It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made those gentlemen value their bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. Mark Twain - Life on the Mississippi.

Twain was serious, and although he was the only person of note to accuse Sir Walter Scott directly of being responsible for the Civil War, many others have pointed out the huge influence Scott had on Southern character and culture.

It is difficult nowadays for anyone who has managed to plough through a Scott novel to understand the tremendous influence he had on the world. Not only was he regarded as the greatest writer of his age, his influence was everywhere - everything from operas to knitting patterns, from dog breeds to railway stations, were named after his books and characters (he was even responsible for a minor agricultural revolution in Poland). He had invented the historical novel, captured the romantic imagination of the world, and nowhere more than in the United States of America.

Of course, a very significant part of the Southern population, both in numbers and influence, was of Scottish and Ulster-Scots (Scotch-Irish) descent. In his book A History of the Old South, Clement Eaton calls them "the cutting edge of the frontier", "excellent Indian fighters", and "the blue blood of the South". Many Southerners were descendants of Scottish (and English) Cavalier and Jacobite exiles, or the 1,000 survivors of Culloden transported there after the ’45. This ‘Celtic’ component was a ubiquitous feature of antebellum Southern life - Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun (Colquhoun), James K(nox) Polk (Pollock), Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, Davy Crocket, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, to name but a few, were reared on old-world stories of warrior heroism. Davis’s grandmother for instance was Scottish, and his mother told him legends from the land of her birth, and even taught him a few words of Gaelic that Davis later took pleasure in teaching his own children - in 1869 he made a highly symbolic pilgrimage to Culloden Battlefield, the site of the final Jacobite defeat.

In his book The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash has emphasized the hold of the Scottish clan tradition in the South, whereby the ordinary white farmer stood shoulder to shoulder with the Planter "like a Scottish clansman to his chief", for there was a fierce sense of belonging to a great aristocratic tradition. In this new country this sense of ‘clan loyalty’ developed into a sharing of the Planter’s aristocratic paraphernalia, including his culture, his standards of honour, and even his distinguished ancestors, for, like the Highland clan, the ordinary white was often related by ties of blood to his aristocratic neighbour, or at the very least, shared the Highland concept of "widely extended kinship", or in Scott’s words - "associations common to inhabitants of a rude and wild land".

Before the war, Southerners had identified with the manners and ideals of Scott’s novels (Professor Osterweiss of Yale University calls the South ‘Walter Scottland’); but after the war, in defeat, they identified even more closely their ‘Lost Cause’ with Scott’s novels of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ‘Lost Cause’ of the Jacobite struggle for Scottish independence in 1746.

Back in Scotland, ‘The Wizard of the North’ had, through his novels and poems, (with the help of other Lowlanders, particularly songwriters and collectors such as Robert Burns, James Hogg and Lady Nairne), ‘reconstructed’ the once feared Jacobites, and by the time of his death in 1832, (and with Highland society safely destroyed), the Highlands had become a romantic wonderland of noble savages and past glories. In a similar way, the Southerners, who had vehemently opposed Northern ‘Reconstruction’, slowly began to reconstruct themselves in the American imagination. Ironically, according to Taylor, it was with the unwitting connivance of many Northerners, who still longingly regarded the South as having the romantic, aristocratic, and ‘Cavalier’ society that the more democratic and acquisitive North lacked.

However, the South’s stubborn resistance to the North’s attempt at ‘Reconstruct’ them had a much more sinister component. According to Professor Osterweiss – "It was characteristic if not inevitable that the institution employed to restore the Southern system was a clandestine, quasi-military band of self-styled "knights-errant" in the Scottish tradition, who surrounded their organisation with the symbols of both romantic and folk myth. The Ku Klux Klan – a title and a concept with probable debts to Scott and Goethe." The origins of ‘The Klan’ remain a mystery; some suggest it was founded by Confederate veterans at Pulaski, Tennessee - men who "saw themselves as persecuted Scottish ‘klansmen’ riding forth to redress the wrongs being perpetrated by . . . people in league with the hated conquerors." Professor Macinnes of Aberdeen University thinks their lineage is undoubtedly Scottish, their name being an Aberdeen dialect term introduced by farm workers who belonged to the elite and secret Society of Horsemen, which survived in Scotland well into the 20^th century. Whatever their origin, the symbolism is obvious, the fiery cross for instance (in Gaelic the crosh-tairie), a symbol of resistance and coercion, is straight out of Scott’s The Lady of the Lake; a poem ‘inflicted’ on every Southern child.