Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies

Name: Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies
Brand: UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS
SKU: 9780813949314
Price: 296.0 AUD
Availability: InStock

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESSISBN: 9780813949314

Southern Violence and White Supremacy in the Civil War Era

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By James Hill Welborn III
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS
Release Date: September 24, 2023
Format: HARDBACK
Pages: 284

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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 honour 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 honour. 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 honour reached its apogee and took national centre stage. Welborn analyses the birth of this peculiar moral ethic in Edgefield and traces its increasing dominance across the American South in the build-up to the Civil War, as white Southerners sought to cloak a war fought in defense of slavery in the language of honour and Christian piety.

James Hill "Trae" Welborn III is Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Georgia College & State University.

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

"In this book James Welborn makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the intersection of religion and honor culture in the antebellum South. While other scholars have often painted with a broad brush, Welborn's rich account of the inner lives of two generations of white men in Edgefield is the first to study this relationship as lived by particular people in a particular place." - Robert Elder, Baylor University, author of Calhoun: American Heretic"Perhaps no person epitomized the violence of the Civil War era South more than Edgefield, South Carolina's most famous resident: Preston Brooks. In this compelling and gracefully written study, Welborn dives into the peculiar world of Brooks's hometown to reveal a form of toxic masculinity that alternately exposed and resolved the tensions between Christian piety and Southern honor. This pervasive sense of 'righteous honor,' Welborn explains, consumed the minds and actions of elite white men far beyond Edgefield, leading them to commit acts of violence in the name of God. The prevalence of 'righteous honor' in today's world should come as no surprise, as Welborn explains how this ethos survived the Civil War and continues to flourish in the present." - Lisa Tendrich Frank, author of The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman's March

Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies

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