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Essays on SOUTHERN CHARACTER and AMERICAN IDENTITY

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Essays on SOUTHERN CHARACTER and AMERICAN IDENTITY The Field of Honor This page intentionally left blank The ield Honorof essays on SOUTHERN CHARACTER and AMERICAN IDENTITY edited by John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette foreword by Edward L. Ayers The University of South Carolina Press © 2017 University of South Carolina Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208 www.sc.edu/uscpress 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mayfield, John, 1945– editor. | Hagstette, Todd, editor. Title: The field of honor : essays on southern character and American identity / edited by John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette ; foreword by Edward L. Ayers. Description: Columbia, South Carolina : Published by the University of South Carolina Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016047777 (print) | LCCN 2016048207 (ebook) | ISBN 9781611177282 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611177299 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Honor—Southern States. | Southern States—Social life and customs—1775–1865. | Southern States—Social life and customs—1865– Classification: LCC F209 .F54 2017 (print) | LCC F209 (ebook) | DDC 975/.03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047777 Front cover images (left to right) of JamesChestnut Jr., William Gilmore Simms, and Thomas Nelson Page courtesy of the Library of Congress. CONTENTS Foreword: Honor’s Southern Journey ix Edward L. Ayers Preface xix Acknowledgments xxi Part I: Challenging Honor—The Marketplace 3 The Marketplace of Values: Honor and Enterprise in the Old South 5 John Mayfield To Civilize King Cotton’s Realm: William Gilmore Simms’s Chivalric Quest 21 David Moltke-Hansen Bushels of Corn, Tubs of Trouble: Measuring Honor at the Pendleton Farmer’s Society, 1823–1824 40 Kathleen M. Hilliard “A Very Honorable Man in His Trading”: Honor, Credit Reporting, and the Market Economy in Antebellum Charleston 55 Amanda R. Mushal Part II: Honor, Violence, and the Law 75 Writing the Duel: Rhetorical Negotiation and the Language of Honor in the Nineteenth-Century South 77 Todd Hagstette An Honorable Death? The Stuart-Bennett Duel of 1819 93 Matthew A. Byron “Not a Judicial Act, Yet a Judicious One”: Honor, Office, and Democracy 108 Christopher Michael Curtis vi Contents The Subversive Rhetoric of Honor and Illegality in Thomas Nelson Page’s “Marse Chan” 127 Bradley Johnson Part III: Defining the Man—Honor and Character 145 “The Honor of New England”: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Cilley-Graves Duel of 1838 147 Robert S. Levine Pursuits of Character: Rethinking Honor among Antebellum Southern College Students 163 Timothy J. Williams “The Deceivingest Fellow”: Honor, Respectability, and the Crisis of Character in the Old South 180 Lawrence T. McDonnell “He Ordered the First Gun Fired & He Resigned First”: James Chesnut, Southern Honor, and Emotion 196 Anna Koivusalo Part IV: Defining the Other—Honor and Shame 215 “The Prisoner . Thinks a Great Deal of Her Virtue”: Enslaved Female Honor, Shame, and Infanticide in Antebellum Virginia 217 Jeff Forret “Tattling Is Far More Common Here”: Gossip, Ostracism, and Reputation in the Old South 231 Brenda Faverty “Early-Acquired Superstition”: Conjure and the Attempted Redefinition of Racial Honor 242 Jeffrey E. Anderson Contents vii Part V: The Persistence of Honor 259 “The Secret of Vengeance”: Honor and Revenge in Andrew Lytle’s The Long Night 261 Sarah E. Gardner Iron Chests: Honor and Manhood in Southern Evangelicalism 276 Edward R. Crowther Honor and the Rhetoric of Conservatism in Twenty-First-Century America 292 Dickson D. Bruce Jr. and Emily S. Bruce Bibliography 309 Contributors 349 Index 351 This page intentionally left blank Edward L. Ayers FOREWORD Honor’s Southern Journey Honor threatened to end my scholarly career before it had properly begun. The encounter occurred just after I had delivered my first conference paper, sketching the outlines of crime and punishment across the South in the nineteenth century, arguing that much of the well-documented homicidal violence in the South had been shaped by and driven by a culture of honor. Previous explanations for the persistent bloodshed in the region’s past had focused on dysfunctional conditions such as the frontier, alcohol, militancy, pessimism, and a sense of grievance, so the idea that violence followed a certain kind of perverse logic seemed provocative and perhaps even useful. After the session ended a genial scholar in a bright plaid jacket and bow tie came up to offer a word of support. I recognized the memorable name on his tag— Bertram Wyatt-Brown—from an article he had published a few years earlier, “The Ideal Typology in Antebellum Southern History.” I told him how much I admired that piece and asked him what he was working on now. He cheerfully said that he had just completed the final