Wyatt-Brown is the author of book Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982), which explores the kinship networks and the related honor code which was prevalent in so much of Southern society and which greatly influenced white Southerners' perceptions of abolitionism and Northern criticism.
In the NY Review article, he offers this observation:
We must understand that Southern whites thought and acted within a set of cultural standards very different from our own and also that of their contemporaries in the North. The Southerner linked his identity with his lineage, family, posterity, and community. As a result, the regional politician - and voter, too - did not easily distinguish those insults directed toward himself from those that disparaged, as he saw it, the values of his neighborhood, state, or region. The individual was merged into the whole even as he felt himself to be its representative to the world. For instance, Reuben Davis, a Mississippi congressman favoring secession, in recollection boasted that he had been "the mouthpiece of a wronged and outraged people, and their righteous indignation poured itself through me." Under these circumstances, politicians saw themselves as stout defenders of those communal values without which, they insisted, political order could not be preserved. To ignore the workings of the psychology of honor is to miss the anger and hurt pride that secession was intended in large measure to vindicate. (my emphasis)Just to be clear so that this one isolated quotation doesn't leave a mistaken impression: Wyatt-Brown is not a Confederate apologist. And he does not offer the Southern sense of "honor" as somehow the "real cause" of the war. He recognizes that slavery was the cause. But the perceptions and reactions Southerners learned in their honor culture shaped and misshaped their perceptions of Northern opposition to slavery.
Tags: american civil war, bertram wyatt-brown, confederate heritage month 2008, us civil war
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