A

HONOR

---

The tradition of honor has largely disappeared from modern discourse with the exception of military life. In that world, separated from civilian conventions, this ancient, once practically universal, code of behavior still reigns. No army, past or present, has long survived without a disciplined sense of hierarchy under orders, an ideal of valor under battle stress, and an intense bonding of warriors under arms. For those at war, faith in the ethic helps to reduce a sense of vulnerable isolation and fear of dying alone and unmourned. With all its qualities of discipline and heroic bearing, though, honor's relationship to violence is undeniable. Thanks in part to films including Gone with the Wind, the popularity of Civil War reenactments, and neoconservative Rebel flag waving, nostalgia for the romance of heroism and cavalier manners persists in public memory. Honor also has long had a merciless side, however, that is not always recognized. As the sociologist Orlando Patterson asserts, all slave societies from prehistory to the modern era have required an adherence to that ethic. The slaveholding South was no exception.

ORIGINS OF HONOR IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES

From the beginning of regional settlement, traditions of honor served as the basis for conventions in the relative absence of institutional, mediating structures. The ethic embraced the whole spectrum of living, from the famous practice of dueling as an assertion of power to romantic literary representations. Equally important for understanding its scope is honor's centrality to the relationship between men and women and to a reliance upon family and exclusive community. A biological ranking placed male over female, age over youth, rich over poor, strength over frailty, and, above all, white over black. It was a world of stark moral contrast—good vs. evil, honorableness vs. disgrace. For some men, honor was a reward above all others. Richard II in Shakespeare's play of the same name cries out, "Take honor from me, and my life is done." Less eloquently Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina confessed, "Life without honor is the deepest damnation. Not to do your duty is dishonor" (McDonnell, p. 123). Yet, the transatlantic community has always known that traditional honor relies upon public opinion and is a capricious monarch. To borrow again from Shakespeare, this time from Troilus and Cressida, outward shows of honors—"place, riches, and favour, / Prizes of accident"—sometimes weigh more than integrity. For white antebellum Southerners like Hammond, honor embodied the independency of the individual, the white family, and the property holder whose eternal rights included "laisser asservir"—the white man's right to hold human beings as possessions (Fisher, p. 412).

Whereas males might take different roads toward the goal of respect, women were defined by their ineligibility for reaching that prize by similarly aggressive means. The convention for them took on a negative character: modesty, not outspokenness; chastity, not license; submissiveness, not assertiveness; domesticity, not public notice. A woman's obligation was not merely to obey men but also to rear sons valorously dedicated to the protection of dependent family members. The mother of Sam Houston of Tennessee, founder of the Texas Republic, once handed her young son a musket and reminded him that it would be better for her sons to "fill one honorable grave, than one of them should turn his back to save his life" (Wyatt-Brown, p. 51). Although increasing religious conversions and an emerging commercial climate were well underway by the advent of secession and civil war, Southerners learned to combine old ways with the newly adopted. As a result, the venerable code survived the transatlantic changes that set the Northern industrializing states on a different, secular, and progressive path.

RATIONALES FOR HONOR

Projected aggressively outward, honor permitted its adherents few inner doubts. Its psychology and its opposite, shame, have always differed from the ethic of conscience and guilt. In the latter case, a sense of remorse arises from interior, often religious sources, rather than from threats of public exposure. To illustrate, consider a planter who kept his slave mistress at a distance from his residence. His male friends would know and, as he walked by, slyly joke about his upcoming rendezvous. Affably he would acknowledge their smiles. But if his wife were to find out and be openly pitied, and if both men and women together gossiped about it, the adulterer would only then lose his honorable standing and be disgraced. Appearance of virtue, not the real thing, mattered most.

The major duty of the man of honor was to uphold his own and his family's reputation and to protect the purity of the bloodline. In a chronically distrustful world, he was expected to guard the chastity of female relatives. They, in turn, could seek no autonomy. A case of black amalgamation–black male with white female—was the most horrifying possibility imaginable. In early 1861 John S. Preston, secession commissioner from South Carolina, informed the Virginia convention debating disunion that abolitionists would force white women to cohabit with blacks. "No community of laws, no community of language, of religion, can amalgamate . . . people whose severance is proclaimed by the most rigid requisitions of universal necessity," he warned (Reese 1:90). Such Protestant clergymen as Benjamin Morgan Palmer and John Fletcher asserted that in Genesis 9 God cursed Ham's sexual sin of alleged miscegenation, bringing divine castigation upon the black race. That ancient incident had supposedly undermined the natural order that the Creator had fashioned at the world's beginning.

