Since first announcing this invaluable criterion in print, Jerry Mills has uncovered even more late lamented victims in southern prose, so many that he kindly agreed to bring us up to date by sharing his latest discoveries. But while one or two dead mules might be no more than a couple of unhappy accidents, even a casual reader must wonder why so many of these humble beasts have met their ends in southern literature. The answer seems as irresistible as it is obvious. Like the animals of my own childhood, mules are emblematic of the South's rural past. They are also stubborn, ungainly, unnatural, and more than a little ridiculous.
Dead ones are probably more so.
As good southerners, we at Southern Cultures are taught to cherish a good story for its own sake and to despise pernicious abstractions, but Mills's deadpan masterpiece cries out for explication. Jerry Mills's cardinal test of a southern writer inevitably points to the larger question of southern difference and its causes. As it happens, Peter Coclanis addresses that question directly. In 1999 Coclanis delivered the first annual Alfred D. Chandler Lecture in Southern Economic History at the UNC Center for the Study of the American South, and we are happy to share it with our readers. His essay considers the economic differences between North and South and their origins in the two regions' development from colonial days forward.