
          Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior
in the Old South. Oxford University Press, 1982.
          By Morgan, LyndaLynda Morgan
          Vol. 5, No. 5, 1983, pp. 22-24
          
          In his History of the Southern Confederacy,
published in 1954, Clement Eaton noted that students of the American
South needed to pay more attention to "Southern honor" and its role in
the secession movement, although he was careful to add that the real
issue concerned the safety of slavery. Twenty-eight years later,
Bertram Wyatt-Brown has provided the first important assessment of the
problem Eaton recognized. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior
in the Old South, the first volume of a projected trilogy, is
an elaborate and expansively documented study which explores the
functional aspects of honor, here described as the sine qua non of the wealthiest and most powerful
slave society in the New World. This culture of honor was a lily-white
and largely classless ethic that fueled secession and had little or
nothing to do with the institution of slavery. "I have not placed
slavery at the center of Southern concern," Wyatt-Brown
explains. "White Southerners seldom forgot the presence of blacks;
nevertheless, what mattered most to them was the interchanges of
whites among themselves." As an idea virtually imbued with a life of
its own, honor "existed before, during and after slavery . . . The
South was not founded to create slavery: slavery was recruited to
perpetuate the South. Honor came first" and existed distinctly "apart
from a particular system of labor, a special region of the country,
and a specific time in history."
          It is difficult to understand how a notion like honor, foreign to
or at least defined differently by those of us living in the late
twentieth century, could hold so much power over 7i~eil and
events. What exactly was honor? For nineteenth-century white
Southerners it defined a system of ethical principles virtually
synonymous with reputation; it was the culprit behind the South's high
incidence of violence; and it generally excluded women, children, and
slaves from its exactions. Honor, which is also to say personal worth,
was conferred or besmirched by other members of the community; it was
entirely external in origin and application. If a man were held
dishonorable, he remained so until he had proven otherwise, usually
through some form of physical violence. Personal worth came not from
within, as increasingly it did among nineteenth-century Northerners
(and as it later would for Southerners), but from without: you had
only as much honor as others said you had. These tenets applied to
individuals, families, communities, and eventually, the entire region,
insofar as these terms describe white male society. It was an "ancient
ethic," "the cement that held regional culture together," a precept
that arrived in the South partly via the cultural baggage of the
unruly Scots and Scots-Irish, who enjoyed a preponderance among
immigrants to the Old South. And it caused civil war. "The inhabitant
of the Old South was not inspired to she 

his own or another's blood
for the right to own slaves," says Wyatt-Brown. "Ever since man first
picked up a stone to fling at an enemy, he has justified his thirst
for revenge and for public approval on the grounds of honor."
          These are sweeping claims. While we are indebted to Wyatt-Brown for
a provocative new approach to the Southern past and to a topic long
neglected, Southern Honor contains errors of
conceptualization and credits the cultural and ideological precept of
honor with vastly more importance than it merits. The relegation of
slavery to obscurity is the worst fault and the one which will be most
fully discussed here. But the inability to integrate cultural concepts
into the wider social, political, and economic context, the
unfortunate tendency towards ethnocultural determinism, and the
inattention paid to how societies change over time--inattention, that
is, to the very stuff of history--are other problems that mar the book
throughout.
          Disregard for some of the most important historiographical insights
of the last three decades bespeaks a certain indiscretion. Remarkable
for their absence in Southern Honor are the findings of two of the
most eminent Southern historians of our time, C. Vann Woodward, of
whom Wyatt-Brown was once a student, and Eugene D. Genovese. Two major
and widely accepted themes emerged from their most influential works,
Origins of the New South 1877-1918 (1951), and
Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972),
respectively. Origins emphasized the discontinuities
rather than the continuities of Southern history; stressed
socioeconomic and political as well as ideological conflicts; and
rejected the then prevalent consensus approach which envisioned a
homogenous white South, an approach perhaps best illustrated in the
writings of U.B. Phillips. Genovese's classic Roll, Jordan,
Roll carefully detailed antebellum slavery from the slaves'
perspective and painstakingly delineated what is now a commonplace in
Southern history that is ignored at considerable peril: "Masters and
slaves shaped each other and cannot be discussed or analyzed in
isolation." Woodward too had underscored this point in 1964 in the
preface to a book of essays entitled American Counterpoint:
Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue,  when he
said:
          