In addition to protecting families from dishonor, sexual and otherwise, the Southern male was expected to react forcefully to insult or to anticipate humiliation. This was the underlying principle of the duel. Members of a community expected that violent retribution, sometimes by the gentlemen's ritualized encounter on the field of honor, should be the manly vindication of an insulted party. The duel was ordinarily confined to those admitted to a circle of gentlemen. The principals were required to be approximately the same in age, rank, and public standing.

DUELS

Contrary to general understanding, the duel was uncommon in America until the French and English officer corps introduced it during the French and Indian War (1756–1763). When national parties developed after the Constitution was ratified, Revolutionary veterans, as militia officers and political leaders, displayed their willingness to die for the honor of their faction by dueling with partisan foes. Thus, they demonstrated a murderous loyalty to their followers and thereby bound them to their leader. Often these supporters, mostly young attorneys, junior militia officers, and editors, would likewise serve their patrons, hoping to advance in power. To solidify their separate and feuding factions' constancy, Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) and Jeffersonian vice president Aaron Burr's (1756–1836) meeting at Weehawken in 1804 followed the patron-client pattern. Northern outrage against the practice erupted, however, when Hamilton fell. Few Yankees thereafter met an opponent on the ground. In the South, however, a connection between the duel and the exhibition of manly leadership continued up to the Civil War.

Southern states did pass weak laws against the practice. Occasionally the clergy criticized it. Yet, confident of public acquiescence, apologists defied the scowls of church and state. Justifying a duel with Thomas L. Clingman of North Carolina, William L. Yancey of Alabama proclaimed that God's order, state laws, and even a father and husband's duty to family "yield, as they have ever done," in the past—and the present—to the imperative of the duel or be humiliated (Wyatt-Brown, p. 51).

HONOR AS SOCIAL DISCOURSE

In public affairs, the honor code was supposed to guide men toward mutual regard of each other, if reputations so warranted. Honor therefore offered little in the way of personal privacy or deviancy from accepted rules. The presentation of the self as honorable had to be accepted by the local public or else the claimant to regard was disdained or worse. He had to take such a loss of face as part of his own personality. This mode of deciding who belonged and who did not was largely a consequence of the agrarian character of the Old South and the limited number residing in any community, where everyone knew everyone else's business. Indeed, in such face-to-face locales, strangers were unwelcome and suspected of malicious intentions. To win favor, they had quickly to establish some connection to known parties, demonstrate an admired skill, or exhibit an easy manner. Moreover, honor also enlisted violent community means to suppress some alleged outrage. Whippings, the applications of tar and feathers, and possibly lynch law might replace ordinary judicial processes. After the terrifying ritual of shaming or execution, participants congratulated themselves for having purified the moral environment.

Needless to say, however, not all Southerners participated in such celebrations. Instead, in elite circles, the most elevated form of honor often guided manners and appearances. They sought to meet the ideals of noblesse oblige, magnanimity, and gentle manners, an aspect of ancient concepts of Stoic dignity. Steven Shapin comments that in seventeenth-century England "a series of classical and pagan virtues—fortitude, fidelity, valor—were expressed in the notion of a gentleman's word" (p. 68). In his class notes after a lecture by the German American political scientist Francis Lieber, James Henry Hammond at South Carolina College in Columbia, jotted down this sentiment: "Honor is that principle of nature which teaches us to respect ourselves, in order that we may gain the esteem of others" (Wyatt-Brown, p. 103). Like Thomas Jefferson years earlier, Southern gentlemen of an elevated spirit considered the pursuit of honor to be praiseworthy only if the claimant understood that he had to treat others, if deserving, with respect—even slaves. That spirit endured into the late nineteenth century. In 1891 the Confederate general Wade Hampton, a defeated, old-style South Carolina governor, explained that holding elective office "is only honorable as an evidence of the good will, the esteem, the confidence of those who bestow it" (Holden, p. 72). With his gravitas, Christian bearing, and refined sense of honor, Robert E. Lee epitomized that widely praised Southern gentlemanly tradition. Long after the Civil War he served as the South's prime exemplar.

