The Burial of the Guns

Thomas Nelson Page (April 23, 1853 - November 1, 1922) was a lawyer and American writer. He also served as the U.S. ambassador to Italy during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, including the important period of World War I. Page's postbellum fiction featured a nostalgic view of the South in step with Lost Cause mythology. Slaves are happy and simple, slotted into a paternalistic society.For example, the former slave in Marse Chan is uneducated, speaks phonetically, and has unrelenting admiration for his former master. The gentry are noble and principled, with fealty to country and to chivalry-they seem like knights of a different age. The strain epitomized by Page would carry through the postwar era, cropping up again in art with films like Birth of a Nation. The ideology and thoughts that appear in Page's writing and in Southern ideology are no mere simplistic, archaic world-view; they are part of a complex history that has informed, for worse and for better, the evolution of the Southern mind to today.