Honor and Slavery

""I hope that I have established enough associations to have created an elementary primer of the language of honor,"" says Greenberg, a Suffolk University professor of history and author of Masters and Statesmen, at the end of this study of the Southern chivalric code. That code was held by ""Southern Men of Honor"" whose values, beliefs and behaviors determined what most Northern readers will see as not just one but many ""peculiar institutions"" south of the Mason-Dixon line. Many of Greenberg's observations offer revealing contextualizations. Particularly interesting are chapters on death and on the duel and its rather less drastic variation, the tweaking of the nose, a symbol of masculine honor. Sometimes, he stretches his points, as with the issue of lying when John Randolph says to a would-be guest: ""Sir, I am not at home."" ""This interaction illuminates one meaning embedded in the idea of `giving the lie' in the culture of honor.... You did not own a lie until you were called a liar."" (Greenberg also fails to make clear why he doesn't translate Randolph's ""at home"" in the 18th- and 19th-century sense in which it meant ""accessible to strangers."") Greenberg argues that the slave-master relationship molded the conduct of Southern gentleman, conduct in which open confrontation, for example, by being associated with slaves was considered dishonorable. According to Greenberg, this same code caused baseball to be less popular in the South than in the North. ""The act of running in baseball implied a change of position that seemed inappropriate to a man of honor."" Gambling, on the other hand, was considered an appropriately elitist pastime and one, he says, that would inform Confederate strategists. ""The Confederacy may well have lost the Civil War as a result of lessons learned at Southern card tables and racetracks."" (May)