Brothers of a Vow: Secret Fraternal Orders and the Transformation of White Male Culture in Antebellum Virginia (review)

This book, a social and cultural history of the Freemasons, Oddfel-lows, and Sons of Temperance in late-antebellum Virginia, builds upon the work of Jonathan Daniel Wells and Frank Byrne to add crucial detail to our emerging portrait of the middle class in the nineteenth-century South. Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch argues that merchants, artisans, and professionals in towns and cities increasingly joined fraternal organizations between 1840 and 1860 to combat the effects of economic changes that threatened their access to social advancement and to proclaim their civic virtue in political debates with elite men who sought to sustain the correlation between property-holding and citizenship. Directly confronting the rural slaveholding planters’ code of honor and the impulsive violence of the poor, members of fraternal orders found opportunities in their secret rituals and public ceremonies to cultivate a standard of masculinity. That standard emphasized “self-discipline, moral character, and success at work,” and fostered “civic brotherhood” among white men that transcended class distinctions (5). Pflugrad-Jackisch employs different historical methods and sources to support her analysis. A social historian, she makes good use of lodge rosters to determine that commercial and manufacturing men outnumbered farmers in fraternal orders, and that the majority of members owned at least a few slaves. A cultural historian, she listens carefully to the voices of Virginians who professed their faith in the equality of white men and the ways in which their fraternities enshrined those ideals.

Brotherhood was absolutely essential, these men thought, as urbanization and industrialization in Virginia jeopardized the bonds of community and friendship that had often been the foundation for trust in the marketplace. Fraternal organizations created stable commercial networks in which brothers forged reputations for integrity and helped to ensure each other’s economic safety and success. The “moral character” of these institutions had political implications argued the men who made them. Widening economic inequalities meant the nation was descending into social disorder and self-interested “licentiousness,” and Masons, Oddfellows, and Sons of Temperance saw themselves as defenders of the virtuous Republic (72). They steadfastly excluded black men from membership to maintain the racial hierarchy that supposedly ensured the citizenship rights of all white men. They also shouldered charitable responsibilities and advocated educational access for white youth, in the process casting aspersions upon the benevolent efforts of white women and effectively safeguarding the masculine privileges of citizenship.

Of course, the existence of alternative definitions of manhood in Virginia did not diminish the social and political power of planters. Nor did it lessen the cultural sway that honor and violence continued to have in the South. And indeed, while fraternal orders stipulated that members refrain from partisanship in the lodge, Virginia fraternity members cut ties with and fought against their northern counterparts during the Civil War to protect their “independent status as heads of their households and protectors of social dependents” (121). As Stephanie McCurry has argued, appeals to the social and cultural value of mastery had the power to unite white southern men around common purposes. And yet Pflugrad-Jackisch’s book helps us to see the rich complexity of the cultural debate about manhood in antebellum Virginia, and how it helped to mitigate conflict among white men, even as it also bolstered their power over southern society.