The Man Who Started the Civil War: James Chesnut, Honor, and Emotion in the American South

By Anna Koivusalo

A fresh biography of a neglected figure in Southern history who played a pivotal role in the Civil War.

In the predawn hours of April 12, 1861, James Chesnut Jr. piloted a small skiff across the Charleston Harbor and delivered the fateful order to open fire on Fort Sumter—the first shots of the Civil War. In The Man Who Started the Civil War, Anna Koivusalo offers the first comprehensive biography of Chesnut and through him a history of honor and emotion in elite white southern culture. Koivusalo reveals the dynamic, and at times fragile, nature of these concepts as they were tested and transformed from the era of slavery through Reconstruction.

Best remembered as the husband of Mary Boykin Chesnut, author of A Diary from Dixie, James Chesnut served in the South Carolina legislature and as a US senator before becoming a leading figure in the South's secession from the Union. Koivusalo recounts how honor and emotion shaped Chesnut's life events and the decisions that culminated in the cataclysm of civil war. Challenging the traditional view of honor as a code, Koivusalo illuminates honor's vital but fickle role as a source for summoning, channeling, and expressing emotion in the nineteenth-century South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Jun 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781643363066

Book preview

THE MAN WHO STARTED THE CIVIL WAR

THE MAN WHO STARTED THE CIVIL WAR

JAMES CHESNUT, HONOR, AND EMOTION IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH

ANNA KOIVUSALO

© 2022 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-64336-304-2 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64336-305-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64336-306-6 (ebook)

Portions of chapters 4 and 6 appeared previously, in slightly different form, as Anna Koivusalo, ‘He Ordered the First Gun Fired and He Resigned First’: James Chesnut, Southern Honor, and Emotion, in The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity, ed. John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017), and Anna Koivusalo, Honor and Humiliation: James Chesnut and Violent Emotions in Reconstruction South Carolina, American Studies in Scandinavia 50, no. 1 (2018). Revised versions of both appear in this volume with permission.

Front cover photograph: James Chesnut Jr. and Mary Boykin Chesnut, 1840s, courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia

Front cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray

In memory of my grandmothers, Liisa Lahti and Maire Ukkonen

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Many-Sided Jewel

Part I: 1815–1858

Adopting Honorable Emotion and Learning to Express It

Chapter 1

Good Habits and Honourable Sentiments: Parental Advice for the Chesnut Sons, 1815–1836

Chapter 2

A World Completely Ideal: Love and Honor, 1836–1858

Chapter 3

We Must Try to Steer Our Little Ship with Honor and Safety: Honor, Emotion, and Politics, 1836–1858

Part II: 1859–1861

Raw and Noble Emotion

Chapter 4

He Ordered the First Gun Fired & He Resigned First: Beginning the Civil War, 1859–1861

Part III: 1861–1885

Honor and Emotion in Time of Crisis

Chapter 5

Like a Patriot and a Gentleman: The Civil War and the Transformation of Antebellum Honor, 1861–1865

Chapter 6

The Old Legion of Honor: Outdated Honor, Violent Emotions, and Reconstruction, 1865–1885

Conclusion: Clean and White Record, 1885

Appendix: Genealogical Table

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

James Chesnut Sr.

Mary Cox Chesnut

James and Mary Boykin Chesnut, ca. 1840

James Chesnut, 1850s

Secession meeting in front of the Mills House, Meeting Street, Charleston, S.C.

Capt. John Johnny Chesnut

Col. James Chesnut, ca. 1862

James Chesnut, 1880s

Mary Boykin Chesnut, 1870s

Acknowledgments

The vague but persistent idea of writing this book originated in 2009. A pleasure to write, a true labor of love, this book was also one of the most difficult and time-consuming things that I have ever done. It would not have been completed without the help and support of several people with whom I have been very fortunate to connect, either because of my research or despite it.

First of all, my greatest debt, as always, is to Markku Peltonen, who has mentored me since my undergraduate studies. I cannot thank him enough for his expert guidance, kindness, and patient attention throughout this long project and beyond. I have also benefited from comments and suggestions from Rani Andersson, Stephen Berry, Todd Hagstette, Markku Henriksson, Anu Lahtinen, John Mayfield, Lawrence McDonnell, Kari Saastamoinen, Mikko Saikku, and Michael Woods. I thank everyone at the University of South Carolina Press, especially Ehren Foley, for turning the manuscript into a book, and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable insights. I appreciate the research and travel funding provided by the Fulbright Finland Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, the Finnish Concordia Fund, the Oskar Öflund Foundation, and the University of Helsinki.

