AS the election of 1976 showed, the South has finally trod the road to reunion. Jimmy Carter's election gained added significance by coming one hundred years after the end of Reconstruction. It has taken a century since the nation was supposedly restored from the Civil War for the South to be brought fully back into the American mainstream. Obviously, sectional reconciliation has been a long and difficult job, and the work has had to be done with few prophets or heroic leaders and in the face of enormous frustrations. For many Southerners the biggest frustration of all has been the conviction that alienation between their section and the rest of the country has been wrong and unnecessary. One of the first Southerners after Reconstruction to argue that sectional hostility was needless and one of the most important advocates of national reunion during his life-time was the North Carolina-born editor, publisher, and reformer, Walter Hines Page. Ironically, he has been better remembered as the United States ambassador to Great Britain during World War I than as the proponent of the views that helped shape his life and most influenced his times.

Page was an early exponent of the viewpoint that was encapsulated in the title of a collection of essays published in 1960—The Southerner as American. The authors of those essays believed, stated the editor, Charles G. Sellers, Jr., "that the traditional emphasis on the South's differentness and on the conflict between Southernism and Americanism is wrong historically." In support of that thesis and its corollary that mistaken notions of separateness warped Southern thinking,