The Southern whites are in many respects a great people. Looked at from a certain point of view, they are picturesque. If one will put oneself in a romantic frame of mind, one can admire their notions of chivalry and bravery and justice.

Johnson’s phrasing is deliberately double-edged: he concedes that Southern white culture can appear “great” and “picturesque” when viewed through a “romantic frame of mind,” but the conditional language signals critique. By stressing that admiration depends on adopting a particular viewpoint, he implies that the celebrated ideals—“chivalry,” “bravery,” “justice”—are often aestheticized myths rather than moral realities, especially when set against the South’s racial order. The quote reads as an exposure of how nostalgia and romance can sanitize oppression: one can admire the pageantry of honor-culture only by bracketing the lived experience of Black Americans and the violence that underwrote that social system.