The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s–1880s (review)

The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s. By Bertram Wyatt-Brown. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xix, 412. $55.00, cloth; $19.95, paper.)

Twenty years ago, in Southern Honor (1982), Bertram Wyatt-Brown offered a fresh perspective on the age-old question of Southern distinctiveness. The result was a new chapter in Southern historiography, in which scholars supported and challenged his thesis that the notion of honor was the linchpin of antebellum Southern culture. The present volume, which its author offers as a sequel, is therefore welcome, for in it Wyatt-Brown, Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida, presents a collection of essays that recapitulates and extends his study of the role of honor in Southern life. The eight previously published pieces, which appeared between 1970 and 1998, have been revised—some of them substantially—reflecting Wyatt-Brown's maturing thought and willingness to benefit from the work of others.

For Wyatt-Brown, "honor [is] the ethic which white southerners believed supported the other two pillars of their society: white supremacy and Christian faith" (xi). Fittingly then, race and religion are major factors here, but the fabric into which they are woven is honor. In "Dignity, Deception, and Identity in the Male Slave Experience," Wyatt-Brown incorporates the perspectives of psychology, anthropology, and modern black literature in a subtle analysis of the "Elkins thesis" of slave infantilization. Finding Elkins's work oversimplified and incomplete, but not essentially wrong, he builds on the analogy of the Nazi concentration camp to produce a more sophisticated portrait of slave behavior in which the "Sambo" personality is seen as a natural, intelligent, and complicated product of the slave experience. Through a mixture of compliance and subtle defiance, the slave survived with some dignity intact. For a slave, the sacrifice of honor, "the willingness to lower one's own self-esteem to gain an advantage in the struggle against the master," was worth its reward, and it shows the slaves' appreciation of the place of honor in the masters' milieu (12). Yet among themselves some male slaves claimed honor through verbal dexterity, physical aggression or sexual dominance. Others managed somehow to retain "a certain stateliness," while many found a friend in the suffering Jesus (28).

In "Honor, Dread of Enslavement, and Revolutionary Rhetoric," Wyatt-Brown asserts that something more than the objective reality of the pre-revolutionary decade must have been at work to turn colonists into rebels, and finds the key to that something in the "bloodthirsty rhetoric" found in hundreds of pamphlets. Here, as elsewhere in the book, he takes familiar aspects of the story—in this case taxation without representation, the presence of placemen, and standing armies—and shows how an acute sense of honor made each of these unsettling aspects of imperial relations into intolerable affronts to honorable manhood. While for Tories, the same code of honor "required submission to established authority," the bare-knuckled language of the revolutionary pamphlets painted Tories as gutless cowards, or even "emasculated eunuchs"(33, 36). In an atmosphere charged by such rhetoric, it is not surprising that dueling became more common, or that signs of masculine virility—gambling, wenching, profanity—did little to diminish the esteem in which men like Washington were held. Meanwhile, Wyatt-Brown sees shame, the sanction corresponding to honor, in the behavior of Benedict Arnold and in the complaints of Nathaniel Greene that he feared being "degraded in public" and thus made "unfit for the service"(46). But note that these men were Northerners, an indication that in the eighteenth century the concept of honor was a shared feature of colonial culture, uniting rebels from New England to Georgia. Southerners would carry the same understanding of honor into the middle and late nineteenth century, while Northerners' understanding of the notion would be transformed by new economic and social conditions...