Honor And Violence In The Old South By Bertram Wyatt-Brown

The nature of the Old South depended on a firmly structured society where plantation owners, or a small white body of southerners, existed as the elites of society, “crackers,” who were sometimes depicted as poor whites but, in this case, refer to those whites in the south who represented a culture which drew from its Celtic origins, and, most importantly, African American slaves who were firmly regimented in state of inferiority to both crackers and planters. In terms of ethics and economics, the nature of the Old South created for itself a unique civilization where, ethically, southerners possessed a high degree of honor and were in a constant state of fear of humiliation, and, economically, southern society was unique for its reliance on

In his seminal book, Honor and Violence in the Old South, historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that southern society differed from the northern states in three respects, what honor truly meant in the north vs. the south, honor as it related to southern whites, and the role of the woman in the household, that, Wyatt-Brown argues, always existed. Southerners adhered to this moral code that is termed the rule of honor. In defining an ethical institution that was omnipresent among a select few individuals in the south, the author argues that northern notions of honor differed significantly from how honor was perceived in the south. In the north, “honor… became akin to respectability, a word that included freedom from licit vices that once were signals of masculinity.” Drawing on a rich source of literature that is unbiased, Wyatt-Brown contends that the system of honor in the south differed ostensibly, as honor was “an encoded system, a matter of interchanges between the individual and the community to which he or she belonged.” In fact, a key characteristic that Wyatt-Brown points out in both southern literature and southern society that “honor, not conscience, [and] shame, not guilt, were the psychological and social underpinnings of Southern

In the book, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, historian Grady McWhiney interestingly submits that “fundamental and lasting divisions between Southerners and Northerners began in colonial America when migrants from the Celtic regions of the British Isles – Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall – and from the English uplands managed to implant their traditional customs in the Old South.” In this respect, McWhiney essentially argues that the origin points for both the north and the south differed because of the culture that was implanted there. The Celts, who were the culture originators of the Old South, “brought with them to the Old South leisurely ways that fostered idleness and gaiety, a society in which people favored the spoken word over the written and enjoyed such sensual pleasures as drinking, smoking, fighting, gambling, fishing, hunting, and loafing.” In addition, southerners held stronger familial ties compared to England and in the antebellum North and spent more time consuming liquor and tobacco. Northerners, on the other hand who drew from Englishmen, “favored urban villages and nuclear families…imbued with a work ethic and commercial values, they were neater, cleaner, read and wrote more, worked harder, and considered themselves more progressive and advanced