Southern Violence Revisited

Abstract

Edward Ayers has made a distinguished contribution to venerable debate over relationship between southerners and laws. Perhaps even more important, however, his consideration of crime and punishment in nineteenth-century South illuminates central questions concerning character of region in an era of fundamental change. Ayers's findings about rates and types of crime and patterns of conviction and punishment portray a distinctive section transformed by experience of war and Reconstruction. Vengeance and Justice brings new evidence and a refreshing perspective to current disagreements about capitalist or precapitalist nature of Old South, about ties between and slavery, about effects of war and emancipation. Ayers begins his study with a consideration of southern violence that allows him to characterize antebellum southern society more generally. Bertram Wyatt-Brown's recent work on occupies an influential place here, but Ayers has revised these earlier arguments to imbed in a social-structural context that he contends Wyatt-Brown neglected. Slavery, Ayers asserts, generated honor (p. 26), and honor, in turn, produced violence and a sense of limited applicability of law. An overweening concern with opinions of others (p. 19), is in Ayers's view product of economically undiversified, localized, explicitly hierarchical societies where one standard of worth can reign (p. 26). Slavery insulated Old South from market development and cultural diversity associated with capitalism and its system of values. In North and other more developed areas, came to be supplanted by dignity, an internal rather than external gauge of self-worth -the conviction that each individual at birth possessed an intrinsic value . .. theoretically equal to that of every other person (p. 19). The importance of self-control, discipline, and autonomy within wider notion of dignity indicates its close connection to the transformations