing on the prior spadework of Tennant S. McWilliams, Charles O. Lerche, Jr., Alfred O. Hero, Jr. and an army of other scholars, Fry weaves their findings (and fresh research of his own on the Cold War years) into a cogent synthesis that in many ways reminds me of the "New American Nation" series. Fry argues that southerners approached world affairs from a "self-conscious" (p. 11) sectionalist perspective as far back as George Washington's administration and that the region's position has been less singular recently only because many nonsoutherners have internalized southern values. Fry illuminates many traits that have molded the region's response to world affairs, among the most important of which have been an agrarian republicanism (especially a suspicion of centralized national power), Anglophobia and later Anglophilia, a colonial economy that sought military spending and markets for cotton, a quest to protect slavery first and later segregation, a code of honor, Jeffersonian Republican and later Democratic partisanship, and memories of invasion and occupation during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Partisanship and economics generally trumped other factors, especially during the Jefferson-Madison, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt presidencies. But southern perspectives on race, honor, and the American past were always part of the mix. Republican fears of dependency, in fact, help to explain why Confederate leaders in the Civil War failed, until it was too late, to pursue formal alliances with foreign powers.

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