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
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- $52.99
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- $52.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I hope that I have established enough associations to have created an elementary primer of the language of honor," says Greenberg, a Suffolk University professor of history and author of Masters and Statesmen, at the end of this study of the Southern chivalric code. That code was held by "Southern Men of Honor" whose values, beliefs and behaviors determined what most Northern readers will see as not just one but many "peculiar institutions" south of the Mason-Dixon line. Many of Greenberg's observations offer revealing contextualizations. Particularly interesting are chapters on death and on the duel and its rather less drastic variation, the tweaking of the nose, a symbol of masculine honor. Sometimes, he stretches his points, as with the issue of lying when John Randolph says to a would-be guest: "Sir, I am not at home." "This interaction illuminates one meaning embedded in the idea of `giving the lie' in the culture of honor.... You did not own a lie until you were called a liar." (Greenberg also fails to make clear why he doesn't translate Randolph's "at home" in the 18th- and 19th-century sense in which it meant "accessible to strangers.") Greenberg argues that the slave-master relationship molded the conduct of Southern gentleman, conduct in which open confrontation, for example, by being associated with slaves was considered dishonorable. According to Greenberg, this same code caused baseball to be less popular in the South than in the North. "The act of running in baseball implied a change of position that seemed inappropriate to a man of honor." Gambling, on the other hand, was considered an appropriately elitist pastime and one, he says, that would inform Confederate strategists. "The Confederacy may well have lost the Civil War as a result of lessons learned at Southern card tables and racetracks."