Southern Honor Summary

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Book Review pt.2
Honor of the society was held up by the society and it was community rule that dominated individual and collective decision-making. This is the first major reinterpretation of Southern life and custom since. It explores the meaning and expression of the ancient code of honor as whites both slaveholders and non-slaveholders applied it to their lives..
Honor fueled the seemingly opposed proclivity of geniality and competition which played out to predictable and entirely southern responses in the arenas of hospitality, gambling, and duels. All are joined with some social sense of who was whom and their respective status on the social ladder. Hospitality, gambling, and or dueling could serve as the steps on the social status. …show more content…

The author uses historical and literal writings to show the roots and evolution of the Antebellum South’s dependency on honor, it was more than reputation and a boast of status, it governed society and helped make life more straight forward while setting forth standards to live by. “Since honor gave meaning to lives, it existed not as a myth but a vital code” (114). Two different types of honor contributed to the South’s antebellum code of ethics. The first, primal honor, According to primal honor, Southerners must stand up to threats against their home; their center of prestige and the focus of their identity. must live up to the critics of honor; accomplished through actions, mindset, and physical prowess. This was the code of ethics that supported the strong, masculine, and dependable protector. The second type of honor which mingled and altered straight primal honor, was what Brown calls gentility. Gentility, what modern historians often accredit to Southern gentlemen of the antebellum period, allowed a transformation to an educated and pious class of smart …show more content…

Near Natchez Mississippi in march of 1834. Her death was not a notable crime (463). Her death was soon revealed as the people of natchez used it. As a text, a moral scenario in which actions spoke a language that revealed inner passion and intensely felt social values. The “deep play” of the drama reproduced, on a small, manageable scale, the ageless contradictions of honor when disorder was paradoxically employed to reconfirm collective order. And on an individual level, the rites of humiliation to which Susan Fosters killer was subjected gave the individual participants a momentary sense of master over death, as if the bloody shaming of their victim extended and gave rich meaning to the lives of his tormentors (463). After she was eventually raised out of her coffin jurors noticed whip marks and bruises over her back and her thighs being red, her left arm was broken near the shoulder and every part of her body was blistered as if it was produced by a whip and the bottom of the coffin was bloody. Susan’s agony had been prolonged. judging from the report of the corner’s jury and William fosters deposition, one may conclude that Susan foster’s killer had acted in a frenzy, probably without deliberating and possibly without and premeditation (467). The book tells us that James Fosters was probably thoroughly drunk. He was also a stout athlete man over six foot and did not understand his own

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