Honor in the American South

Unlike the Northern code of honor, which emphasized emotional restraint, moral piety, and economic success, the Southern honor code in many ways paralleled the medieval honor code of Europe — combining the reflexive, violent honor of primitive man with the public virtue and chivalry of knights.

by Brett & Kate McKay on November 26, 2012 · 4 comments

in A Man's Life, On Manhood

Welcome back to our series on manly honor Today we tackle Southern honor in the 19thcentury Now, be prepared: this is and will be the longest post in the series by far The

complexity of traditional honor and its various cultural manifestations cannot possibly be

underestimated, nor can the difficulty in distilling these complexities into an accessible,

coherent narrative We have done our best with that task so far, and here as well; however,understanding Southern honor requires a more in-depth exploration We could have just

sketched out the very basics, but truly grasping those basics necessitates an understanding ofthe framework which underlies them Also, as we shall see, because the South’s culture ofhonor still influences that region today, it’s a good subject to become knowledgeable about ifyou want to understand the country Plus, it’s just really interesting!

We didn’t set out to do it, but I’m proud of the fact that this series has turned into a resourceunlike any other that is out there I don’t imagine there’s a huge audience among blog readersfor 7,000-word posts about Southern honor, but those who are interested in the subject willhopefully really dig it, and anyone who girds up his loins and reads the whole thing will be

rewarded

Southern Honor: An Introduction

In our last post about the history of honor, we took a look at how honor manifested itself inthe American North around the time of the Civil War Yet when most folks think about honor in

the States, both then and now, what first comes to mind is invariably the South.

There’s a reason for that While honor in the North evolved during the 19th century away fromthe ideals of primal honor and towards a private, personal quality synonymous with “integrity,”the South held onto the tenets of traditional honor for a much longer period of time

Unlike the Northern code of honor, which emphasized emotional restraint, moral piety, andeconomic success, the Southern honor code in many ways paralleled the medieval honor code

of Europe — combining the reflexive, violent honor of primitive man with the public virtue andchivalry of knights

The code of honor for Southern men required having: 1) a reputation for honesty and integrity,2) a reputation for martial courage and strength, 3) self-sufficiency and “mastery,” defined aspatriarchal dominion over a household of dependents (wife/children/slaves), and 4) a willingness

to use violence to defend any perceived slight to his reputation as a man of integrity, strength,and courage, as well as any threats to his independence and kin Just as in medieval times,

“might made right” in the American South If a man could physically dominate or kill someonewho accused him of dishonesty, that man maintained his reputation as a man of integrity (even

if the accusations were in fact true)

Anthropologists and social psychologists believe this form of classical honor survived andthrived in the American South and died in the North because of cultural differences betweentheir respective early settlers, as well as the North’s and South’s divergent economies

Herding, the Scotch-Irish, and the South’s Culture of Honor

To understand why a

more primal and

early settlers While

the northern United

States was settled

(particularly from areas around London), the southern United States was settled primarily by

herdsmen from the more rural and undomesticated parts of the British Isles These two

occupations — farming and herding — produced cultures with starkly different notions of

honor

Some researchers argue that herding societies tend to produce cultures of honor that

emphasize courage, strength, and violence Unlike crops, animal herds are much more

vulnerable to theft A herdsman could lose his entire fortune in one overnight raid

Consequently, martial valor and strength and the willingness to use violence to protect his herd

became useful assets to an ancient herdsman What’s more, a reputation for these martial

attributes served as a deterrent to would-be thieves It’s telling that many of history’s mostferocious warrior societies had pastoral economies The ancient Hittites, the ancient Hebrews,and the ancient Celts are just a few examples of these warrior/herder societies

As it happened, the Scotch-Irish settlers that poured into the Southern colonies from the late

17th century through the antebellum period were genetic and cultural descendants of the like and pastoral Celts Hailing from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and the English Uplands,these Scotch-Irish peoples made up perhaps half of the South’s population by 1860 (in

war-contrast, three-quarters of New Englanders, up until the massive influx of Irish immigrants in the1840s, were English in origin) As the Celtic-herdsmen theory goes (and it is not without itscritics), their influence on Southern culture was even larger than their numbers These roughand scrappy Scotch-Irish immigrants not only brought with them their ancestors’ penchant forherding, but also imported their love of whiskey, music, leisure, gambling, hunting, and…theirwarrior-bred, primal code of honor Even as the South became an agricultural powerhouse, thevast majority of white Southerners – from big plantation owners to the landless — continued

to raise hogs and livestock Whether a man spent most his time working a farm or herding hisanimals, the pastoral culture of honor, with its emphasis on courage, strength, and violence —

characterized by an aggressive stance towards the world and a wariness towards outsiders

who might want to take what was his — remained (and as we will see later, continues even tothis day)

Agrarian Economics

While the South’s ethno-cultural background may explain the origin of its primal and sometimesviolent code of honor, it doesn’t explain why it remained so entrenched in Southern life for solong while contemporaneous Northerners were quick to adopt the more modern, private notion

of honor To answer that question we simply need to look to the divergent economies of thetwo regions

While industrialization transformed the Northern landscape in the 19th century and sparked therise of urbanization, the antebellum South remained largely agrarian and rural This created twoimportant effects in the region: economic opportunities were fewer in number and less diverse,and kinship ties remained very strong

Land Ownership and Class

While for many, slavery is the first thing

that comes to mind when they think of

the Old South, only 25% of the white

population owned slaves, and 73% of

those who did held fewer than ten In

other words, three-quarters of the white

population were nonslaveholders While it

is common to imagine there were only

two white classes in the South — rich,

slave-holding planters and poor whites —

there was actually a middle-class majority

of non-slaveholders (around 60-70%)

who owned their own land All told, about 75% of all white males in the South owned land.Another number were professionals and artisans, and the remaining percentage were “poorwhite trash” (yes, this derogatory term originated way back in the 19th century) Alternatelyreferred to as “squatters,” “crackers,” “clay/dirt-eaters,” and “sand-hillers,” these poor whiteseked out a subsistence living in isolated settlements nestled in the hills and mountains, plantingperhaps a few crops and raising a few animals, but mainly getting by through hunting and

fishing

The richest planters might own thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves, while a yeomanfarmer worked a hundred acres and held no slaves; 90-95% of all agricultural wealth in theSouth was in the hands of slaveholders by 1860 Despite this deep inequality, the culture of theSouth was quite different than the walled-off oligarchy of the Old World nobility WhereasEurope’s landed aristocracy held a monopoly on power and claimed honor as exclusively theirown, because of the accessibility of land in the South – even if men’s holdings vastly differed –

a common bond between the two groups existed

Yeoman farmers typically lived close to plantation owners, and the two groups frequentlyintermingled through both trade and kinship While entering the upper echelon of Southerngentlemen depended partly on family lineage, there was a degree of social and economic

mobility; non-landowners acquired land, non-slave owners acquired slaves, and non-plantersmarried into planter families Yet, most yeoman farmers sought not great wealth, but being a

“good-liver” — attaining a simple, comfortable self-sufficiency surrounded by one’s family and

enough land to pass onto one’s sons Striving to get ahead was too much work; while industry was perhaps the sine qua non of honorable virtues both in Victorian England and the American

North, Southerners valued leisure in their lives In this they harkened back to their Celtic

forbearers, who had employed the least labor-intensive method of herding — the open rangesystem – and used the rest of their time for feasting, fighting, and merriment

This satisfaction with self-sufficiency was rooted in both cultural ideals and practical

considerations While industrialization in the North had opened up a new stratum of diverseprofessions, options in the South outside of agriculture were far fewer; the only other

honorable professions were law, medicine, clergy, and the military, but even then, many menhoped these positions would simply serve as stepping-stones towards becoming a planter Andwhile Northern men were celebrated for having the pluck and initiative to leave home in pursuit

of personal goals, Southerners wished to stay close to hearth and home, and some saw suchpecuniary striving as crass Again, this viewpoint derived from both cultural and utilitarian

considerations; the ability to move into professions and politics in the South relied less on theegalitarian boot-strapping that defined the North, and more on personal and familial

connections

Honor in the South

The differences between the industrialized North and agrarian South led to differences in theirhonor codes While the North equated honor with economic success, and economic successwith moral character, honor in the South hinged on hitting a more basic threshold

The Southern ideal, in theory, if not always in practice, was that the rich man was no betterthan the poor man; all whites of all classes considered themselves part of the same honorgroup As all traditional honor groups are, it was a classless hierarchy not of wealth, but of rank.The military makes a good comparison All soldiers are equals as men of honor, but there arehigher and lower ranks; each strata has greater or lesser responsibilities and privileges, and itsown culture

Every white man acknowledged the personal equality of every other – horizontal honor – whilealso acknowledging that some, because of blood and talent – had risen higher than others andachieved greater vertical honor Most who occupied a position below the top respected that setup as proper and natural; differences in status did not hold moral significance Southerners

also did not see hierarchy as incompatible with democracy, but rather as a necessary way ofbringing order to what would otherwise be a society dominated by chaos and mob rule

While the poorest whites were seen as dishonorable and despicable because they did notcontribute anything to society, and just as importantly, chose to live in isolation from the “tribe,”such a label was only possible for those who could perhaps be members of the honor group,but failed to meet the code While some Northern gentlemen did not even acknowledge thecommon manhood of “the roughs” because of their failure to meet any of the requirements ofthe Stoic-Christian honor code, poor whites in the South had the potential to be included

because basic Southern honor was not dependent on gentility (clothes/education/manners),but things that were accessible to every man While poor whites weren’t generally concernedabout the integrity part of the Southern honor code as much as the farmers and planters were,all were united in honoring independence (not working for another man and being master ofone’s own “little commonwealth”), strength and personal valor, and a man’s willingness to useviolence to defend his reputation Men from every rank in the South believed that honor

required a man to take an aggressive stance to the world – a constant readiness to fight forwhat was his against the encroachments of outsiders and the insults of scalawags of all

varieties

What About Slavery?

When discussing the differences between North and South in the 19th century, obviously thehuge elephant in the room is slavery Slavery definitely affected the honor code inasmuch as itshaped the South’s economy and was part of the way of life whites wished to defend It

influenced it in other ways as well, but historians disagree on exactly how Some think the fear

of a slave uprising made Southerners more prone to engaging in reflexive violence –

demonstrating strength as a warning against would-be mutineers Some say that by including

all whites in the Southern honor group, rich and poor alike, they pacified possible resentmentfrom the lower class, and thus headed off the possibility of their teaming up with slaves in arebellion against rich plantation owners Slavery helped solidify the Southern hierarchy, andtraditional honor thrives in an environment of “us vs them.”

It’s obviously a complex subject, which sits outside the purview of this article Since an honorgroup can only consist of those who consider themselves equals, for Southern whites, blackswere obviously excluded Thus, honor for whites in the South was something generally onlyjudged, jockeyed for, and mediated amongst each other (with the exception of black on whitecrime, in which a white man’s honor necessitated his meting out justice himself, sometimes inthe form of a lynch mob.)

As with the North, we know that just because one group claims exclusive right to honor,

doesn’t mean those left out don’t have their own code (i.e., the gentlemen and the roughs).Slaves assuredly had their own code of honor too, but unfortunately no one has tackled thatsubject yet that I know of A Ph.D dissertation waiting to be written…

The Public Nature of Southern Honor

That a man’s public reputation remained the basis of his honor, as opposed to shifting towardsprivate conscience as in the North, was due to the close communities and kinship ties in theSouth In the North, waves of immigration, coupled with urbanization, created a diverse societydominated by impersonal relations, making agreement on a single honor code difficult, andsparking the development of personal codes of honor The South, on the other hand, remainedagrarian and sparsely populated; at the start of the Civil War, the North had 10+ million moreresidents

Southerners preferred to live physically close to their relatives, and the foundation of everycommunity was one’s extended family One of the interesting signifiers of the way Southernerswere more tied to tradition and familial interests versus Northerners can be found in the

diverging naming practices of the two regions For example, at the beginning of the 1800s, only10% of boys in a typical Massachusetts community were given non-familial names, but thatjumped up to 30% by the time of the Civil War In contrast, Bertram Wyatt-Brown reports that

as late as 1940, a rural sociologist in Kentucky “discovered that only 5% of all males had namesnot affiliated with traditional family first and middle names Over 70 percent of the men werenamed for their fathers.” Giving sons familial names symbolized the patriarch’s important

position in Southern families, tied grandparents and grandchildren together, and imparted tosons a sense of pride and place in a long lineage – a lineage he was charged with honorablyupholding

As a result of the close-knit, more homogenized nature of Southern society, two fundamentalrequirements of traditional honor remained in place: a cohesive honor code that everyone inthe group understood and ascribed to, and frequent face-to-face interactions that allowedmembers to judge each other’s reputations This also left in place traditional honor’s

mechanism for dealing with social deviants: public shame and group justice.

Honor acted in tandem with the formal legal system in the South For Southern men, somematters of honor could not possibly be justly settled in a court of law; the matter had to beresolved mano-a-mano, sometimes in the form of a duel On her deathbed, Andrew Jackson’smother (Scotch-Irish herself, and an immigrant to the Carolinas) told him: “Avoid quarrels aslong as you can without yielding to imposition But sustain your manhood always Never bring asuit in law for assault and battery or for defamation The law affords no remedy for such

outrages that can satisfy the feelings of a true man.” Jackson took his mother’s advice toheart, participating in at least 13 “affairs of honor.”

Crimes and disputes that did end up in court were discussed in the taverns and parlors abouttown, and judges were swayed by the public’s opinion of the crime and of the accused whenrendering their sentences Southerners wanted it this way; impersonal justice seemed too

Northern — a justice system which incorporated local circumstances preserved local autonomy.When the community felt that justice, according to the dictates of honor, had not been served

by the court, they believed it within their rights to step in and mete out the proper punishmentthemselves This often took the form of lynch mobs, which frequently went after blacks, butsometimes fellow whites as well Whites in need of shaming were more likely to be on the

receiving end of a “charivari”, which was an ancient ritual that dates back at least to the MiddleAges in which the townspeople would gather outside the home of one who had violated thecommunity’s norms – perhaps through adultery or wife-beating – and beat on pots and pans,hoot and holler, and sometimes give the accused a tar and feathering The duly shamed wouldquickly get the message and high-tail it out of town

For Southerners, these extra-legal forms of justice were not a substitute for the court system,but a supplement; as Wyatt-Brown puts it: “Common law and lynch law were ethically

compatible The first enabled the legal profession to present traditional order, and the secondconferred upon ordinary men the prerogative of ensuring that community values held ultimatesovereignty.”

Yet it was the threat of simple, informal shunning — being made an outcast — that was

enough to get most Southerners to conform to the code As in all traditional honor societies, aSoutherner’s relations with others and their inclusion in the community were the heart of life;one could not separate their personal identity and happiness from their membership in thegroup What Moses I Finley said of the world of Odysseus was true of the South as well: “one’skin were indistinguishable from oneself.” Thus to be abandoned was the worst possible fate.Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish writer who was popular in the American South, described this tribalmindset well:

“Isolation is the sum-total of wretchedness to man To be cut off, to be left solitary:

to have a world alien, not your world, all a hostile camp for you; not a home at all,

of hearts and faces who are yours, whose you are! … To have neither superior,

nor inferior, nor equal, united manlike to you Without father, without child, without

brother Man knows no sadder destiny.”

These strong bonds with kin, along with their deep connection to the land, created an honor

culture extraordinarily rooted in people and place.

