Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South

Abstract

Numerous anecdotes and personal letters infuse Halls of Honor with the feel of college life in the Old South. Robert F. Pace frames his book with the concept of honor, arguing that southern college students faced competing impulses from the dictates of honor and adolescent drives. Building on the scholarship of Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Pace succeeds in privileging honor among college and university men. “A student peer-developed honor ethic” (p. 83) becomes the transitional phase between childhood and adulthood. This college culture reflected southern honor's demand for “the appearance of duty, pride, power, and self-esteem” (p. 116) and flourished in student-controlled literary debating societies, ubiquitous at antebellum colleges. Quotations from primary sources provide the language of the era and evidence for nearly every point. Chapters present excellent descriptive narratives of major themes in student life. In order to cope with potential challenges to their honor from the faculty, difficult curricula, and recitation, young men worked hard, disrupted classes, challenged professors, and cheated. Honor directed adolescents into “creative solutions” (p. 55) for the college situations they faced: housing, roommates, illness, food, clothing, and money. Honor also supplied “a formative structural element” (p. 96) to guide young men through childishness, violence, and pranks as they chafed against school rules and forged relationships with peers and females. With well-drawn descriptions, Pace portrays the variety of student behavior as directed by honor, even when the outcomes were contradictory. Expanding the 117-page text may have clarified how the culture of honor simultaneously caused some adolescents to study and others to cheat, or some youths to indulge in alcohol while others joined temperance societies.