Reviews in American History

In October 1857, University of North Carolina freshman William Wooster reflected on his new life far-removed from parents and longtime friends. "In College we have not the strong will of the Father, nor the pleading voice of a mother to check us in our career of sin," he wrote, and "[n]o kind friend is near to tell us when we err, or to smile approval when we do well." If eighteen-year-old William expressed some of the anxieties familiar to nearly every college student since his time, he also betrayed a concern for individual moral restraint that was distinct to his era. In order to ensure his own right conduct, he resolved to depend more than ever on his conscience and self-control—or what he called "moral courage" (Williams, p. 30). As Timothy Williams argues in Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the antebellum South, this sudden need for moral independence posed a daunting, yet exhilarating, challenge for Wooster and his southern peers, for they approached higher education as a rite of passage essential to making themselves proper, restrained men. They would soon learn to depend on each other rather than their former communities in their pursuit of "intellectual manhood." In all of these respects, they exemplified an ideal of selfhood as much bourgeois and Victorian as it was distinctively Southern.

The contrast Wooster articulated—between an old self defined and regulated by natal communities and a new, aspirational one of "intellectual manhood" that grounded moral discipline in the individual and a new elective community—was far more widespread than he possibly knew. As Robert Elder argues in The Sacred Mirror: Evangelicalism, Honor, and Identity in the Deep South, 1790–1860, antebellum southern evangelicals of all stripes experienced [End Page 46] tension between identities formed in relation to "worldly" communal honor and new, converted selves defined by the moral standards of their chosen sacred communities—and increasingly by such individualist notions as guilt and conscience. The behavioral ideals of intellectual manhood and southern sainthood were distinct, to be sure (although the religiously inclined Wooster embodied their overlap). Yet they were both manifestations of modern selfhood in the antebellum South. Significantly, both cultural ideals forged alternatives to southern honor culture, even as they coexisted and harmonized with certain elements of that culture.

These two books portray an Old South once preoccupied with honor and reputation yet increasingly invested in notions of autonomy and independence. By thus depicting the antebellum South as a cultural mix of "pre-modern" and "modern" features, they may be included among a surge of scholarship that has systematically dismantled interpretations of the region as socially static, geographically homogenous, and culturally and economically pre-modern—as well as exceptional in all of these respects. While recent works on capitalism and slavery are the most notable examples of this interpretive shift toward a modern and more nationally integrated antebellum South, historians have also taken pains to identify a southern middle class that was distinct from the planter elite; differences between the Upper South, Lower South, and Old Southwest; and religious and political striving for "progress." From such work it is clear that the antebellum South was far more complex and dynamic than past historians have suggested.

For his part, Elder builds on some of these interpretative trends by sketching out a complicated relationship between evangelicalism, honor, and identity. Relying on an array of unpublished and published sources from the Deep South states of South Carolina and Georgia, his argument likens early evangelicalism to a Trojan horse: an agent of modern self-making that invaded southern culture disguised in the familiar garb of honor and shame—the pre-modern instruments of identity formation—yet destined to transform...