Honor and Violence in Virginia, 1607-1861

Project Description

Bruce C. Baird

Purpose

This study will trace the transformation of Virginia from an intensely-governed, socially and politically stable, and relatively non-violent society in the colonial era to the honorific “culture of violence” of the antebellum era. This will be set more broadly within a comparative historical analysis of the increasingly violent nature of American society after the American Revolution and its link to the dramatic changes in Northern and Southern attitudes toward honor violence and dueling from the late colonial to the antebellum era.

Significance

Scholars since the publication of W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South (1941) have been fascinated by the image of a violent South, the South of duels, feuds, bushwhackings, and lynchings. Historians have turned to violence in the American South as the key to the central theme of Southern history. Social scientists have sought in an understanding of the historically higher levels of violent behavior in the South some partial explanation for the plague of violence in modern America.

As the ultimate source of this higher level of violence, scholars have proposed several different explanations. Some, like Cash himself, locate the roots of the “savage ideal” in the American frontier which has always been a violent place. The effects of the frontier simply lingered longer in the South than in the North because of lower population densities and the relative absence of towns and cities. Following an even older interpretation associated with Thomas Jefferson and Northern abolitionists, John Hope Franklin (1956) found the “militant South” a direct outgrowth of the institution of slavery.

But by far the most popular explanation today stresses cultural rather than environmental or institutional roots, much older and deeper than the frontier and slavery, the outgrowth of ancient notions of honor. Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s seminal Southern Honor (1982) proposed the idea that Northern and Southern colonists alike carried ideas of honor‑-with its inherent propensity for violence in defense of reputation‑-in their common Anglo-Saxon cultural baggage. But the two regions began to diverge by the early nineteenth century as the North rejected honor in favor of Christian piety, relegating honor violence to the South. Edward Ayers, Kenneth Greenberg, and numerous other antebellum Southern scholars have all built upon Wyatt-Brown’s foundation (Ayers 1984; Greenberg 1996).

An historical analysis of the relationship between honor and violence in Virginia from 1607-1861 raises some significant questions about these attempts to understand the origins of a violent South. Historians have long acknowledged that dueling was exceedingly rare in the colonial era but typically explain this away by hypothesizing that dueling evolved out of more primitive modes of honor violence under the general civilizing influence of Anglicization in the late eighteenth century and the particular influence of British, French, and German officers during the American Revolution (Isaac 1982; Gorn 1985). But contrary to the scholarly consensus, not only was dueling rare in the colonial era but so was honor violence in general, at least before the mid-eighteenth century. Thus the emergence of dueling in Virginia after the American Revolution reflected far greater changes than historians have been willing to admit. Unfortunately, because of their assumptions about honor and violence, scholars who, following Rhys Isaac, like to speak of “the transformation of Virginia” have missed this transformation.

Environmental, institutional, and cultural hypotheses have all contributed to the view of colonial Virginia as a competitive, honorific society in which aggressive displays of drinking, gambling, banter, swearing, horse racing, and cockfights naturally erupted, at times, in violence (Morgan 1975; Breen 1980). But this scholarly consensus stands greatly at odds with the work of seventeenth-century Chesapeake historians like Arthur Scott, Bradley Chapin, Lois Green Carr, Jon Kukla, James Perry, and James Horn who have taken a close look at seventeenth-century records and conclusively rejected the view of the colonial Chesapeake as a violent and chaotic frontier. They find Virginia and Maryland to be “intensely governed societies” remarkable for “the primacy of law” and their social and political stability. What violence there was‑-that directed at felons, servants, slaves, and other underlings‑-was strictly controlled by the elite in order to maintain the hierarchical order.

This does not mean that Virginians were unconcerned about their reputations. As James Horn (1994, 363) notes in his most recent synthesis of the social history of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, “‘considerations of honour, good name, and reputation’ were of vital concern at all levels of society.” Yet colonial Virginians believed these were proper matters only for the courts. As Horn (1994, 367) concludes, “perhaps the most important point to emerge from this analysis is that a means of channeling social friction through the courts was quickly established by adopting English precedents, and potentially bloody contests over honor, rank, and status were for the most part avoided.”

Yet sometime in the eighteenth century this societal consensus began to fall apart. By mid-century there are reports out of the Virginia backcountry of gouged eyes and chewed-off ears in vicious rough-and-tumble contests. By the early nineteenth century dueling had become firmly entrenched among the Virginia elite. How had this transformation in attitudes toward honor violence come about? To answer that question and to discern fully the ramifications of that transformation is the purpose of this project.

One interesting possibility emerges out of the work of Forrest McDonald, Grady McWhiney, and David Hackett Fischer which traces Southern violence not to Anglo-Saxon but to Celtic or British borderland roots. The thesis has recently drawn further theoretical and empirical support from cultural psychologists Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen in their book Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (1996). Although none of these scholars explore the exact nature of the timing and impact of the cultural interaction between the different population elements, the emergence of honor violence in Virginia is certainly consistent with the arrival of the Scotch-Irish in the backcountry in large numbers in the early to mid-eighteenth century. Yet as both critics and supporters of the “Celtic thesis” acknowledge, there is exceedingly little hard empirical evidence to support it.

