American Honor: The Creation of the Nation's Ideals during the Revolutionary Era by Craig Bruce Smith (review)

Craig Bruce Smith has written a different study of honor. Rather than opening on the battlefield or the dueling ground, the book begins with the delegates arriving at Carpenters' Hall for the First Continental Congress in 1774. Before the Revolution began, these Americans shared an understanding of honor and virtue. When many of these same delegates met two years later to declare independence, they pledged their sacred honor to the cause.

Smith argues that common and well-defined conceptions of honor, virtue, and ethics united Americans in the patriot cause. As a consequence, "Americans from expansive gender, social and racial categories transformed them as their own" (2). As individuals came to understand honor and virtue as synonymous with ethical precepts, they adapted understandings of honor and virtue to direct their conduct. Smith argues that as these broadened and deepened ethical understandings from the American Revolution created a "continuing ethical ideology" (7).

Smith offers us a refreshing and original perspective on the role of ethics in the American Revolution and its aftermath. He sees this ethical interpretation of the Revolution not as challenging economic, political, and social considerations; he offers us instead a complementary narrative. The author urges his readers to take the moral purposes of the American Revolution and its participants seriously. In this endeavor, Smith directs his attention not only to the elite but also to men and women of the middling and lower orders and also to African Americans, both free and enslaved.

For Smith, this "egalitarian shift" in ethics contrasts with "the violent, hierarchical and oppressive aspects of honor culture" (9). Smith acknowledges the importance of honor culture, especially to elite men from the South. Smith argues for regional variations in what was defined as "honor"; for Bertram Wyatt-Brown's southerners, virtue and honor were inseparable. Smith contrasts John Adams as the emblematic New Englander who argued for the supremacy of virtue over honor.

The institutions that played the most important role in instilling notions of virtue and honor among elite young men were the colleges. The standard texts in moral philosophy would have included Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue, Hutcheson's Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, and later Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. For Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, honor and virtue were closely related. For Adam Smith, however, virtue was acquired by merit and honor was the adherence to the rules of society.

The other source for a wider circle of young men and women to imbibe the principles of honor and virtue was the colonial resistance of the 1760s and 1770s. In 1775, as British troops engaged New Englanders in battle, the notions of honor and virtue, national and personal, northern and southern, gradually blended together. Smith quotes Joseph Warren's observation that henceforward the struggle for independence was not only a political choice; it was an ethical choice as well. Americans of all ranks believed their national honor was based in the moral superiority of their cause.

In the early years of the Revolutionary War women like Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail Adams, and poet Hannah Griffitts were at pains to describe the superiority of national honor based in virtue. Washington, on the other hand, was instrumental in creating some collective conception of military virtue. Washington argued for a form of Stoic conduct; Roger Stevenson argued in Military Instructions for Officers that true honor was founded on religion.

There were tensions between civilian and military conceptions of honor and virtue: American civil society had fashioned an egalitarian conception of national honor, while the officer corps had internalized a sense of honor based on hierarchy and rank. Nowhere did these contradictory notions come into more obvious conflict than in the recruitment of free African Americans into New England army units.

Smith argues that after the conclusion of the Revolutionary...