The Old South

Honor and Violence in the Old South

Honor and Violence is the Old South is actually an abridged version of Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. The book presents an objective and highly well researched account of life for women and slaves in the South who were considered devices with which to maintain family honor. The subject of honor has been studied from historical and anthropological perspective. The author seeks to explain why white masters treated slaves in an inhumane manner and similarly how women were expected to behave in patriarchal societies of the South. Everything was eventually connected with honor and it was the pursuit of the same that gave birth to violence in these traditional and highly conservative societies. "Honor in the pre-Civil War slave states was an encoded system, a matter of interchanges between the individual and the community to which he or she belonged. Meaning was imparted not with words alone, but in courtesies, rituals, and even deeds of personal and collective violence. In such a system, words could assume particular, and sometimes dangerous, force, as in the case of communicating a challenge to a duel." (Preface, vii)

The author explains that there were two extremely important driving forces behind South's obsession with preservation of honor. For one, it was believed that since Northerners were the enemy, they must never be allowed to ridicule South's men of honor. It was essentially a defensive tactic that helped South keep its head high against a more sophisticated, civilized and successful enemy. In the antebellum period, South was mainly an agrarian society while North had become a major industrial force. It was clear that South's economy was waning with most immigrants settling in Northern region and contributing to the development of industries there. Cotton plantations were one of the main sources of income for the rich South and with decrease in its production, South was losing to North on the economic front. In these circumstances, South needed some reasons to somehow feel better than their enemy and preservation of so-called honor was their best device. "Whites in the antebellum South were a people of honor who would not subject themselves to the contempt of a ruthless enemy, as the Yankee supporters of Abraham Lincoln and abolitionists were thought to be. As early as 1851, secessionist leader James Jones of South Carolina argued that even if the overwhelming power of the North were to defeat a Southern struggle for independence, the Southerners would have at least "saved our honor and lost nothing." (Bertram, viii)

The main reason why honor was to be preserved was grounded in South's fear of humiliation. This humiliation would result if South lost to North on any front. Since a very long time, South had been dominant in economic field; it was considered an affluent society, which couldn't be displeased. Due to South's powerful status in the country, its rich class would smugly preserve its patriarchal family structures and civil rights of everyone were blatantly ignored. Women and slaves would both suffer under this system. While salves were treated inhumanely to preserve family honor, women were forced to suppress their desires and opinions as this would help in maintaining perfect natural order. "Southern male honor required that women be burdened with a multitude of negatives, a not very subtle way to preserve male initiative in the never-ending battle of the sexes. Female honor had always been the exercise of restraint and abstinence. "She cannot [that is, ought never to] give utterance to her passions like a man," commanded T.R. Dew of William and Mary College." (Bertram, 86)

South was a strictly conservation society with somewhat weird religious beliefs. The affluent men of honor in this region believed that slavery was indeed "an honorable institution" (ix). On the one hand it helped them preserve their social position and on the other South believed, blacks were meant to be treated in a certain manner. They connected it with God's natural order of things. "Southern whites believed (as most people do) that they conducted their lives by the highest ethical standards. They thought that they had made peace with God's natural order." (Bertram, 2)