1. Antiques II, no. 1(January 1927): 27. Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 5. Larry J. Griffen, “Why Was the South a Problem to America?” in The South as an American Problem, edited by Larry J. Griffen and Donald H. Doyle (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 19. Anne Norton, Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 8. 2. As cited in Griffen, “Why Was the South a Problem to America?” p. 25. 3. Richard B. Harwell, “The Stream of Self-Consciousness,” in The Idea of the South: Pursuit of a Central Theme, edited by Frank E. Vandiver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 23. Frank L. Owlsley, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930; reprint ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), p. 66. 4. C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), pp. 69–81. 5. As quoted in Richard N. Current, Northernizing the South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 35. This idea paraphrases Toni Morrison’s concept of race as a literary metaphor for being American (see Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992], p. 47). 6. Rachel Raymond, “Construction of Early American Furniture, II. Eighteenth Century Types,” Antiques 2, no. 6 (December 1922): 255–56. Morrison H. Heckscher and Leslie Greene Bowman, American Rococo, 1750–1775: Elegance in Ornament (New York: Harry Abrams for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1992), pp. 180–81, fig. 123. For more on the context of the master’s chair and its relationship to Masonic symbolism and ritual, see F. Carey Howlett, “Admitted into the Mysteries: The Benjamin Bucktrout Masonic Master’s Chair,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1996), pp. 195–232. Jonathan Fairbanks and Elizabeth Bidwell Bates, American Furniture, 1620 to the Present (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1982), pp. 89. Heckscher and Bowman, American Rococo, p. 166. 7. Griffen, “Why Was the South a Problem To America?” p. 14. 8. Woodward, Burden of Southern History, pp. 15–21, 190. 9. Although these differences have not been thoughtfully commented upon by decorative arts scholars, they have been the focus of considerable research by historians. Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 21–67. 10. John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn (1851; reprint ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), pp. 9, 35. William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (London: W. H. Allen, 1963), p. 133. James M. Dabbs, The Southern Heritage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), p. 35. 11. Griffen and Doyle, eds., The South as an American Problem, p. 1. Also, it is important to recognize the “New South,” a post-1880 political and economic faction dedicated to the emulation of the northern capitalist-industrial model. George Tindall, “Mythology: A New Frontier in Southern History,” in Myth and Southern History, vol. 2, The New South, edited by Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 10. Marshall Davidson, “The Old South,” Antiques 61, no. 1 (January 1952): 40. 12. Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, “The Northern Origins of Southern Mythology” in Gerster and Cords, eds., Myth and Southern History, pp. 46–47. As quoted in Griffen, “Why Was the South a Problem to America?” p. 11. Fairbanks and Bates, American Furniture, p. 328. To their credit Fairbanks and Bates are among the few northern decorative arts scholars to present many southern furniture forms in a complimentary light. 13. David L. Smiley, “Quest for a Central Theme,” Atlantic Quarterly 71, no. 3 (summer 1972): 20. Gerster and Cords, eds., Myth and Southern History, pp. 1, xiv. Michael O’Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920–1941 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. xi. 14. Tindall, “Mythology,” pp. 5–6. 15. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, pp. 95–96, 133. Current, Northernizing the South, p. 29. 16. The author thanks Ronald L. Hurst for first suggesting this interpretation. 17. John Kirke Paulding, Letters from the South, Written During an Excursion in the Summer of 1816, 2 vols. (New York: James Eastburn & Co., 1817), 1:118–19. 18. Paulding, Letters, 1:126–30. 19. Carole Shammus, “English Born and Creole Elites in Turn-of-the-Century Virginia,” in The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society, edited by Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), p. 288. As cited in Richard Beale Davis, ed., William Fitzhugh and His Chesapeake World, 1671–1701 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), p. 246. 20. Eugene D. Genovese, “The Shaping of a Unique Society,” in Major Problems in the History of the American South, edited by Paul D. Escott and David R. Goldfield (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1990), pp. 277–79. Sobel, The World They Made Together, passim. For more on Day, see Rodney Barfield, “Thomas Day: Cabinetmaker,” in Nineteenth Century 2, no. 3/4 (autumn 1976): pp. 23–32; and Laurel C. Sneed and Christine Westfall, “Uncovering the Hidden History of Thomas Day: Findings and Methodology” (private publication prepared for the North Carolina Humanities Council, 1995). 21. Paulding, Letters from the South, 2:93, 1: 142-43. The author thanks Wallace Gusler for this reference.