Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the ProSlavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (review)

342CIVIL war history inconsequential exception: the power of the state to intervene in the domestic lives of all Southerners, regardless of their race, gender, or class position, increased in the postwar era. According to Bardaglio, while white Southern men certainly did lose direct power over their household dependents as a consequence of the Civil War and emancipation, what the patriarchal household head could no longer control in his own right, the state now stepped in to defend. The result was a basic shift from the patriarchal household structure of the antebellum Southern slave system to a capitalist market system predicated upon a legal structure of state paternalism. The emphasis in Bardaglio's work is on the persistence of white male domination rather than on the tactics and strategies of those groups who presumably forced the development of the new form that white male domination took in the postwar period. That is to say, this is a book that focuses on social control and those members of the social order who were in a position to continue to exercise that control, rather than a social history of those groups whose agency made new forms of social control necessary. Thus, while this book offers a much-needed general history ofchanges in the legal order, and in the process makes a powerful case for the ways in which recourse to the legal system allowed white men to maintain their dominance despite the emergence of African Americans and women as autonomous citizens in the postwar social order, it does not give the reader an interactive picture of this process. We come away from this book with no clear idea as to how the struggle ofAfrican Americans and women for a more equitable place in the postwar Southern social order contributed to the emergence of what Bardaglio describes as new legal order grounded in state paternalism. LeeAnn Whites University of Missouri-Columbia Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the ProSlavery Argument , Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South. By Kenneth S. Greenberg. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 176. $24.95.) Kenneth S. Greenberg's goal in Honor and Slavery is to reconstruct and translate the "language" spoken by men of honor in the Old South. His intention is to provide historians with a tool for understanding the institutions created and sustained by these men and the violent confrontation that undermined their social order. Although nineteenth-century Southerners spoke English just as their countrymen in other parts ofthe nation did, the meanings attached to their words and gestures were shaped by a code of honor and a system of human slavery that were peculiar to their region. Honor was what distinguished master from slave, and honor functioned as the ideal of white males regardless ofclass (xii). Greenberg notes that the "difference between having and not having honor was the difference between having and not having power" (25). BOOK reviews343 Greenberg isolates then contextualizes phrases, gestures, and behaviors of nineteenth-century Southerners in order to clarify the inherent values of their culture. He draws the reader to his work with instances ofpuzzling behavior on the part of his subjects, which he then explains in relation to three concepts: public persona as reality, generosity and gift-giving as evidence of status, and control over life and death as a reflection of authority. One ofhis most interesting "translations" ofthe language ofhonor deals with his analysis oftruth and reality. In the language ofhonor, that which was visible or apparent to the world was ofcritical importance, since image was considered a reflection of true character. Men of honor valued physical appearance and public behavior, both of which had to remain unblemished, or at least the man ofhonor had to prevent others from exposing the truth behind his "mask."White Southerners assumed lying was common among slaves, but the word of a man of honor was always assumed to be truthful. The determination of truth between master and slave was, however, based on possessing the power to unmask . As Greenberg points out, "Both masters and slaves dressed up for the masquerade ball of slavery, but it was only...