            The ironic thing about these two great hyphenate minorities,
Southern-Americans and Afro-Americans, confronting each other on their
native soil for three and a half centuries, is the degree to which
they have shaped each other's destiny, determined each other's
isolation, shared and molded a common culture. It is, in fact,
impossible to imagine the one without the other and quite futile to
try.
          
          This is precisely the error that Southern Honor
makes--it describes white Southerners without regard for the impact of
Afro-Americans on their lives and their culture, if whites can be said
to have had a "separate" culture. For even if it were true that
intraracial exchanges assumed priority with antebellum white
Southerners, the fact is that slaves fundamentally influenced every
aspect of white society, especially honor. Indeed, the very fact that
honor in its American incarnation lasted longest in the slaveholding
South 

indicates that slavery played no small part in the development
and character of that ethic.
          The dynamics of this master-slave dialectic as they applied to
honor need to be more fully explained. Even on the rare occasion when
Southern Honor discusses master-slave relationships, the interaction
tends to proceed from master to slave, rather than between master and
slave. Wyatt-Brown claims. for example, that honor required "the
unfeigned will ingress of slaves to bestow honor on all whites
. . . if slaves merely pretended to offer respect, the essence of
honor would be dissolved; only the appearance, shabby and suspect,
would remain." But a slave's willingness to bestow respect was typically an insincere appearance, though a
sophisticated rather than a shabby one. As a survival technique, the
facade of obedience ironically provided slaves with the very sense of
inner personal worth that was so illusory to slaveholders themselves,
and which they could do nothing to destroy in their slaves--if indeed
masters were even aware of it. These attitudes, far from dissolving
honor, affected it profoundly and, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, made honor
"a vast and awful thing." No matter how much whites would have liked
to believe it, slaves were hardly social ciphers. As Genovese so aptly
noted, slaveholders "wallowed in those deformities which their slaves
had thrust upon them in the revenge of historical silence--deformities
which would eventually lead to their destruction as a class."
          Although Wyatt-Brown insists that honor existed strictly apart from
socioeconomic factors and untouched by time and place, Southern
Honor is hardly persuasive on this point. Honor may have been
an ancient ethic, but in different societies and at different times it
expressed itself in different ways. Neither honor in the Mediterranean
nor "primal" honor were the same as Southern honor. In the American
case it would seem that the nineteenth-century move to industrial
capitalism, a change which was accompanied by the end of slavery and
the advent of new forms of social and productive relationships, would
have had an immense impact on cultures North and South. Wyatt-Brown
does hint that change occurred: honor is clearly in decline in the
North by the early nineteenth century, though why and what replaces it
are unclear. Honor also eventually departs the South, and its decline
dated from the Jeffersonian era and was linked to the rise of Southern
evangelicalism. Since Wyatt-Brown promises to address honor's demise
in a subsequent volume, it is unfair to fault him for his brief
treatment of it here. Hopefully his later works will take these
questions into fuller consideration.
          In writing Southern Honor, Wyatt-Brown has performed
yeoman service. This initial foray into an important and hitherto
unstudied realm of Southern history has brought us to a fuller
understanding of what life in the Old South was like. His description
of honor, more anthropological than historical, sheds light on another
antebellum Southern culture, perhaps better described as a
sub-culture. Yet the book has left many questions unanswered:
questions of time and place, of class and race and of the changing
socioeconomic environment and its impact on culture. In short, there
is more to Southern honor than Wyatt-Brown is telling us.
        
