The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s

Abstract

The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s. By Bertram Wyatt-Brown. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xix, 412. Appendix. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $19.95.) Bertram Wyatt-Brown noted that few books on honor existed when he began researching the topic thirty years ago. As much as any historian studying the American South, he has addressed this paucity with his magisterial Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982), his study of the Percy family, his many essays, and now this book. As he shows in twelve interconnected essays, some previously published, honor was a communal value that animated southern male behavior. Honor competed with grace, a term embracing religious beliefs and practices, and its potency challenged and sometimes altered religious institutions, beliefs, and values. The nuances of southern honor mutated with time, but the code insisted on redress, independence, and standing tall in the community, and thus underlay the posture of white southern masculinity in the American Revolution, the Civil War, and, finally, the racial and political violence of the late nineteenth century. In this way, honor, grace, and war shaped southern culture and society from its settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. Wyatt-Brown divides his volume into three components. The first section examines the broad theme of race and politics. Dignity, Deception, and Identity in the Male Slave Experience examines how slave honor, shame, shamelessness, and identity developed (5). Since slaves could not strike out at slaveholders, they had to act out through violence, risk-taking, and even self-abasement. Wyatt-Brown positions himself between the interpretations of Stanley Elkins, on the one hand, and Herbert Gutman and John W. Blassingame, on the other. His second essay examines the honor-based political rhetoric of the American Revolution. The rights-based ideology of the early American Republic emerged from an older, status-conscious polity in which reputation and character were paramount. Revolution offered a logical means to leave dependence on a mother country and acquire independence. This status-consciousness persisted among southern politicians in the early national period, which Wyatt-Brown explores in an analysis of Andrew Jackson's honor. Old Hickory fought duels, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun within the ritual and rhetoric of an honor-based, patron-client society. He dueled to demonstrate his manliness and fitness for leadership. Clay violated the cherished notions of independence by accepting a cabinet post from John Quincy Adams. Calhoun's conduct as secretary of war under Monroe and as vice-president made him disloyal and dishonorable in Jackson's eyes. Hence, Jackson banished him. Part two consists of four essays that treat Protestantism in the Old South and during the secession crisis. The first of these examines the ethical and religious development in the South between 1600 and 1860. Southerners passed through a civilizing process of three stages, during which religious values competed with concepts of masculine honor. When secession occurred, the south possessed a divided soul in which neither honor nor evangelicalism wholly triumphed (104). Wyatt-Brown emphasizes the differences between formal religious ideas and honor-based behavior along with the tensions between churchmen and un-churched men, a view of southern religious history akin to Ted Ownby's in Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (1990). The next essay, Paradox, Shame, and Grace in the Backcountry, is a significantly recast version of Wyatt-Brown's classic article on Anti-- Mission Baptists. …