The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity ed. by John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette (review)

When Bertram Wyatt-Brown published Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982), he joined Eugene D. Genovese and other historians who described the South as a place set apart not only from the North but also from the modern world. Over the next three decades slavery and honor were central pillars in the edifice of southern exceptionalism. But in the last few years this view has been significantly destabilized, if not totally demolished, as historians have redefined southern slavery as a particularly rapacious variety of capitalism that formed the lifeblood of a global empire of cotton. If slavery and the South can be so completely redefined as part of the modern world, then what of honor, which seems so firmly intertwined with an interpretation of the region as a premodern society? Is honor still a compelling lens for looking at the South?

This collection of essays is an excellent place to begin answering that question, among many others, about honor. John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette have assembled an impressively broad and interdisciplinary group of scholars. There are eighteen essays, not counting Edward L. Ayers's foreword, that range from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries and consider honor in legal, literary, religious, commercial, and political frames, covering topics that include dueling, gossip, writing, infanticide, emotion, conservatism, conjuring, credit, college, corn farming, and one infamous confidence man.

Several essays in the collection examine how honor mediated the South's encounter with the capitalist marketplace. In an essay on credit rating in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, Amanda R. Mushal notes that local credit "correspondents often deployed the language, values, and assumptions of southern honor to describe their neighbors' business characters," and she finds that "a reputation for honor or dishonor carried material consequences in the world of business" (p. 56). Honor may have been priceless, but in the case of Charleston merchants William Ravenel and C. K. Huger, their honorable characters led credit correspondent 11007 to rate their creditworthiness at "'say ab[ou]t 2 1/2'" (p. 55). But the market's ways of figuring worth could also threaten shame. Kathleen M. Hilliard examines a scandal that erupted in 1824 when a member of the Pendleton Farmers' Society in South Carolina claimed to have raised a prodigious crop of corn but failed repeatedly in his attempts to have it verified. The story, Hilliard writes, shows "tensions between deeply subjective understandings of Old South honor and ostensibly objective calculations of productivity and reform" (p. 42).

Amid the rising tide of mass production and mobility that accompanied the transition to capitalism, the issue of authenticity—always one of honor's central concerns—was a vexing one. Few figures in the antebellum South better illustrate this anxiety than David Theophilus Hines, whose sins against honor Lawrence T. McDonnell examines in delightful detail. The son of an overseer, Hines became infamous as a confidence man (he may have been the inspiration for Herman Melville's archetype) who aped the manners and mores of the southern man of honor so well that he destabilized the assumptions of honor itself. As McDonnell writes, "if the antithesis of honor could be mistaken for the acme of honor by men who called themselves honorable gentlemen, what did that slip portend?" (p. 182).

Some essays extend Bertram Wyatt-Brown's analysis to groups that did not appear prominently in Southern Honor, revealing the stratified layers of honor groupings that existed in the South. For instance, Jeff Forret brings to bear extensive research into court records to establish that, contrary to the beliefs of some modern scholars and slaveholders themselves, the lack of legally recognized marriages under slavery did not lessen the shame of bearing a child out of wedlock for enslaved women. As Forret writes, "these accounts suggest...