Weaver was interested in analyzing, elaborating, advocating what he took to be the virtues of the Old South; even more, he was interested in criticizing the forces that had undermined those virtues. The enemy, he thought, was not so much Grant’s and Sherman’s armies as the spirit that moved them. It was “science and technology.” It was centralized government. It was the ethic of “total war.” It was affluence, materialism, and the love of comfort. It was the demand for homogenization and equality, “a disorganizing concept,” Weaver writes, “in so far as human relationships mean order.”
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