During a wonderful year spent in South Carolina, many people helped me both in academia and outside of it. I thank everyone at the Department of History at the University of South Carolina, especially Professors Ann Johnson and Mark M. Smith, and the South Caroliniana Library. James Kibler provided help that was unexpected but gladly received. Martha Daniels gave me information on the Chesnut family, a detailed tour of Mulberry, and the use of its archives, for which I am truly grateful. Kay Edwards patiently answered my endless questions, both practical and academic. Last, but certainly not least, David Moltke-Hansen, a most generous, wise, and helpful friend, spurred me to surpass myself by asking just the right questions and making subtle but perfect suggestions.

At the University of Helsinki, I thank the members of the graduate seminar for North American Studies, especially Saara Kekki and Anna-Leena Korpijärvi. The general history research seminar has been my intellectual home and refuge for over a decade: Mikko Immanen, Markku Kekäläinen, Antti Lepistö, Adriana Luna-Fabritius, Antti Taipale, Laura Tarkka, Tupu Ylä-Anttila, and particularly Soile Ylivuori have been more than helpful in not only reading and commenting on my texts but also in providing me with invaluable peer support and camaraderie. Above all, Elise Garritzen is the best colleague–friend anyone could hope to have.

I am much obliged to Nora Alajoki, Nina Kemiläinen, Riikka Koivusalo, Niina Linkova, and Raisa McNab, who have offered practical help, emotional support, and stress-reducing activities such as ice swimming and long walks to keep me going. Jenni Siivola has been thoroughly supportive in everything I do for the last thirty years; Johanna Särkijärvi is my personal development coach in life’s challenges and successes. I am very lucky to have all these trustworthy friends in my life.

I could not have survived this project without my family members: Tapio Lahti and Pirkko Harmaala, Hanne and Hannu Jäppinen, Hille Aho, Kalle Jäppinen, and Matti Jäppinen, who also acted as my IT support (on duty 24/7). My children, Iris and Samu, I thank for all the love that I never imagined could exist before they were born. For them, the Carolinas were a second home for a while; I hope they will never forget the experiences we created together.

Ever since our first meeting, I have been trying to impress Pete Stockley. I would have written this book just to do so, if it would not have already been in its final stages when he entered my life, bringing Emilia with him to further enrich it. Words do not suffice to say how grateful I am for my amazing partner, who shares my dreams, keeps me safe, and takes my breath away every single day.

Both of my grandmothers were book lovers. Liisa Lahti took me to the library almost every time I visited her. Maire Ukkonen had several enormous bookshelves that were like a treasure cove; she also gave me many captivating novels and historical books. This book is dedicated to the memory of my beloved grandmothers, who believed I could do anything I only set my mind to. They shaped my world-view by urging me to expand my horizons through reading, showing me the power of knowledge and the magic of stories.

Abbreviations

Introduction

The Many-Sided Jewel

In 1876 the Honorable James Chesnut, a respected lawyer, South Carolina statesman, US senator, and former Confederate general, was invited to give an alumni address at the commencement at Princeton. Despite the festivity of the day, he described himself as a wanderer who reentered the home of his childhood as blundered and bruised. By 1876 Chesnut’s career, crippled by the Civil War and Reconstruction, was sputtering to its end, and the losses and hardships he had encountered had made his life but dead ashes and darkness.¹ Yet he felt hopeful that the nation could be saved via education and enlightenment. He advised the young students to work hard to prepare for the great and noble work of life. Their guiding principle, he stressed, should be honor. In his view it was more important than anything else.