touches on a book to be called Southern Honor. In fact he had been reading the page proofs in his hotel room, and the book would be out in a few months.1 I must have done a poor job of disguising my anxiety and disappointment, for he kindly invited me to have a beer with him at the hotel bar, where he described his forthcoming book in detail. I was astounded by its reach and scale but reas- sured by Wyatt-Brown’s generous spirit, reflected in his insistence that I call him Bert. He said he would send me the page proofs as soon as he finished reading them. A couple of weeks later I studied the many pages with admiration but also with churning stomach as I confronted a proudly idiosyncratic work that com- bined literary history, gender, law, psychohistory, and more, all in surprising ways. The book explicated honor in lovingly detailed vignettes of violence, disorder, and betrayal. Wyatt-Brown invoked W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South as an inspira- tion, and indeed both books were intoxicating in their confidence. Wyatt-Brown announced in the introduction of Southern Honor, moreover, that he would write another book on slavery and honor and yet another on honor’s decline—which he saw beginning as early as the time of Thomas Jefferson. In the meantime those aspects of honor would have to wait, for “the task of the moment is to show how x Foreword honor functioned in the first place.” He performed that task with daunting energy and imagination.2 Southern Honor was not a fashionable book in 1982; in fact it was boldly icono- clastic, insisting on culture’s independence from its social and material founda- tions. Nevertheless Wyatt-Brown’s book, we can see at this distance, embodied several aspects of the intellectual climate of the 1970s and early 1980s. The concept of honor as a coherent culture had recently been defined, elaborated, and theorized by anthropologists and sociologists, who found honor at work in many places throughout the world. Julian Pitt-Rivers, J. G. Peristiany, and others had pioneered the idea in the 1960s and published a series of influential essays and collections over the next decade that brought the topic wide recognition. In its depth and coherence, their portrayal of honor fit comfortably with the work of fellow anthro- pologist Clifford Geertz; his seminal article on the cultural logic of the Balinese cockfight was becoming one of the most influential works among historians in the 1970s and 1980s.3 Powerful new books in southern history at the time also inclined scholars to look for inclusive and coherent cultural interpretations. Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll exerted remarkable intellectual hegemony after its publication in 1974, portraying the slave South as a complex society dominated by the relationship be- tween master and slave. Honor corresponded well with such a hierarchical and organic society in which a personalized relationship between master and slave ef- fectively resisted the machinery and values of capitalism. Many historians agreed with Genovese that the South was a place profoundly distinct from the North, with a ruling ethic in sharp contrast to the ethic of industrial capitalism. The dramatic critical rise and fall of the Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross, which aimed to demonstrate through econometrics that the slave South was in fact profoundly capitalist, only secured the conviction of many historians that the South was nothing of the kind.4 As a graduate student in the late 1970s, consumed by these exciting devel- opments, I was intrigued by another recent book, this one by sociologists Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hans Kellner: The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. The Bergers argued that the modern world was tone deaf to the concept of honor. “Honor occupies about the same place in contemporary usage as chastity,” they observed. “An individual asserting it hardly invites admiration, and one who claims to have lost it is an object of amusement rather than sympa- thy.” In our own time, the communal and hierarchical concept of honor had been replaced by the individualistic and egalitarian concept of “dignity,” tailored to a dynamic capitalist society, for dignity “relates to the intrinsic humanity divested of all socially imposed roles or norms. It pertains to the self as such, to the individual regardless of his position in society.”5 Foreword xi Elliott Gorn and I read The Homeless Mind for an independent reading in the “new social history” in 1977. The book led us in turn to the anthropological litera- ture on honor also influencing Wyatt-Brown in these years. Elliott and I would both adopt honor versus dignity in our work, the binary appearing in my 1980 dissertation and in what would become Elliott’s important and influential essay on backcountry fighting in the American Historical Review in 1985.6 Despite the doors it opened, The Homeless Mind presented only a brief excursus on honor.
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