POLITICAL MANIFESTATIONS OF HONOR

In light of this code—in both its truculently primal and its genteel forms—the South regarded the growing controversy with the free states as a form of dueling. Heated insults rang through the congressional corridors. They appeared in print, pulpit, and public speeches as well. An upsurge of Southern anger was scarcely a wonder. The relentlessness with which Northern politicians, preachers, and reformers had voiced their antislavery sentiments throughout the years before the war was bound to prompt almost hysterical responses, particularly in the lower South. The density of its slave population, rural character, and relative isolation from Northern influences set the region apart, even from the other slave states closer to the Northern juggernaut. Southern whites were so proud of their religious devotion, suppression of deviant ideas, agrarian prosperity, and honorable motives that they considered secession a God-given choice. To many of them, as Susan Keitt of Charleston, wife of a leading Fire-Eater, put the matter, the Northern enemy was just "a motley throng of . . . Infidels and Free Lovers, interspersed by Bloomer women, fugitive slaves and amalgamationists" (Marchant, p. 348). In politics, every Yankee advance seemed to threaten the Southern way of life. Economically and socially dependent upon their slaves, white Southerners could not imagine what other way of life there could be.

As sectional differences became ever more bitter, Southerners proclaimed themselves a culture apart from the rest of the nation. The fast growth and ethnic diversity of the Northern population was eroding the underpopulated South's political strength in the Congress and endangering slaveholding control of the national government. The idea of a social order based upon the "cavalier" followers of the Stuart monarchy appealed to the Southern slaveholding elite. In 1861 Samuel Phillips Day, an English journalist, observed that the struggle harkened to earlier times when "Cavalier and Roundhead" took to warfare. The descendants of "Plymouth Rock" and the Virginia colonists had become no less bloodthirsty than the Puritans and Cromwellians of old.

HONOR IN LITERATURE

In the development of a distinctive antebellum Southern literature, the traditions of honor were bound to appear. William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870) of South Carolina, one of the first American authors to make a living from fiction writing, depicted stereotypical heroes, handsome and virile. They were Southern through and through. Novelists like Simms followed such contemporary conventions as depicting cousinly wedding ties that for decades had been a regional means to hold property within family boundaries and find partners compatible in habits and aims. Unlike such contemporary Northern writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), they did not examine the deepest feelings of their characters. Instead, the artist relied on the given verities—the success or failure of their heroes and heroines to meet lofty standards. A culture steeped in honor sets a wall of reticence around the inner life. Moreover, Simms, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (1784–1851) of Virginia, and others held that the artist's duty was to offer examples of moral achievement and dishonorable perversity. In the grandiloquent rhetoric that Southern novelists treasured, Tucker, author of The Partisan Leader (1836), has the hero, George Balcombe of Virginia, admonish a friend for belittling good bloodlines. Given all other claims, Balcombe crows, "is it not a higher honour to spring from a race of men without fear and without reproach—the ancient cavaliers of Virginia?" Such gentlemen as he could never tarnish their honor. Rather, Tucker writes, Balcombe and company would spill "their blood like water," and sacrifice "their wealth like chaff" if honor so demanded (Taylor, pp. 320–321). It never occurred to the Southern belletrists to criticize their society for its anti-intellectualism, blind adherence to outworn ideas, racism, and, above all, dedication to slavery. To do so would have violated a sacred social compact, in which the precepts of honor and community loyalty were paramount.

Although Edgar Allan Poe's (1809–1849) poetry and fiction are not generally associated with his native Virginia, he, too, embraced the ideals of Southern honor and even more, a dread of shame. Alcoholic and quite possibly affected by bipolar disorder, he recognized his social and moral inadequacy by the criteria of respectability. He displayed a self-destructiveness in his many quarrels and frequently severed connections with literary colleagues. Poe's gothic stories often involved a sadist, who, after almost senseless acts of rage and malice, recognizes his unworthiness for normal acceptance. In remorse, he confesses his crime to some official or else comes to a self-inflicted death. An orphan reared by an unloving Richmond merchant and his melancholy wife, Poe placed his well-hidden resentments and sense of doom in such tales as "The Cask of Amontillado."

HONOR IN SOUTHERN POETRY

Likewise, Southern poetry was largely steeped in the various aspects of the honor code. An example was the Kentuckian Theodore O'Hara's (1820–1867) poem "The Bivouac of the Dead" (1848). It was composed to memorialize veterans killed in the Mexican-American War and stressed the immortal glory of heroes:

Nor shall your glory be forgot 

While Fame her record keeps, 

Or Honor points the hallowed spot 

Where Valor proudly sleeps.

(Hughes and Ware, p. 58)

The battles in Mexico were a prelude to bloodier encounters not many years later. The concept of military honor was no less pronounced in the Civil War. In 1861 the Reverend George L. Lee, a Baptist of Alabama, lectured a battalion on the eve of departure from home. "I want you to do noble . . . deeds that will bring glory to God, honor to Christ, happiness to man, confusion to devils, and to all of old Abe's fanatics, and eternal credit and honor to yourselves" (Flynt, p. 114). In the mind of a well-read soldier, war, honor, and literature were easily combined. "I am blessing old Sir Walter Scott daily," wrote a South Carolinian officer early in the fight, "for teaching me, when young, how to rate knightly honour, & our noble ancestry for giving me such a State to fight for" (McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, p. 27). One was unlikely to locate the same Cavalier sensibility among the Northern "Roundheads," the historian James McPherson observes. As the Carolinian implied, adherence to honor plunged its devotees into the ruin of civil war—and defeat.