[Honor] will compel you, in every case, to respect the rights of others, and everywhere and under all circumstances to be faithful to every trust. Cultivate this sense of personal honor—cherish it as you do your life’s blood. In adversity and in prosperity it will stand you in great stead; and may enable you to assimilate your character to the many-sided jewel; turn which face you please to the light, it will flash back a gleam of the true promethean fire.²

Honor was at the heart of the emotional landscape of the nineteenth-century South as white southerners made a constant effort to navigate in society by expressing honorable emotions, feelings that were deemed as acceptable, appropriate, or desired. To do so, however, they had to adopt an understanding of honor and be able to reshape it throughout their life. James Chesnut’s definition shows us the compelling nature of honor; in every case, everywhere, under all circumstances, one had to obey its requirements. It was a resource that commanded one to respect others and do one’s duty. It was something to be guarded and cherished, for it was maintained with trouble and easily lost forever. Most important, he pictured honor as a many-sided jewel, one according to which a person could adjust his or her character, behavior, and personal concept of honor. He compared honor to a jewel because of its preciousness but also because of its multiple facets. It could be regarded from many different directions and perspectives. Chesnut, then, was painfully aware of honor’s changing nature and people’s inability to ever fully grasp it. It did not prevent him from trying. All his life, he struggled to assimilate his character to the many-sided jewel he called honor in order to reach the true promethean fire: knowledge, power, and wisdom.

This book offers a novel perspective on how white southerners understood the relationship between honor and emotion in the nineteenth-century South. It aims to show that honor was central in the appraisals of and discussions about appropriate emotional expression. To do so, it follows Chesnut, a US senator from South Carolina—and the husband of the famed Civil War diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut—throughout his life. He is significant for at least two reasons.

First, observing Chesnut shows that honor was vitally important as a guideline and a source for creating, shaping, and expressing honorable emotions. Instead of primary reactions, raw emotions such as fear, jealousy, and anxiety, one was expected to demonstrate their more refined noble counterparts, such as courage, romantic love, and determination, when interacting with other individuals. Although honorable emotional expressions and their management were important within the family, individuals paid even more attention to them in society.³ Because white southerners strived to gain and secure a good reputation and a prominent position in society, it was necessary to adopt the concept of honorable emotion and constantly shape one’s emotional expressions in order to achieve life goals. On the one hand, then, Chesnut’s importance derives from his being representative of the white upper-class concept of honor and emotion. His life span, from 1815 to 1885, enables us to see how honor and emotional expression in the elite white male culture transformed from the antebellum period through the Civil War to Reconstruction. Therefore, although this work has a bearing as Chesnut’s first full biography, it does not simply concentrate on him but approaches southern society more broadly.

Second, Chesnut is also distinctively significant as the subject of this study. Because of his social position as a political leader, first in South Carolina and later known throughout the South, Chesnut inspired white southerners to express honorable emotions by his own behavior and expressions. He supported slavery and the mastery of white men by honorable emotional expressions both verbally and in writing. For Chesnut, a moderate politician, the importance of honor crystallized when he became a leading figure in the South’s secession from the United States in 1861. By examining this and several other episodes, it is possible to unfold the many levels on which honor affected his emotional life. Chesnut’s emotional processes show that honor’s role in emotional navigation was not about suppressing feeling but about managing its manifestations. Sometimes honor controlled emotion; sometimes it spurred it on.

The main aim of this book is to substantiate honor’s importance as a guideline for nineteenth-century white southerners for summoning and expressing honorable emotions. Its central point of departure is to show that honor was not, as previous research suggests, merely a code or a method of control that aimed to hide undesirable emotion. Instead, because an understanding of honor was necessary and central for southerners, it played an important role in emotional navigation by helping individuals create, shape, and express appropriate emotions. Because honor and emotion were interconnected, constantly transforming concepts, carefully cultivated noble emotion shaped understandings of honor as well. The interplay between honor and emotions was apparent in all spheres of life. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the abundant research on southern honor and the expanding field of the history of emotions, historians have overlooked the interdependence of honor and emotion. This book seeks to define their relationship by integrating recent work on the history of emotions with honor studies. Moreover, historians have paid very little attention to how the concept of honor in the South changed over time. As this book will show, honor and related emotional expressions were subjected to considerable changes during the Civil War era.

This book builds on previous scholarship on honor, which has held a prominent position in southern history since the 1980s. Most scholars agree that honor’s effect on both society and individuals was fundamental. Extensive work on honor has shown that the concept, with all its variations, was interwoven in everyday life and belonged to all members of southern society: men and women, white people, African Americans, and Native Americans, who all had their own concepts and ways of observing its requirements. How southerners attempted to obtain and maintain reputation as honorable, then, depended on their race, gender, class, and social status. Although pronounced in the South, honor knew no geographic limits in the United States. It provided Americans with standards of conduct, stability in politics, and moral fiber during the Civil War.⁴