Moreover the cult of honor in early national Virginia was hardly strictly backcountry in origins. An independent force seems to have stemmed from the lowcountry, a force far closer to Cavalier elements in England than the primal honor of the Scotch-Irish, an aristocratic view of honor out of place in colonial America but not among certain elements of Virginia society in the early republic who sought to distinguish themselves by the duel as much through their lack of fear of death as their ability to restrain their passions. These were the first hints of the chivalric revival that would sweep the South and the rest of the United States in the nineteenth century (Osterweis 1949; Cunliffe 1968; Higginbotham 1992).

The origins and impact of this chivalric revival in the South need to be explored. For its origins one might not have to look any farther than the American Revolution. Heroic wars have always had a tendency to put chivalric ideas in the heads of idealistic youth who come of age hearing tales of the courageous deeds of “our illustrious Heroes & patriots,” reflected most strongly in the veneration bestowed on the great American warrior George Washington in the early American republic. Yet the chivalric revival was in many ways more a rebellion against than a fulfillment of the values of their parents. There is no better proof of this than the passion with which the second generation of Virginia patriots took to dueling, a passion shared with other chivalric revivals like the Elizabethan revival of Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, and Sir Walter Raleigh (Ferguson 1960, 1986; Esler 1966). In post-revolutionary Virginia, as in Elizabethan England, a younger generation believed new circumstances demanded new principles. Reacting against the rationalism of their parents’ generation, filled with a pessimism about the future of the natural aristocrat in Jeffersonian Virginia, they sought solutions in romanticism (Osterweis 1949; Taylor 1961; Sutton 1968; Brugger 1978).

There are many other aspects of post-revolutionary political and legal culture that need to be pursued. Many scholars have associated the rise of the duel in various nations with an elite threatened by the lower orders and/or outsiders. The duel set the bounds of the circle of honor and the code of honor provided the strong inner bond to an aristocratic class pervaded by tension and antipathy as well as fraternity (Kiernan 1988; McAleer 1994). In this view the numerous political duels between Federalists and Republicans in the early republic were all part of a general caste response to the democratic changes accompanying the Revolution. But perhaps, as Richard Buel (1972) and Dickson D. Bruce (1979) suggest, “in the South during the early national period, there was less a question of whether an elite would rule than of who should be fit for the elite” (Bruce 1979, 40). Furthermore both defenders and critics of dueling stressed the power of “public opinion” in forcing men onto the field of honor, but who was the “public” and what exactly was their “opinion”? Ideas of free speech in tension with evolving libel and defamation laws also certainly played an important role in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century affairs of honor (Rosenberg 1986). Finally, one cannot ignore the impact, so often emphasized by historians, of the direct personal experience of Continental and militia officers with traditional military notions of honor and dueling during the War of Independence (Royster 1979).

But we would be wrong to think that we could explain the rise of dueling from strictly local factors. For the early nineteenth century also saw the introduction or revival of dueling in many parts of the English-speaking world including England, Upper Canada, the West Indies, and other English colonies, as well as post-revolutionary France (Simpson 1988; Kiernan 1988; Billacois 1990; Nye 1993; Morgan 1995). Furthermore the romanticism of Virginia youth has to be seen as part of the Romantic Movement that swept Europe and America after the French Revolution. Although the timing of the rise of dueling in America can hardly be explained, as some historians are wont, by the direct influence of Sir Walter Scott‑-“the Sir Walter disease” as Mark Twain put it‑-one cannot deny that European opinions and fashions had a significant direct and indirect impact on notions of honor and dueling in America.

Clearly an understanding of the relationship between honor and violence in Virginia from 1607-1861 has great significance for early American historians. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw a rash of honor violence across both the North and South. Richard Maxwell Brown, particularly in his most recent book No Duty to Retreat (1991), has shown how Americans‑-not just in the South but throughout the nation‑-grew increasingly acceptant after the American Revolution of many forms of violence they had previously rejected. Yet the debates over dueling that followed the Hamilton-Burr duel in 1804 reveal North and South gravitating toward opposing notions of right conduct. The South started moving toward an ideal centered around romanticized honor and dueling, while the North aspired to an ideal of Christian virtue in which dueling was considered pagan. These divergent ideals would play a major role in the tensions between a Cavalier South and a Yankee North that eventually would lead to the Civil War. Yet historians have been too willing, as were antebellum Americans themselves, to give such ideologies longer historical roots than they deserved. As North and South moved in opposite directions on honor and dueling, Americans little realized how far they had come from a colonial world in which even the Southern elite stood firmly united against and effectively suppressed honor violence.

