Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies: Southern Violence and White Supremacy in the Civil War Era

A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era

by James Hill Welborn

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 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.

Genres: History

284 pages, Hardcover

First published June 23, 2023

About the author

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, reared in Fernandina Beach, Florida, and educated at Clemson University (BA 2005, MA 2007) and the University of Georgia (PhD 2014), Dr. Welborn specializes in American cultural history. His work focuses especially on the emotional dimensions of evolving conceptions of virtue, vice, and the role of violence in shaping these cultural values during the American Civil War Era (1820-1880) and the long Nineteenth Century (1780-1920). His scholarship and teaching also engage topics related to Civil War memory and Southern foodways that further incorporate issues of cultural diversity as they evolved over the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in American history.