This book concentrates on the honor concept of white men, particularly the members of the upper class, who, as the rulers who held social, economic, political, and cultural power in the nineteenth-century South, set preconditions for how honor should be understood. There is little research on to what degree honor was class-bound and shared across class lines before the Civil War. Jonathan Wells’s important study on the emerging southern middle class argues that its members readily attacked the elite concept of honor. However, Chesnut, an acclaimed leader and politician, was seen by his peers and members of the lower classes as a model of honorable emotion, which suggests that white elite southerners had a shared view on honor during the antebellum period and that the other classes were influenced by it. As this book will show, a growing clash between elite and popular notions of honor did take place only after the war. In fact, the elites’ use of honorable emotional expression mobilized white men and women of all classes to defend slavery and helped to bring on the Civil War.⁵

Both honor culture and honorable emotional expression were largely predicated upon slavery. Honor and slavery were inextricably intertwined for two reasons. First, they were two ends of a spectrum of independence and dependence and of mastery and submission. Earlier scholarship has argued that the ruling class’s mastery and honor, both in the South and in slave societies in general, was built upon the subjugation and humiliation of the enslaved people. Lacking independence and mastery of themselves and other people, they could not possess honor. However, as, for example, Jeff Forret and Bertram Wyatt-Brown have concluded, African Americans had their own concept of honor, which was based on self-regard rather than on a hierarchical position in society and recognized within their own honor group. Their honor was not inconsequential for white people, who, to bolster their own status, sought to humiliate Black people and thus deprive them of honor.⁶

Second, as the ubiquity of slavery strongly reminded southern white men that their mastery was dependent on the submission of others, they struggled to maintain it publicly as well. Honor was present in writings and speeches on slavery, especially on the eve of secession. Southern white men claimed that abolition would tarnish the honor of all white southerners, as it would allow African American men to demand societal and political equality with white men and sexually threaten white women. Moreover, southerners saw northerners’ vindication of abolition as an insult to their political and economic independence.⁷

White southerners widely used honorable emotional expressions to defend themselves against this dual threat to their honor. Proslavery thinkers prescribed appropriate feelings, such as benevolence, happiness, and contentment, for both enslavers and enslaved in order to maintain the balance of mastery and subordination in society. Strong but controlled emotion that supported the ideals of paternalism and domestic sentimentalism had an important role in depicting the beneficialness of slavery. Of course, as Michael Woods has shown, these emotional expressions often merely masked the actual experiences of anger, frustration, and other irascible passions of white southerners. Proslavery advocates also used honorable emotion to defend slavery by expressing their own emotions vividly. Chesnut joined other proslavery advocates in justifying slavery by the happiness it allegedly brought for both white and African American southerners. Further, to incite white southerners of all classes to preserve the elites’ ruling status and wealth, he pushed himself and them to summon such feelings as indignation, courage, and determination.⁸

Honor and honorable emotion, then, were at the heart of the secession crisis as they spurred men to fight for a nation that was founded on the principle of human bondage. Therefore, it is also important to note what is not in this book: the relationship between honor and morality. Although many modern readers may consider those notions equivalent, they definitely were not that for nineteenth-century white southerners. White southerners judged the honorableness of themselves and others by paying attention to external performances and position in society rather than by evaluating their ethics.

For white southerners, to comply with the requirements of honor, it was important to recognize what was honorable. This became, however, problematic as different people had different, even contradictory, ideas of what constituted honor. An individual’s honor notion could change, too, over time or due to circumstances.⁹ Southern white men found it difficult to define honor and to follow its requirements as honor lived and changed all the time, causing significant difference between the idea of a code and the actual honor culture. Yet assumptions of honor as a code that guided white southerners by setting behavior rules have characterized earlier scholarship. Historians have argued that southern society was bound together by a code of honor, which also served to classify and rank society members and helped reinforce the social order. The signposts of appropriate conduct, as Bertram Wyatt-Brown has called them, certain manners and behavior, were necessary to define a man’s social status and how much respect others owed him.¹⁰

Personal honor, for white men, meant that a man was entitled to respect after having behaved according to the values approved by his community. The values connected to honor they believed to be important were often external, such as physical courage, political and professional success, self-control, manners and politeness, and the external appearance of a gentleman. Wealth and ancestry, although less so than in the Old World, counted as well. Appearance and behavior, the external performances of honor, helped one to obtain and maintain the reputation of an honorable man.¹¹

