Life & Wisdom Quote by John Sergeant Wise

Wise is doing the unglamorous work of deflating a regional fairy tale. In a single, clipped comparison, he strips Virginians of the flattering costumes history loves to dress them in - “angels” and “philanthropists” - and swaps in a more durable, less marketable engine: ordinary human motive. The sentence is built like a corrective memo. First comes the demystification (they weren’t morally exceptional), then the leveling move (no different from North or South), then the real thesis (they behaved like people always do).

The intent reads as anti-hagiography with a purpose: to make Virginia, and by extension the Old South’s leadership class, legible without romance. That’s not neutrality; it’s an argument against moral alibis. By naming “affections,” “interest,” and “resentments,” Wise quietly rejects the idea that grand causes alone explain political behavior. Affection covers loyalty, kinship, and local pride; interest is the blunt instrument of property, power, and status; resentments signals the emotional fuel of grievance politics. Those three together are a model of how societies justify themselves: sentiment gives the story, interest gives the incentive, resentment gives the heat.

Context matters: Wise is writing in the post-Civil War “memory economy,” when Lost Cause narratives were busy laundering defeat into nobility and turning complexity into pageantry. His final phrase - “just as humanity is moved today” - is the sting. It denies readers the comfort of treating the past as a museum of exotic morals. He’s implying that the machinery that made sectional conflict possible hasn’t vanished; it just changes costumes.