Dixie, the song reminds us, is the place where old times are not forgotten. Even before the terrible swift sword of the Union army put a premium on southern nostalgia, regional apologists encouraged the idea that southerners were a people of the past, renouncing the mad rush of Yankee progress to retain a slower pace of life and the values of an older time. In the world of the plantation romances, worship of tradition and disdain for the grubby go-getting of modernity were predictable as the moonlight and indispensable as excuses for the slave South’s inability to keep up with the growing wealth and power of its free-labor competitor.