Indeed, Southerners so venerated Scott that the language of his romances had arisen earlier in political debate. Just before resigning, Congressman Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina put his own hostility toward Northern Unionists into Scott's rhetoric. He was prepared, he thundered, to face the Yankee foe "with helmet on, with visor down, and lance couched" (Walther, p. 186). With the Southern duel in mind, he welcomed a war soon to be fought on "the field" of honor. Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) and other historical novels appealed to the planter class because in them they found their own basic ideals and values reified. That sense of romance continued well into the war but gradually faded as reality offered a different perspective.

HONOR ON THE BATTLEFIELD

In the war itself, however, the concept of a heroic cavalier spirit for a time helped to disguise the sights and smells of death, injury, and devastation. Unsurprisingly, solders' letters home often spoke of honor. A new enlistee from North Carolina pledged to "give up my life in defence of my Home and Kindred. I had rather be dead than see the Yanks rule this country" (McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 310). He and so many others would meet that very prospect. Intermixed with pledges to honor was a fear of shaming their units by a seizure of panic or an impulse for cowardly flight. Some feigned illness. Others, truly sick, joined their comrades, "determined," an Alabama lieutenant wrote his wife, "to not have it said that our Comp[any] was in a fight and I not with them" (McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, p. 79).

Not all, however, were convinced. Honor seemed an empty vessel as the war lengthened and specters of failure loomed. The poet Henry Timrod (1828–1867) of Charleston had won popularity with his cheerleading verses. Yet, as early as the aftermath of First Manassas, fought on 21 July 1861, Timrod sang mournfully of "meadows beaten into bloody clay," banners "drooping in the rain," and of "whispers round the body of the dead!" (Rubin, p. 205). These lines did not inspire nor were they meant to.

As Timrod and others ultimately recognized, courage and a devotion to the principles of honor could not win a war for the doomed rebel cause. After the destructiveness of Sherman's march, after Lee's surrender, after slavery's fall, Southerners were bound to mourn. They looked upon the carnage and the bravery and whispered soulfully and proudly "We have lost all save honor."

DISTURBING LEGACIES

In fact, honor was still restorative enough to inspire the launching of a guerrilla war with vigilante groups and the Ku Klux Klan, whose night riders spread near-anarchy. The paramilitary units and the Democratic "Redeemers" were determined to wrest political control from the Republicans, preserve white dominion, and resist by every means "social equality"—not only the intermingling of races but also all signs of freed people's advancement. From 1865 to the 1870s the hard-pressed Republicans in the South, both white and black, tried to create a new order of biracial, two-party democracy. They failed as Northerners grew weary of trying and Southern resistance mounted. The era of lynch law under Redeemer state governments held the emancipated race in a new grip. It took nearly a century to undo, at least partially, the enormous moral and social damage that a virulent spirit of honor, tragically, had helped to generate.

See also Civil War; English Literature; Individualism and Community; Manhood; Proslavery Writing; Slavery

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Day, Samuel Phillips. Down South; or, An Englishman's Experience at the Seat of the American War. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862.

Reese, George H., ed. Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention of 1861, February 13–May 1. 4 vols. Richmond: Richmond State Library (Historical Publications Divisions), 1965.

Secondary Works

Brown, William Garrott. The Lower South in American History. 1902. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1968.

Donald, David Herbert. Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 1960.

Fisher, David Hackett. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Flynt, Wayne. Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998.

Haynes, Stephen R. Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Holden, Charles J. "'Is Our Love for Wade Hampton Foolishness?' South Carolina and the Lost Cause." In The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Hughes, Nathaniel Cheairs, Jr., and Thomas Clayton Ware. Theodore O'Hara: Poet-Soldier of the Old South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998.

McDonnell, Lawrence T. "Struggle against Suicide: James Henry Hammond and the Secession of South Carolina." Southern Studies 22 (summer 1983): 109–137.

McPherson, James M. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Marchant, John H. "Lawrence M. Keitt, South Carolina Fire-Eater." Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1976.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Taylor, William Robert. Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character. New York: Braziller, 1961.

Walther, Eric H. The Fire-Eaters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Williams, Jack Kenny. Dueling in the Old South: Vignettes of Social History. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1980.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown