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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. By Kenneth S. Greenberg. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xvi, 176 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-69102734-X.)
Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. By Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen. (Boulder: Westview 1996. xviii, 119 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8133-1992-7. Paper, $12.95, ISBN 0-8133-1993-5.)
"This is a work of translation:' Kenneth S. Greenberg tells his readers in the opening line of his highly entertaining study of the culture of the Old South. He then translates the language of honor, "spoken with words, gestures, values, and behaviors that seem remote and unusually difficult to understand." Behind every duel, every tweak of the nose, every humanitarian gesture, lay concern for personal reputation, an apparent willingness to die for it, and, most of all, an awareness of slavery. As Greenberg explains, southern white gentlemen regularly demonstrated a willingness to die. Death with dignity equaled honor, which in turn equaled freedom. Fear, of any kind but ultimately of death, reduced one to slavery. One who would live in bonds rather than die had no honor. One who would sacrifice honor to save one's skin was no more free than a slave. It was the presence of the slaves, then, that kept slaveholders perpetually challenging each other in duels to the death, whether for real or in the symbolic challenges of gambling and hunting. Compared to the North's "culture of trade:' with whom late-twentieth-century Americans share a lingua franca, the Old South's culture of honor was a foreign place indeed, where all visitors will surely be lost without a copy of Greenberg's honor / English dictionary.
Building on the work of Steven Stowe, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and others...