The inner self-worth of an individual, his sense of honorableness, depended heavily upon the respect of others. If challenged, an individual was expected to defend his honor, usually in some form of counterattack, such as a duel; otherwise, his honor could be destroyed. Reciprocally, when insulted, a southerner defends not merely his own honor but the honor of his peers as well. The studies by Edward L. Ayers, Dickson D. Bruce, and Elliott J. Gorn on the meaning and controlling of southern violence have all observed that both upper-class duels and backwoods fighting among white lower-class men were honor-bound phenomena. Any confrontations between white men, Christopher Olsen has argued, were subconsciously seen as struggles of mastery and subordination, as the ruling class appealed to both honor and manhood in order to secure its political power.¹² Violence itself, however, was not always necessary in order to upkeep honor, if one observed its practices (such as dueling rules) that aimed to respect the other party and to control unbridled emotion.

This book examines James Chesnut’s attempts both to obtain and maintain the reputation of being honorable and to satisfy his craving for internal honor. To clarify Chesnut’s honor notions and his continuous attempt to adjust them with the requirements of his society, it concentrates on male versions of honor—that of Chesnut but also those of his peers and other white southern men who turned to one another to pinpoint interpretations and definitions of honor. Therefore, although this book turns its closest attention to honor, it does not overlook the relevance of manhood, on which nineteenth-century Americans placed great emphasis. Culturally created and publicly sustained, honor and manhood were interrelated notions that complemented each other.¹³ Both of them were constantly changing cultural ideals. Different men interpreted manhood—and honor—differently both in the North and the South.¹⁴

Manhood, like honor, was of a great significance to southern white men for obtaining and preserving peer respect. Education played a major role in defining both manhood and honor, providing discipline and strengthening the ambition of young men. Rather than any specific qualities one was required to possess, it was about proving oneself worthy, being independent, and, especially in the South, having mastery over one’s dependents. Male maturity, as Timothy Williams has observed, consisted of mastering manhood morally, physically, socially, and especially intellectually. Manhood could be expressed in a multitude of ways, but, as with honor, earning other men’s recognition and respect by publicly performing in accordance with the cultural requirements was of the essence.¹⁵

Rather than a mere dimension of manhood, however, honor was a lens through which James Chesnut and other southerners observed manly behavior. White men’s conception of manhood gave honor subject matter and thus distinguished it from the honor concepts of women and African American men. However, because honor was embraced by all members of southern society and consisted of much more than manhood, displaying manly behavior was only one of the performances connected to the reputation of being an honorable man.

The prevailing idea of honor was shaped by multiple individual interpretations of honor and other related cultural norms such as manhood. These individual experiences became collective experiences within a particular honor group—a group of people who had a roughly similar idea of what honor was or what it should be. Something that was honorable to one man was not necessarily so to another, and thus these individual notions also constantly shaped general or public honor. This accounts for why such different southern men were thought of as men of honor. Some men created new meanings for it simply by insisting that their actions were honorable because they were honorable. Others, such as Chesnut, were so careful in trying not to overstep honor’s boundaries that their constant readjustment seemed almost like fickleness. Rather than increasing safety, therefore, honor contributed to southerners’ uncertainty, no matter how determined their attempts to maintain the illusion of stability. In sum, honor was not consistent, but it was vital.

Despite the prevalence of honor in southern culture, historians have been less attentive to its significance for emotional practices. This study builds on and negotiates with both classic and recent histories of emotions, developing them further in the context of southern honor. It assumes that it is essential for a community to create a set of normative emotions and strategies for expressing them and to require that individuals comply with them, while also seeing emotions as something that individuals actively practice socially. As culturally developed and sustained mental processes and experiences, emotions reflect individuals’ thoughts and motivations. This book inquires what kinds of things prompted emotion and charts the ways it was felt, demonstrated, and managed.¹⁶

To do so, it examines expressions that were used to signify emotion, usually expressed through language or at least accompanied by words—more specifically, the emotional vocabulary of James Chesnut and other southerners. Chesnut, like most of his contemporaries, used the words affection, feeling, and sentiment to refer to more refined feelings as opposed to passions, which he deemed as involuntary, uncontrolled impulses.¹⁷ Emotions, for white southerners, were not only bodily reactions but also complex mental processes and their expressions that could be, and were, consciously created and reshaped. They understood that feelings were socially created, often chronicled them, and attempted to manage and inspire them in themselves and others.

