In short, the living word and the performance, the marrow of folklore, were likewise the marrow of southern culture. The most obvious feature distinguishing the South from the rest of the United States was its racial composition and the resulting historical developments provoked by profound sectional difference. Like others who crossed the Atlantic, Africans brought with them their myths and their music, their beliefs and their words. Folklore travels in the heart of humankind and therefore had the power to survive even the horrors of the middle passage and the merciless process of annihilation of African traditions that took place upon arrival. The archsurvivor, Brer Rabbit, was born in Africa.
People forget their victories and virtues but never their defeats and sins.
Thus, southerners were hypersensitive to the past, for it included racial repression and the loss, on their own precious soil, of the bloodiest war in American history, followed by a decade of military occupation. Original sins and lost causes can be the cement of a culture and the germ of its folklore and literature. As the North raced into the Industrial Age, the South seemed to stand still. Its folk traditions remained in place. From the viewpoint of the Gilded Age, the postbellum South was backward.