Moonlight-and-magnolia

Here the myth of a moonlight-and-magnolia South founders on dry empirical realities.

Source: wiktionary

The romantic South of myth and legend, the “moonlight and magnolia” South with which plantation epics captured the national imagination in the era of the Lost Cause, has acquired a nightmarish quality; […]

Source: wiktionary

If a white employer could take so much interest in the child of a black employee, in whom he had no property interest, that would illustrate—as did Hentz's other fiction—the moonlight and magnolia world of Southerners' concern for their slaves.

Source: wiktionary