How did white Southerners in the nineteenth century reconcile a Christian faith that instructed them to turn the other cheek with a pervasive code of honor that instructed them to do just the opposite—to demand satisfaction for perceived insults? In Edgefield, South Carolina, in the 1830s, white Southerners combined these seemingly antithetical ideals to forge a new compound: a wrathful moral ethic of righteous honor. Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies investigates the formation and proliferation of this white supremacist ideology that merged masculine bellicosity with religious devotion.
In 1856, when Edgefield native Preston Smith Brooks viciously beat the abolitionist Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, the ideology of righteous honor reached its apogee and took national center stage. Welborn analyzes the birth of this peculiar moral ethic in Edgefield and traces its increasing dominance across the American South in the buildup to the Civil War, as white Southerners sought to cloak a war fought in defense of slavery in the language of honor and Christian piety.
Table of Content
Introduction: Edgefield, S.C. as the Birthplace of Southern Righteous Honor
1. Honor: From Colonial Virility to Antebellum Refinement
2. Piety: The Ascent of Evangelical Protestantism
3. Righteous Honor: Merging the Ethics of Honor & Piety in the Early Antebellum Period
4. Moral Failings: Exorcising Inner Demons During the Sectional Crisis
5. The Conundrum of Slavery: Sanctioning Violence on Moral Grounds
6. 1856: Righteous Honor Triumphant
7. The Civil War & Reconstruction: Violent Conflict as Divine Contest
Epilogue: The Damnable Legacies of Righteous Honor
About the author
James Hill ‘Trae’ Welborn III is Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Georgia College & State University.
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