The Code of the Antebellum Whites
BLASSINGAME, JOHN W.
The Code of the Antebellum Whites Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South By Bertram Wyatt-Brown Oxford. 597 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by John W. Blassingame Professor of History and...
...Yet the penetration of the slave into the white's psyche loomed so large in the old South that Wyatt-Brown was perhaps correct to leave this subject for more extended treatment in a second volume...
...His book is a complex analysis treated in 17 chapters that are grouped into three parts, beginning with "Origins and Definitions...
...Although Southern Honor is a less unified study than Dickson Bruce's Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South, it covers far more terrain...
...by which judgments of behavior are ratified by community consensus...
...Moving easily from ancient Rome to the 20th-century South, Bertram Wyatt-Brown draws on an unusually wide range of sources and methodologies to explore life in the region between 1800-1860-Although, curiously, he devotes little attention to the role of religion...
...Subordinating law to communal needs and autonomy, Southerners had a virtual "indifference toward violence itself," which was often a means of enforcing community norms...
...Marriage was viewed as a means of securing livelihood and place...
...Barrenness and spinsterhood were calamities...
...Wyatt-Brown contends that the old South was fraternally rather than patriarchally bound...
...Their "role was inert, uncritical and flattering to the self-regard-ing male...
...Wyatt-Brown's failure to analyze the part played by churches in determining ethics and behavior, on the other hand, is open to criticism...
...They of course directly affected child rearing practices, sexual behavior, the outlook on the law, and the white Southerner' s sense of insecurity...
...Gambling and dueling similarly enhanced reputation and undergirded the social structure...
...Still, the gentry rejected dueling with inferiors and looked down on professional gamblers...
...The response of Natchez, Mississippi whites to a dissolute planter's murder of his wife is presented as symbolic of the interrelationship between the family, local mores, the law and brute force...
...Low membership throughout the antebellum period notwithstanding, the churches (as Ann Loveland and Donald Mathews have demonstrated) significantly shaped family life as well as attitudes toward violence and slaves...
...Some historians will challenge his description of the passivity of women, but they will do so only by ignoring the cultural and legal matrix he describes...
...Tradition weighed on the family: There were frenetic efforts to maintain family fortunes, and newborns were named after distinguished ancestors...
...In addition, early differentiation of sex roles, raising children to value the region's notion of rectitude, and encouraging aggressiveness led Southerners to prize military submissiveness...
...Though they possessed some of the "sisterhood" traits of Northern women, they more often closely associated with their brothers and lavished love on their children...
...was a man in too much of a hurry...
...The customary behavior of males in the family was to gather separately at social affairs, to travel away from home a good deal, and to beat their wives (often while drunk) as a mark of masculinity...
...Lacking confidence in their intellectual powers, men wanted wives younger (and less educated) than themselves...
...From earliest times, the author claims, honor was "inseparable from hierarchy and entitlement, defense of family blood and community needs...
...Part Two, "Family and Gender Behavior," is the most significant section...
...The central emphasis of such actions was on misconduct (adulterous women, rapists) that menaced family purity, that bedrock of honor...
...Lynch law was usually "a celebration of white supremacy" against slaves charged with heinous crimes...
...There were tolerant attitudes toward male fornication along with vehement rejection of female adultery...
...Miscegenation was acceptable as long as the black woman's inferior rank was maintained, but there was fear of mulatto male dalliances with white females...
...Conflicts between brothers-in-law (especially over property) were common, and this kind of intrafamilial violence severely endangered the social order...
...Suspecting his wife of adultery, he beat her to death, despite his own history of miscegenation, professional gambling and bad debts...
...Legislators were sympathetic to male divorce petitions involving adultery only when there was a confrontation with the lover and chastisement of the wife...
...author, with Mary Berry, "Long Memory" This sprawling work is a chilling account of life in the old South...
...In return, the citizens of Natchez flogged Foster to within an inch of his life after a judge quashed the indictment against him: The community thus purged itself of Foster's evil with the cooperation of lawyers...
...Few of the rituals the author discusses can be adequately understood without keeping in mind the churches' regard for order, stability and morality...
...With the exception of some unconvincing reasoning about miscegenation, the first two parts of Southern Honor are impressive for their research and analytical sophistication...
...all whites were "brothers...
...Since one of the central ways of sustaining honor involved property, the government had to protect it and men had to acquire it...
...Part Three, "Structures of Rivalry and Social Control," is less tightly woven...
...Meanwhile, tarring, feathering and riding on rails were generally reserved as ways of shaming whites...
...Moreover, the license planters enjoyed on the plantation spilled over into white society...
...Slaves stand largely on the outside of this study...
...Rejecting the myth of the belle, the author sees a kind of toughness in South-em women who realized they lived in a man's world...
...It is a depressing summary...
...Even in the case of the murder of slaves, the gentry escaped punishment because of their class...
...Instead, it focuses primarily on relations among the whites...
...Primitive education and the need to revere the patriarch by engaging in farming placed severe limits on the career choices of young men...
...He also overcomes the paucity of secondary accounts of the white family to present an unusually sensitive reading...
...The author defines "honor" as "the cluster of ethical rules...
...They shared a sense of family pride and learned to be poised in the midst of adversity...
...Ritual shaming and lynching both were stylized affairs constituting "ceremonies of moral purification" and attempts to promote stability...
...Legislatures were devoted to protecting the male's self-image and dignity, dismissing divorce petitions that charged drunkenness, brutality, and intercourse with prostitutes and mistresses in the wife's presence...
...But James Foster Jr...
...Stressing the "cheerless anxiety and unmanageable furies" beneath the conviviality of gambling and hunting and the slow pace of life, the author explores the rules of hospitality (suspicion of strangers and obligation to relatives and peers...
...Yet at the same time, permissiveness encouraged stormy self-expression, especially in males...
...Here Wyatt-Brown examines the generational conflicts that resulted from fathers holding on to power long after sons desired it, and the "flawed prescriptions of shame and humiliation and the ideals of hierarchy and honor" in child rearing practices...
...The first of a projected three-volume work, Southern Honor deliberately ignores the slave...
...Ultimately, that forthcoming book will constitute the proof of much in Southern Honor...
...in a world of chronic mistrust," honor was the concern of everyone, not simply one class...
...Practically powerless and alone before the law, women were generally "passive...
...The Foster family was acquisitive and demonstrated various levels of gentility...
...Reviewed by John W. Blassingame Professor of History and Afro-American Studies, Yale University...
...White responses to slave insurrections and panics reaffirmed the community's will and provided the means for overcoming the dread of slaves...
...Inherent in the concept were conformity, feelings of self-worth, public reputation, shame...
...Others will complain of his fixation on oedipal complexes and the like, studiously refusing to admit the force of the evidence underlying his psychological analyses...
...Hospitality invited competition at the same time that it muted some rivalries...
...Some subordination of individual autonomy to collective will was essential to preserve order, and in the South this meant a stress on bravery, hatred and family protectiveness...
...Indeed, it comes closer than any recent book to matching the broad tapestry of Wilbur J. Cash's The Mind of the South...
...Frequent intermarriage among cousins had the effect of concentrating wealth...
...The majesty of Wyatt-Brown's work lies, however, in his attentiveness to comparisons with Europe and the North, in his care to prevent exaggerations of the distinctiveness of particular practices while demonstrating that the Southern mosaic was nonetheless different...
...Wyatt-Brown ends his book with a well-told story...
Vol. 65 • December 1982 • No. 24