The Three Pillars of Southern Honor Culture

While it is true, as Wyatt-Brown asserts, that “honor in the Old South applied to all white

classes,” it was still lived with “manifestations appropriate to each ranking.” If you remember ourmilitary analogy above, it can be compared to the way officers and privates are equals as men

of honor, but each group has its own culture and way of interacting with each other

For example, the code of honor of the upper middle class and the wealthy was tempered bygentility Their aggressive stance to the world was refined and balanced by an emphasis onmoral, dignified uprightness, clothes and manners, and education The latter was typically

devoted to classical literature from ancient Greece and Rome; The Illiad and The Odyssey were instruction manuals on living a life of honor, and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations was considered

second only to the Bible in importance

There were, however, three pillars of Southern honor culture that transcended socio-economicstatus, even if they sometimes manifested themselves differently according to class For allwhite Southern men, these three pillars were public, ritual encounters which served to test aman’s honor, and Wyatt-Brown argues, “helped Southerners determine community standingand reaffirm their membership in the immediate circle to which they belonged In all of themhonor and pursuit of place muted the threat of being alone and provided the chance to enjoythe power in fellowship.”

1 Sociability and Hospitality

Generosity, friendliness,

warm-heartedness, and expressive

sociability were points of honor for

a Southerner and one of the

primary ways in which he

“distinguish[ed] himself from the

Yankee.” If the watchwords for the

Northerner gentleman were

“coolness and detachment,” the

watchwords for his Southern

counterpart were “passion and

affability.” While Southern men

honored the Stoics for their apathy

towards death and centered calmness in times of both crisis and fortune, they made moreallowance for joviality in social situations than their more restrained Northern brethren Eventoday, Southerners take pride in their region’s friendly and big-hearted ways.

To combat the fear of solitariness discussed above, Southerners looked for any excuse to gettogether with friends and kin and held frequent dances, corn huskings, barn raisings, picnics,and militia musterings, amongst many other types of gatherings

But it was the ancient ritual of hospitality that held the most central role in a Southern man’ssociability and acted as a test of his honor Wyatt-Brown defines hospitality as “the relationship

of an individual and family to outsiders on home turf.” But it started with taking care of one’sown kin Southerners contrasted their generous approach in aiding their relatives to that whichthey perceived as the impersonal and tightfisted way in which Northerners more frequentlyrelied on public assistance – leaving the job to asylums, poorhouses, and charitable

organizations

And of course when it came to strangers and visitors, Southerners felt duty-bound to showhospitality to whomever showed up An element of competition existed in Southern hospitality– households which pulled out more of the stops in entertaining won status in the eyes of thecommunity

The honor-bound obligation to show hospitality to everyone who appeared on your doorstepcould lead to financial distress When Jefferson returned to Monticello after serving in theWhite House, even folks who had simply voted for him felt entitled to swing by and say hello;having to entertain this constant stream of well-wishers contributed to the large debt withwhich the president died

2 Gambling and Drinking

While Southerners were a religious people – often Baptist or Methodist in their faith – theSecond Great Awakening that swept the Northeast did not have as transforming an effect inDixie In the North, a revival in evangelical Christianity led to an emphasis on seeking moralperfection – both individually and as a community This desire for purification sparked the

creation of reformation groups, such as temperance societies, and led some gentlemen tobelieve that abstinence from things like alcohol and gambling were requirements of a man’scode of honor

While such things fell out of favor with Northerners (and some Southerners as well) most

Southern men continued to heartily believe that drinking and gambling (what one contemporaryreferred to as a “generous and manly vice”) were not incompatible with their faith or morality,and greatly contributed to maintaining a social, honorable culture Their piety on Sundays withtheir families and the rowdy good fun they had with each other could be compartmentalized,like two different roles in their life As has famously been said, “The South votes dry, and drinkswet.”

In a time bef ore basketball, f ootball, and hockey, horse racing was America’s most popular sport Especially anticipated were races that played up sectional hostilities — pitting a Southern-bred horse against a Northern one

Sports gave