Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (review)

BOOK REVIEWS91 America" (p. x). They explore slavery—the black community's formative experience—and the family and the church—its two most important institutions—as well as the uneasy place of the free Negro in antebellum America, sex and racism, politics, economics, criminal justice, education , military service, black protest, and black nationalism. Their approach succeeds in producing insightful interpretive chapters that synthesize a large bibliography of secondary materials and provide the vehicles for the authors' own well-known areas of research expertise. The topical approach always seems to keep one alert to the "two-ness" of Du Bois's black souls, and the authors are adept at showing how the black experience was apart from but still of the larger history. A particularly striking example is their treatment of blacks and military service. By fighting for America's causes, the authors note, blacks fought to advance their own. The sadness here, of course, comes from knowing that many gave their lives for a country that restricted the freedom of the survivors and neglected the memory of their community's heroes. While historians will find much of what Berry and Blassingame write familiar, Long Memory will provide their undergraduate classes with stimulating reading that should provoke classroom discussion. The authors have not avoided controversy and at times their words take on an outraged tone. Given the past about which they write, one cannot blame them. Paul A. Cimbala Emory University Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. By Bertram Wyatt-Brown. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Pp. xxi, 597. $29.95.) "Honor" was a word much bandied about in the antebellum South. Men often proclaimed, and occasionally proved, a willingness to risk their lives defending their own or their families' "honor." Southernpoliticians spent some of their best rhetorical coin declaring the inviolability of the "honor" of the region and its people. In this major contribution to the study of Southern history, Professor Wyatt-Brown has done more than any previous scholar to show us what all this Southern talk about honor meant and to demonstrate, as well, that understanding what it meant is essential to gaining any sense of the character of the antebellum South. "Honor" was, as Wyatt-Brown makes clear, a broadly conceived moral concept in the Old South, covering a wealth of supposed virtues ranging from a powerful desire for economic and social independence to an equally strong injunction to gentility and self-restraint. But underlying all was an insatiable quest by men and women alike for public notice and esteem. Wyatt-Brown's South was made up of peoplewholly attuned to others' perceptions and ever fearful of any occurrence that might seem to lower them in the estimation of their peers. It is a convincing picture, and Wyatt-Brown demonstrates its accuracy 92civil war history through prodigious research into many areas of Southern life—the family, society, and customs—as well as into the development and operations of Southern institutions. Honor, he shows, permeated Southern social relationships, defining the roles available to men and women in the society and cementing those definitions through such institutional mechanisms as education and the law. More darkly, Waytt-Brown also describes how honor justified the oppression of women and blacks in the South and contributed to those outbreaks of personal and community violence which marked the region throughout the antebellum era. The result is to deepen considerably our understanding of the culture of the Old South. Above all, Wyatt-Brown has put that culture into a larger historical context than is often done, showinghow the main tenets of a system of honor older even than the European colonization of the New World were maintained and adapted to Southern conditions, including to such a crucial element of Southern life as that of race. Although one may argue that Wyatt-Brown has undervalued the meaning of race as such in his analysis of the Old South—especially in his treatment of slave insurrections—his looking beyond the South for sources of the region's culture is a major corrective to the tendency to ascribe Southern character solely to Southern conditions. In illuminating this larger context, moreover, Wyatt-Brown has...