"The Sir Walter Disease"

"Sir Walter Scott, more than any other writer, shaped Americans’ conception of manliness, bravery and combat in the period leading up to the Civil War. And his influence did not end once the fighting began.
"If the lived reality of four years of suffering and slaughter did not neatly conform to Scott’s knightly norms, the war as presented in romantic Southern poetry very often did."

Cynthia Wachtell in The New York Times describes the influence of Sir Walter Scott in nineteenth-century America.