Description:
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.
Review Quotes: At once scrutinizing individuals and surveying subtle transformations across several generations, author James Hill Welborn III's work broadens our understanding of the antebellum South on every level. Largely constructed around prominent slaveholding families in Edgefield, South Carolina, Welborn's research serves not only as perhaps the best and certainly most thorough examination of the Fire Eater heartland, but also as a superior articulation of the growth and proliferation of righteous honor and how it spurred the regional animosity leading to the Civil War . . . A genuinely page-turning read, more engaging by far than most histories of its kind. --North Carolina Historical Review