The roots of Southern violence is also of interest to scholars in many other disciplines, as shown by the work of cultural psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists who have mined the idea of a “culture of violence.” A study of honor and violence in Virginia from 1607-1861 addresses issues not only of regional variations in violence but also the whole question of why the United States as a whole has such a higher level of violence than other Western nations. As the work of Ruth Horowitz (1983) and Nisbett and Cohen (1996) show, there are many parallels between Southern honor and the honor or machismo that drives so much of the gang violence in modern American cities. By tracing the evolution of an honorific culture of violence, by showing how the link between honor and violence is historically specific and not inevitable, perhaps we will move closer to finding a solution to the problem of violence in America.

The Expected Result

The project will result in a book tentatively titled Honor, Violence, and the Origins of the Old South.

History

From my dissertation research on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and Virginia, I am thoroughly familar with both the primary and secondary sources central to a study of honor and violence in colonial Virginia. I have also done extensive research in antebellum Southern communities and am generally familiar with the types of primary sources available and the general secondary literature in this era. Also through my graduate work with Bertram Wyatt-Brown, I am well versed in the literature on honor and violence and their role in the overall scope of Southern history.

The results of a preliminary investigation into the rise of dueling in late-eighteenth-century Virginia were presented to general acclaim in a paper delivered at the recent Society for Historians of the Early American Republic conference in Nashville. An expanded version of the paper will be published in a forthcoming collection of originals essays on the history of violence in America edited by Michael J. Bellesiles for New York University Press.

Plan of Work

The first object will be to inventory available newspaper and manuscript collections at the University of Virginia, College of William & Mary, Virginia Historical Society, Virginia State Library, and other archives. Research trips will be necessary to begin searching through the collections that are not available in print or microprint. The initial goal will be to map out all of the affairs of honor that can be found in extant records in the years 1750-1820 as the critical transition period between the colonial and antebellum South.

I will also inventory the relevant local, colony, and state records that deal with crime and punishment. Sample counties will be chosen based on the criteria of quantity and quality of extant sources and the goal of providing sufficiently wide coverage to make possible testting of the cultural, institutional, and environmental factors important to the competing yet potentially complementary interpretations discussed above. For such searches it will be best to begin with a very broad interpretation of honor and violence and then narrow on particular attitudes and incidents as the focus becomes sharper. All forms of violence‑-racial, class, political, domestic, for example‑-should be noted to determine the degree of interdependence.

After the relevant evidence is gathered, the various hypotheses will be tested. The findings from Virginia will then be compared with relevant studies from other places and times.

The specific schedule of work: I believe a time frame of three years is sufficient to complete the project. In the first year I will undertake research trips to Virginia to inventory and begin searching through newspaper and manuscript collections and begin the initial analysis of local, colonial, and state records. In the second year I will complete the collection and analysis of the evidence, making supplemental trips to the archives as needed. In the third year I will undertake the first draft of the book referred to above.

References

Ayers, Edward L. Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Breen, T. H. Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistance in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Brown, Richard Maxwell. No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.

Brugger, Robert J. Beverley Tucker: Heart over Head in the Old South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Buel, Richard, jr. Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics, 1789-1815. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972.

Carr, Lois Green. “The Foundations of Social Order: Local Government in Colonial Maryland.” Town and County: Essays on the Structure of Local Government in the American Colonies. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978. 72-110.

Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. New York: Vintage Books, 1942.

Chapin, Bradley. Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606-1660. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983.

Cunliffe, Marcus. Soldiers & Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775-1865. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968.

Esler, Anthony. The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966.

Ferguson, Arthur B. The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England. Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986.

Ferguson, Arthur B. The Indian Summer of English Chivalry: Studies in the Decline and Transformation of Chivalric Idealism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1960.

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Franklin, John Hope. The Militant South, 1800-1861. 1956. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1970.

Gorn, Elliott J. “‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch’: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry.” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 18-43.

Greenberg, Kenneth S. Honor & 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. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996.

Higginbotham, R. Don. “The Martial Spirit in the Antebellum South: Some Further Speculations in a National Context.” Journal of Southern History 58 (1992): 3-26.

Horn, James. Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth‑Century Chesapeake. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Horowitz, Ruth. Honor and the American Dream: Culture and Identity in a Chicano Community. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983.

Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Kiernan, V. G. The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Kukla, Jon. “Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia.” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 275-98.

McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Morgan, Cecilia. “‘In Search of the Phantom Misnamed Honour’: Duelling in Upper Canada.” Canadian Historical Review 76 (1995): 529-62.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975.

Nisbett, Richard E. and Dov Cohen. Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.

Nye, Robert A. Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Osterweis, Rollin G. Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949.

Perry, James R. The Formation of a Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1615‑1655. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Rosenberg, Norman L. Protecting the Best Men: An Interpretive History of the Law of Libel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Royster, Charles. A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.

Sutton, Robert P. “Nostalgia, Pessimism, and Malaise: The Doomed Aristocrat in Late-Jeffersonian Virginia.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 76 (1968): 41-55.

Taylor, William R. Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American Nationalism. New York: Harper, 1961.

Simpson, Antony E. “Dandelions on the Field of Honor: Dueling, the Middle Classes, and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England.” Criminal Justice History 9 (1988): 99-155.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

[cite]