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

Wyatt-Brown's Shaping of Southern Culture is an attempt to sum up his perspective on the development of Southern thought in the noted time period. The work consists of twelve essays, five previously published, divided into three roughly chronological sections: "Race and Politics"; "Grace: Southern Religion in Transition"; and "War and Aftermath."

The opening section consists of three essays, the first an attempt to apply Wyatt-Brown's well-nigh patented concept of "honor" to African-American slaves in the South. Curiously, this endeavor results in a rehashing of previous work by Genovese, Elkins, Styron, and Patterson. ¹ It also rests heavily on well-known slave narratives, such as those of Douglass and Ibrahima, and sheds little new light on this matter. ² In the second essay, the author looks at the Revolutionary Era, again with "honor" at the forefront of his analysis. He emphasizes—again in unoriginal fashion—that the Founding Fathers premised their sense of "honor" on the fact that they were not slaves and not African. Though interestingly argued, Wyatt-Brown brings little new knowledge or insight to the subject. The final essay in this section deals with Andrew Jackson, duels, honor, and the peculiar nature of Southern violence—an oft-visited topic, too; it barely makes any mention of "race."

The second section consists of four essays that examine religious practices among backwoods whites, religious justifications for slavery, and theological rationales for disunion. These chapters are heavy going, with page after page of elaboration—even, for example, of the well-known Southern belief that God was on their side. Moreover, in irritating fashion, the author seizes every opportunity to point to the overriding primacy of "honor" in motivating their actions and thoughts.

The final four chapters deal with the coming of the Civil War, the struggle itself, and its aftermath. We are told, not surprisingly, that slavery was the root cause for the secession, but it was "Southern honor that pulled the trigger." Once again Wyatt-Brown plunges into the swamp of knife duels, fist fights, and associated innovative forms of violence that marked the Southern way of life (178). The chapter on the war applies "honor" to the motivation of Southern soldiers, while examining McPherson's and Wiley's work on the subject of why soldiers fought. ³ He looks briefly, in this context, at the Fort Pillow massacre. Nothing earth-shaking is in these chapters; the analysis relies mainly on secondary sources.

Wyatt-Brown's examination of the tragic aftermath of the war for white Southerners relies on such well-known sources as Chestnut, Woodward, and Fletcher. ⁴ There is much of Margaret Mitchell, and little attention is paid to the plight of the African-Americans. Finally, he leaps forward to the violence unleashed against blacks when the South "redeemed" itself and to such now well-known and much-covered events as the lynching of Anthony Crawford and the Wilmington race riots. These last chapters, seemingly all written for this book, have a consistency and narrative flow that are absent from the earlier articles, which seem to have been arbitrarily placed into certain categories for editorial purposes.

A fine mind is at work in this book, grappling with important problems. But the valuable material does not start until halfway through the work, by which time all but the most dedicated readers will have long since lost interest. In sum, this is an arbitrary and largely unsuccessful attempt to explain Southern history through the prism of "honor."