The following is an excerpt from The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South by Charles Reagan Wilson, available everywhere books and ebooks are sold. Native Americans and Enslaved Africans Southern colonists, including Jefferson’s forebears, had been on the periphery of Western civilization at the beginning of settlement, but they self-consciously came as predominantly English people who carried civilization into the New World, in opposition to the savagery of Indigenous peoples and Africans. To be sure, Indians of the early South sometimes appeared to possess their own virtues, those...