Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South

Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South explores Southerners’ understandings of honor and how that affected their lives and society. The book speaks to cultural history and draws upon the work of anthropologists such as Julian Pitt-Rivers and sociological studies, particularly the theories of Emile Durkheim.
Wyatt-Brown argues, “Honor served all members of society in a world of chronic mistrust, particularly so at times of crises, great or small” (pg. xxxv). Wyatt-Brown organizes his monograph and Southern society into three overarching topics: origins and definitions of honor, family and gender behavior, and structures of rivalry and social control. His focus on the origins of honor reaches show more back to ancient Rome and Germanic tribes as well as English and Celtic traditions. Discussing the fundamental role of honor, Wyatt-Brown writes, “At the heart of honor…lies the evaluation of the public” (pg. 14). He identifies three essential components to honor in the form of self-worth, public vindication of that worth, and reputation (pg. 14). These concepts drive his argument as he moves through each section in his monograph.
In his discussion of gender, Wyatt-Brown links honor directly to patriarchy. The family served as a physical manifestation in the world. Wyatt-Brown writes, “Reverence for parents was a classless ideal. Few questioned the right of fathers to demand instant, outward deference” (pg. 147). Society at large, and politics specifically, replicated this system. Wyatt-Brown writes, “The occupation of politics had a familial, closed character no less than banking. A young aspirant for office almost had to have a large and strategically placed set of kinfolks” (pg. 184). This section primarily serves to set up his final chapter, about the Foster family in Natchez, Mississippi, in which a man killed his wife. Wyatt-Brown would have benefitted from advancing this case study in his monograph and investigating issues as they arose. This may also have saved him from his overuse of Freud’s theories, which no longer work in psychology.
Finally, dueling plays a key role in Wyatt-Brown’s discussion of public honor. He writes that dueling “was alleged to be a defense of personal honor. Actually, that honor was little more than the reflection of what the community judged a man to be” (pg. 350). Wyatt-Brown works to counter the misconception of the duel as a breach in social etiquette, continuously returning to the rules and structure of the event. Unlike a feud, which may ravage a community, Wyatt-Brown writes, “duels…provided structure and ritual” (pg. 352). They also circumscribed social ranks and reinforced the hierarchy of the South, further affirming Wyatt-Brown’s claim that honor was a public system.
Wyatt-Brown draws upon Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Mary Beth Norton for his discussion of gender. When discussing slavery, he makes extensive use of Eugene Genovese and often interprets chattel slavery through the lens of paternalism, especially in his explanation of slaves as an extension of the master’s family. Wyatt-Brown’s discussion of dueling draws upon Dickson D. Bruce’s 1979 monograph Violence and culture in the Antebellum South. show less