Christianity meant manners, and manners meant landed families, especially in the South and the United Kingdom. This concluding section deals primarily with how Southern texts employed religion as a way to explain intellectual undercurrents that could be found in the South as well as England. Twentieth century traditionalist Southern texts suggested that moving away from the land meant moving away from God. Edmund Burke wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that manners and civilization have for ages depended upon two combined principles, “I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion.”
Those two principles were more than English; they became Southern, that is, in the minds of elites. We know a good deal about how British history and literature contributed to the developing thought of antebellum American intellectual life. We also know something about the connections between antebellum Southern and Northern elites. Daniel Kilbride has argued that antebellum Southern planters and Philadelphia patricians formed a common defense of aristocracy in the face of political and social democratization.