Robert Lewis Dabney and the New South critique

During the decades following the Civil War, Southern religious leaders assisted planters in recapturing their hegemonic social and economic status. Believing that the antebellum world was consistent with true Christianity and that the plantation regime provided a bulwark against decadence and moral decay, these clergy men fashioned the New South critique, which sought to justify continued planter domination of Southern society. Chief among the defenders of the old order was Virginian and Presbyterian divine Robert Lewis Dabney, who argued for a society based on moral rectitude, natural social and racial hierarchies, plantation economy, and religious reverence for the Confederate past. This Old South creed for the New South era provided the region's elites with an ideology potent enough to neutralize the threat posed by nascent industrialists, thereby ensuring the hegemony of agricultural interests in the South until the mid-twentieth century.