The Field of Honor

Description

Current research on the history and evolution of moral standards and their role in Southern society

For more than thirty years, the study of honor has been fundamental to understanding southern culture and history. Defined chiefly as reputation or public esteem, honor penetrated virtually every aspect of southern ethics and behavior, including race, gender, law, education, religion, and violence. In The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity, editors John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette bring together new research by twenty emerging and established scholars who study the varied practices and principles of honor in its American context, across an array of academic disciplines.

Following pathbreaking works by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Dickson D. Bruce, and Edward L. Ayers, this collection notes that honor became a distinctive mark of southern culture and something that—alongside slavery—set the South distinctly off from the rest of the United States. This anthology brings together the work of a variety of writers who collectively explore both honor's range and its limitations, revealing a South largely divided between the demands of honor and the challenges of an emerging market culture—one common to the United States at large. They do so by methodologically examining legal studies, market behaviors, gender, violence, and religious and literary expressions.

Honor emerges here as a tool used to negotiate modernity's challenges rather than as a rigid tradition and set of assumptions codified in unyielding rules and rhetoric. Some topics are traditional for the study of honor, some are new, but all explore the question: how different really is the South from America writ large? The Field of Honor builds an essential bridge between two distinct definitions of southern—and, by extension, American—character and identity.

Contributors:
Jeffrey E. Anderson
Edward L. Ayers
Dickson D. Bruce Jr.
Emily S. Bruce
Matthew A. Byron
Edward R. Crowther
Christopher Michael Curtis
Brenda Faverty
Jeff Forret
Sarah E. Gardner
Todd Hagstette
Kathleen M. Hilliard
Bradley Johnson
Anna Koivusalo
Robert S. Levine
Lawrence T. McDonnell
John Mayfield
David Moltke-Hansen
Amanda R. Mushal
Timothy J. Williams

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• The Ultimate Solution
• His Honour
• King Cotton
• Original intent
• Court of Honor
• Worlds of Honor
• Self-Reliance
• Cultural hegemony
• John L. O'Sullivan
• Walter Savage Landor
• State
• Honour
• General officer
• South
• Chivalry
• History of the Americas
• The Remains
• Charles Sumner
• General
• Ayers
• United States
• Amende honorable
• FL
• Local
• KY
• LA
• TN
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• Charivari
• VA
• GA

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 17 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611177299
• Langue: English

