Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South by Timothy J. Williams (review)

Abstract

INTELLECTUAL MANHOOD: University, Self, and Society in Antebellum South. By Timothy J. Williams. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2015.For much of past generation historical discussions of southern identity were dominated by late Eugene D. Genovese, a Marxian scholar who argued that sectional differences were rooted in aristocratic, seigneurial, and pre-bourgeois outlook of region's large planters. Involving as it did a stark repudiation of Charles Sellers's thesis that southerners shared basic American values and felt guilt over slavery, and Stanley M. Elkins's argument that American slavery reflected dynamics of unopposed capi- talism, Genovese's position went largely unchallenged until 1982 when James Oakes's book The Ruling Race refocused attention on internal diversity of southern slave owners, few of whom met criteria to be called planters and some of whom became educated professionals. Unlike Genovese, Oakes argued that small slaveholders imbibed larger acquisitive and democratic ethos that fueled westward expansion throughout America. Oakes's book was a tacit invitation to reopen discussions about yeoman farmers and urban and industrial sectors of southern society, subjects that had lain largely dormant since work of Frank L. Owsley in 1950s and Richard C. Wade, Robert S. Starobin, and others in 1960s.In his highly original study of antebellum male at university of North Carolina, Timothy Williams adds fresh depth and new dimensions to ongoing debate over sectional identity. The book advances three major propositions. First, that principal concern of University of North Carolina (UNC) students was transition to manhood rather than regional identity. A second closely related theme is that the individual formed main focus of student consciousness. Finally, and most important, Williams finds that focus on self was consistent with middle class or bourgeois culture (2) that increasingly typified antebellum America.Evidence for these assertions comes mainly from a study of University's informal curriculum as revealed in student letters and diaries together with a detailed analysis of some eight-hundred speeches delivered by members of UNC's Dialectic and Philanthropic literary societies. In an unprecedented research effort, Williams compiled a data base of some four-thousand questions debated by two groups, material that fills some twenty-seven bound volumes. These sources reveal a sustained antebellum concern with maturation (manhood defined against boyhood rather than with reference to feminine qualities), self-improvement, and a romantic view of individual self's heroic potential (11). Student orators sought to emulate Demosthenes, seen as classical archetype of manly, muscular speaker (87).Through a careful analysis of geographic, occupational, and economic backgrounds of UNC students, Williams challenges assumption that University was an elite institution catering primarily to sons of wealthy planters. …