Honor and Slavery

Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South

Kenneth S. Greenberg

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691214092
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The "honorable men" who ruled the Old South had a language all their own, one comprised of many apparently outlandish features yet revealing much about the lives of masters and the nature of slavery. When we examine Jefferson Davis's explanation as to why he was wearing women's clothing when caught by Union soldiers, or when we consider the story of Virginian statesman John Randolph, who stood on his doorstep declaring to an unwanted dinner guest that he was "not at home, " we see that conveying empirical truths was not the goal of their speech. Kenneth Greenberg so skillfully demonstrates, the language of honor embraced a complex system of phrases, gestures, and behaviors that centered on deep-rooted values: asserting authority and maintaining respect. How these values were encoded in such acts as nose-pulling, outright lying, dueling, and gift-giving is a matter that Greenberg takes up in a fascinating and original way.
The author looks at a range of situations when the words and gestures of honor came into play, and he re-creates the contexts and associations that once made them comprehensible. We understand, for example, the insult a navy lieutenant leveled at President Andrew Jackson when he pulls his nose, once we understand how a gentleman valued his face, especially his nose, as the symbol of his public image. Greenberg probes the lieutenant's motivations by explaining what it meant to perceive oneself as dishonored and how such a perception seemed comparable to being treated as a slave. When John Randolph lavished gifts on his friends and enemies as he calmly faced the prospect of death in a duel with Secretary of State Henry Clay, his generosity had a paternalistic meaning echoed by the master-slave relationship and reflected in the pro-slavery argument. These acts, together with the way a gentleman chose to lend money, drink with strangers, go hunting, and die, all formed a language of control, a vision of what it meant to live as a courageous free man. In reconstructing the language of honor in the Old South, Greenberg reconstructs the world.

NOTES

PREFACE

1. On dueling and other affairs of honor in the South, see Dickson D. Bruce, Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979); John Hope Franklin, The Militant South (New York: Beacon Press, 1956); Steven M. Stowe, “The ‘Touchiness’ of the Gentleman Planter: The Sense of Esteem and Continuity in the Antebellum South,” Psychohistory Review 8 (winter 1979): 6-17; Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); William Oliver Stevens, Pistols at Ten Paces: The Story of the Code of Honor in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940); Jack K. Williams, Dueling in the Old South: Vignettes of Social History (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1980); Elliott J. Gorn, “ ‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch’: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” American Historical Review 90 (February 1985): 18-43; and Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 23-41.

2. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), describes the system of honor with special reference to the Southern interior and southwestern slave states. But he believes that the values of honor were not confined to a class or region within the South. Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), also agrees that the language of honor was widely spoken all over the South.

3. Franklin, Militant South; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, Stowe, Intimacy and Power; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor.

CHAPTER ONE
THE NOSE, THE LIE, AND THE DUEL

1. “Language” as used in this book does not mean vernacular language. It is closer to what Michel Foucault means by “discourse”—but I hesitate to use the term discourse because I do not accept many of Foucault’s assumptions about language. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973); see the discussion of “language” and “discourse” in John E. Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Anatomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review 92, no. 4 (October 1987): 889-93. See also Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Klein (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), esp. 137-52.

2. The approach used here has been influenced by a number of works in intellectual history, linguistics, and ethnography. Of greatest importance are Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988); James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); John Higham and Paul K. Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Joan Wallace Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981); Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); LaCapra and Klein, Modern European Intellectual History; and Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, and Language (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983).

3. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 62–67.

4. Charleston Courier, January 21, 1843.

5. Charleston Mercury, January 20, 1843.

6. Ibid., February 1, 1843.

7. Ibid.

8. Charleston Courier, February 6, 1843.

9. Ibid., February 1, 1843.

10. Ibid., February 6, 1843.

11. Ibid.

12. Charleston Mercury, March 31, 1843.

13. Charleston Courier, February 1, 1843.

14. See especially the discussion of this issue in Drew Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

15. For discussions of honor that emphasize similar values in other societies, see the essays in J. G. Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965); Christopher Boehm, Blood Revenge: The Enactment and Management of Conflict in Montenegro and Other Tribal Societies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984); Stanley Brandes, Metaphors of Masculinity: Sex and Status in Andalusian Folklore (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980); Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); and Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). Although there are similarities between the language of honor in the South and that used in many of these other societies, the vocabulary and the webs of associations differ enough so that the lan...