Extrait

T HE F IELD OF H ONOR
ESSAYS ON SOUTHERN CHARACTER AND AMERICAN IDENTITY
EDITED BY John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette
FOREWORD BY Edward L. Ayers
© 2017 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mayfield, John, 1945– editor. | Hagstette, Todd, editor.
Title: The field of honor : essays on southern character and American identity / edited by John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette ; foreword by Edward L. Ayers.
Description: Columbia, South Carolina : Published by the University of South Carolina Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016047777 (print) | LCCN 2016048207 (ebook) | ISBN 9781611177282 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611177299 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Honor—Southern States. | Southern States—Social life and customs—1775–1865. | Southern States—Social life and customs—1865–
Classification: LCC F209 .F54 2017 (print) | LCC F209 (ebook) | DDC 975/.03—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047777
Front cover images (left to right) of James Chestnut Jr., William Gilmore Simms, and Thomas Nelson Page courtesy of the Library of Congress.
CONTENTS
Foreword: Honor’s Southern Journey Edward L. Ayers
Preface
Acknowledgments
P ART I: C HALLENGING H ONOR —T HE M ARKETPLACE
The Marketplace of Values: Honor and Enterprise in the Old South John Mayfield
To Civilize King Cotton’s Realm: William Gilmore Simms’s Chivalric Quest David Moltke-Hansen
Bushels of Corn, Tubs of Trouble: Measuring Honor at the Pendleton Farmer’s Society, 1823–1824 Kathleen M. Hilliard
“A Very Honorable Man in His Trading”: Honor, Credit Reporting, and the Market Economy in Antebellum Charleston Amanda R. Mushal
P ART II: H ONOR , V IOLENCE, AND THE L AW
Writing the Duel: Rhetorical Negotiation and the Language of Honor in the Nineteenth-Century South Todd Hagstette
An Honorable Death? The Stuart-Bennett Duel of 1819 Matthew A. Byron
“Not a Judicial Act, Yet a Judicious One”: Honor, Office, and Democracy Christopher Michael Curtis
The Subversive Rhetoric of Honor and Illegality in Thomas Nelson Page’s “Marse Chan” Bradley Johnson
P ART III: D EFINING THE M AN —H ONOR AND C HARACTER
“The Honor of New England”: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Cilley-Graves Duel of 1838 Robert S. Levine
Pursuits of Character: Rethinking Honor among Antebellum Southern College Students Timothy J. Williams
“The Deceivingest Fellow”: Honor, Respectability, and the Crisis of Character in the Old South Lawrence T. McDonnell
“He Ordered the First Gun Fired & He Resigned First”: James Chesnut, Southern Honor, and Emotion Anna Koivusalo
P ART IV: D EFINING THE O THER —H ONOR AND S HAME
“The Prisoner . . . Thinks a Great Deal of Her Virtue”: Enslaved Female Honor, Shame, and Infanticide in Antebellum Virginia Jeff Forret
“Tattling Is Far More Common Here”: Gossip, Ostracism, and Reputation in the Old South Brenda Faverty
“Early-Acquired Superstition”: Conjure and the Attempted Redefinition of Racial Honor Jeffrey E. Anderson
P ART V: T HE P ERSISTENCE OF H ONOR
“The Secret of Vengeance”: Honor and Revenge in Andrew Lytle’s The Long Night Sarah E. Gardner
Iron Chests: Honor and Manhood in Southern Evangelicalism Edward R. Crowther
Honor and the Rhetoric of Conservatism in Twenty-First-Century America Dickson D. Bruce Jr. and Emily S. Bruce
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Edward L. Ayers
FOREWORD
Honor’s Southern Journey
Honor threatened to end my scholarly career before it had properly begun. The encounter occurred just after I had delivered my first conference paper, sketching the outlines of crime and punishment across the South in the nineteenth century, arguing that much of the well-documented homicidal violence in the South had been shaped by and driven by a culture of honor. Previous explanations for the persistent bloodshed in the region’s past had focused on dysfunctional conditions such as the frontier, alcohol, militancy, pessimism, and a sense of grievance, so the idea that violence followed a certain kind of perverse logic seemed provocative and perhaps even useful.
After the session ended a genial scholar in a bright plaid jacket and bow tie came up to offer a word of support. I recognized the memorable name on his tag— Bertram Wyatt-Brown—from an article he had published a few years earlier, “The Ideal Typology in Antebellum Southern History.” I told him how much I admired that piece and asked him what he was working on now. He cheerfully said that he had just completed the final touches on a book to be called Southern Honor . In fact he had been reading the page proofs in his hotel room, and the book would be out in a few months. 1
I must have done a poor job of disguising my anxiety and disappointment, for he kindly invited me to have a beer with him at the hotel bar, where he described his forthcoming book in detail. I was astounded by its reach and scale but reassured by Wyatt-Brown’s generous spirit, reflected in his insistence that I call him Bert. He said he would send me the page proofs as soon as he finished reading them.
A couple of weeks later I studied the many pages with admiration but also with churning stomach as I confronted a proudly idiosyncratic work that combined literary history, gender, law, psychohistory, and more, all in surprising ways. The book explicated honor in lovingly detailed vignettes of violence, disorder, and betrayal. Wyatt-Brown invoked W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South as an inspiration, and indeed both books were intoxicating in their confidence. Wyatt-Brown announced in the introduction of Southern Honor , moreover, that he would write another book on slavery and honor and yet another on honor’s decline—which he saw beginning as early as the time of Thomas Jefferson. In the meantime those aspects of honor would have to wait, for “the task of the moment is to show how honor functioned in the first place.” He performed that task with daunting energy and imagination. 2
Southern Honor was not a fashionable book in 1982; in fact it was boldly iconoclastic, insisting on culture’s independence from its social and material foundations. Nevertheless Wyatt-Brown’s book, we can see at this distance, embodied several aspects of the intellectual climate of the 1970s and early 1980s. The concept of honor as a coherent culture had recently been defined, elaborated, and theorized by anthropologists and sociologists, who found honor at work in many places throughout the world. Julian Pitt-Rivers, J. G. Peristiany, and others had pioneered the idea in the 1960s and published a series of influential essays and collections over the next decade that brought the topic wide recognition. In its depth and coherence, their portrayal of honor fit comfortably with the work of fellow anthropologist Clifford Geertz; his seminal article on the cultural logic of the Balinese cockfight was becoming one of the most influential works among historians in the 1970s and 1980s. 3
Powerful new books in southern history at the time also inclined scholars to look for inclusive and coherent cultural interpretations. Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll exerted remarkable intellectual hegemony after its publication in 1974, portraying the slave South as a complex society dominated by the relationship between master and slave. Honor corresponded well with such a hierarchical and organic society in which a personalized relationship between master and slave effectively resisted the machinery and values of capitalism. Many historians agreed with Genovese that the South was a place profoundly distinct from the North, with a ruling ethic in sharp contrast to the ethic of industrial capitalism. The dramatic critical rise and fall of the Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross , which aimed to demonstrate through econometrics that the slave South was in fact profoundly capitalist, only secured the conviction of many historians that the South was nothing of the kind. 4
As a graduate student in the late 1970s, consumed by these exciting developments, I was intrigued by another recent book, this one by sociologists Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hans Kellner: The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness . The Bergers argued that the modern world was tone deaf to the concept of honor. “Honor occupies about the same place in contemporary usage as chastity,” they observed. “An individual asserting it hardly invites admiration, and one who claims to have lost it is an object of amusement rather than sympathy.” In our own time, the communal and hierarchical concept of honor had been replaced by the individualistic and egalitarian concept of “dignity,” tailored to a dynamic capitalist society, for dignity “relates to the intrinsic humanity divested of all socially imposed roles or norms. It pertains to the self as such, to the individual regardless of his position in society.” 5
Elliott Gorn and I read The Homeless Mind for an independent reading in the “new social history” in 1977. The book led us in turn to the anthropological literature on honor als