At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis

3 Honor and Degradation: Section, Race, and Gender

77 ; 3 Honor and Degradation Section, Race, and Gender n 1860, Charles Colcock Jones Jr., age twenty-eight, became the youngest man ever elected mayor of Savannah , Georgia, a victory his father termed “a high honor.” Charles Sr. used the word “honor” according to its fundafundamental connotation: something worthy of esteem and respect. Although it is difficult to reduce the term to a concise definition, the “essence” of honor, in the words of a noted medievalist, “combines the self-esteem of an individual with the respect accorded by others.” Human beings seem inclined not to separate and divorce their self-esteem from “the respect accorded by others.” The basic question for historians is always how and why others in a particular place and time deem someone worthy of honorable respect.1 Charlie Jones had thoroughlyabsorbed from his parents,Charles and Mary, the principle that he and his two siblings should develop and employ “mind and heart and manners” for the purpose of “usefulness in society.” Charles Sr., owner of several slave plantations in low country Georgia, was an ordained Presbyterian minister and a professor at Columbia Theological Seminary. He had achieved a measure of fame as, in the words of historian Erskine Clark, “a leading advocate for the reform of slavery in an attempt to make the system of slavery more humane”—and thereby more readily and forcefully defensible. In 1860, a young South Carolinian,William States Lee, “the son of a venerable and highly esteemed minister” at the Presbyterian church on Edisto Island, volunteered to assist Jones in preparing a manuscript history of the Christian church for possible publication by Charles Scribner’s New York publishing house. Lee spent several months in 1860 living in the Joneses’ plantation home. Early the following summer, Jones learned that Peggy, “an attractive young slave” in training as a chambermaid, had just given birth to a mulatto girl and had named Lee as the baby’s father. Jones wrote to the young man, who had since established a school for young ladies in Columbus, “There is a resemblance to you beyond mistake.” Jones was indignant not only that a free white man, especially “a gentleman, a married man, and a Christian,” had abused his power over an unfree black girl by engaging in “illicit intercourse” 78 Honor and Degradation but also that Lee had violated basic standards of hospitality while a guest. Having “debauched a young Negro girl,” Jones wrote, Lee had become “the only man who had ever dared to offer to me personally and to my family and to my neighbors so vile and so infamous an insult.” Lee’s inexcusable behavior had simultaneously besmirched his honor and compromised that of Jones; the master seemed far less concerned about any damage to Peggy’s honor. Jones did not follow the protocol that might lead to the elegant violence of a formal duel, a recourse often denounced by evangelical Christian clergy, although he sought, without success, to have Lee’s criminality punished by the leadership of the Presbyterian congregation in Columbus. Charlie Jones had attended South Carolina College and Princeton before graduating from Harvard’s law school in 1855. Within the year, he began practicing law in Savannah with a family friend, John Elliott Ward, the city’s mayor at that time. In mid-October 1860, the new mayor recognized that Republican Party victories in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana state elections rendered Abraham Lincoln’s November presidential victory “almost a fixed fact.” That prospect meant that “the action of a single state, such as South Carolina or Alabama, may precipitate us into all the horrors of intestine war.” Like so many Americans north and south, Jones expressed sincere hope and trust “that a kind Providence, that has so long and so specially watched over the increasing glories of our common country, may so influence the minds of fanatical men and dispose of coming events so as to avert so direful as calamity .” Like his son, Charles Sr. prayed that God would work to prevent a dissolution of the Union and preserve sectional peace: a “separation” of the slave and free states might have such “consequences in the future” as would “be disastrous to both sections. Union if possible—but with it we must have life, liberty, and equality.” Without them, father and son understood, a republican citizen could have no honor. Instead, he would experience what contemporaries often termed “degradation,” which brought unacceptable shame.2 Honor in its “most basic form,” as...