Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation (review)

The sons in Glover's trim, readable, and well-researched study of the United States South between the founding of the nation to the early fissures in national unity that had appeared by the 1820s, are the well-to-do young men of the propertied classes. Most of them had ties to planting and therefore to slave owning. Many of them were among the best-educated, wealthiest American men who wrote copiously about their ambitions, and about the fears that dogged them. Glover's portrait of these men (her study revolves around 200 collections of archived family papers) follows the arc of their growing up from young boys to young husbands, save for the final chapter, which sketches aspects of slavery and slave mastery. Throughout their early lives, Glover shows, men were shaped by, and learned to use, the imperatives of manhood in this time and place—acting decisively, burnishing reputation, mastering self in order to lead others, and wielding coercive power when persuasion failed. In general, the young men in these pages were not raised to be reflective to the point of self-doubt; in the main, they took what they wanted and called it good.

Glover aims to place the story of these southern sons into the established narrative of national unity in 1787 that eventually gave way to the North-South sectional wariness that followed after the first territorial and moral misgivings over slavery. She is especially convincing in the first and last chapters, suggesting that the southern elite began embracing their difference from their northern counterparts immediately after the Revolution. However, change and continuity in these young men's formative years become murky in the middle chapters: A generation came of age, yet it is not clear what changed and what remained in men's family relations and modes of manliness. Nor, ultimately, is it clear just what a historical view of young men adds to, or alters in, the familiar nation to section narrative.

Familiar, too, are the values that drove these men and their families; the book would make an excellent introductory text showing how a distinctive southern moral "type" emerged in American culture by the 1820s—willful, showy, charming, and languid. Aside from this virtue, however, and aside from its careful and deep archival research, this study does not venture into new conceptualizations of manhood, self, and culture. Nor does it make much use of interdisciplinary perspectives that might have given the study more depth. Although a study of self and culture, the book relies on a sometimes wooden sense of cultural expression in which men seem largely pushed along by "requirements for earning manhood" rather than inhabiting a world where manhood was malleable, often perplexing, and open to second guesses (182). Some attention to the growing literature on agency or on self and identity, for example, might have served to deepen our sense of a lived-in culture that fed not one but many narratives, with some alternatives cast aside as men seized their best chance.¹