First of all, this study based on the premise that emotions can be learned and shaped by a culture and that social norms and rules have effects on individuals.¹⁸ It explores southern emotionologies. They are, as established by Peter and Carol Stearns, emotional guidelines that are accepted and/or encouraged in a specific community. Thus, external behavior is not necessarily an expression of an actual emotion, but more like an acceptable presentation of an emotion.¹⁹ Most societies have emotional guidelines that individuals have to take into account. In the context of the nineteenth-century South, the most important guideline was honor.

Another central premise is that emotional expressions were used to achieve a goal and were therefore external manifestations of emotion, observable to other individuals. In this respect this book draws upon William Reddy, who has suggested that emotions are not unchangeable; individuals can learn, manage, and suppress emotions. It is not, however, enough to speak of the management of emotions, because that necessitates that the goal is known beforehand. Therefore Reddy speaks of the navigation of emotions, actively altering one’s emotional expressions to enact a change in others and in oneself. Emotion, for white southerners, was not merely something that needed to be controlled and hidden. Instead they actively sought to cultivate—consciously create, shape, and express—appropriate emotional expressions to reach life goals, turning to southern honor to assist them in that endeavor.²⁰

Emotional practices and experiences do not originate within individuals without any outside influence. This book therefore also takes its cue from Barbara Rosenwein, who has demonstrated that there are multiple emotional communities—groups or people who share the same emotional norms or ideals—within societies rather than one given set of emotion rules. These communities actively influence and participate in the cultural construction of emotion. Different communities have different emotional standards and methods for managing emotions. In the South honor played an important role in this regulation. Although an extensive analysis of the South as an emotional community or its innumerable emotional subcommunities is outside the scope of this book, it argues that southerners shared a certain collective notion of emotion that had countless subtler variations within the subcommunities. However, the larger and more heterogenous the group was, the more its members may have entertained various values, such as concepts of honor, among themselves, over which the community could become divided. More specifically, while this book identifies white elites as an emotional subcommunity that shared an opinion on the quintessence of honorable emotion, it also recognizes the variations within that group. In many respects emotional communities were not unlike honor groups that also provided their members with guidelines. Particularly before the Civil War, social class bore relevance for both emotional communities and honor groups, rendering the upper class the most important custodian of honorable emotional expressions. A shift in the power relations between emotional communities may also affect historical change in emotional practices, and after the Civil War, new emotional communities that emerged due to the war altered the emotional standards of southern society.²¹

In the nineteenth century, white middle- and upper-class Europeans and Americans saw emotions as powerful instruments that could be learned, managed, and changed. They were valued in personal life, politics, and social life, which was controlled by the rules of etiquette. American conduct manuals, for example, required individuals to monitor their feelings and curb unwanted emotional expression. Emotional expression was not, however, completely frowned upon, only such feelings that were assessed to be inappropriate. Emotions, therefore, were important in creating communality, as long as they were not impassioned or disruptive. Southern guidelines for emotional management developed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to some degree as part of a larger American and European discourse on the importance of expressing feeling but also as something peculiar to that region. As Michael Woods has argued, the need to protect the South’s slave-based society led white southerners to actively pursue such emotional expressions as benevolence of the slave owner and jealousy in politics.²²

Nonetheless, despite finding that emotions were critically important in personal life and in society, historians have overlooked the profound importance of honor in this context. If historians mention emotion at all in the context of honor, they share an assumption that emotions were merely personal feelings that individuals were expected to watch and restrain to maintain their status. They have settled for an explanation that honor was merely a method of control or a code of dictated behavior, which masked individual emotions. It was, however, more flexible than that; it was a resource that helped an individual to navigate in society and meet life goals. The constant attention given to honor notions and their readjustment allowed southerners to change their priorities and goals as needed. Emotional management in the South, then, was not simply about the suppression of emotions but also about attempting to create, shape, and express honorable emotions.

The main objective of this book is to show how honor facilitated emotional management in at least three ways heretofore unobserved by scholars. First, it helped white southerners to recognize appropriate emotions. Southern parents introduced honor to their children as a part of their upbringing and taught them to identify honorable emotions and how to express them.²³ Honorable emotion was about not stifling or suppressing feelings but rather channeling them into more acceptable ones. Second, as adults, southerners navigated in society by expressing honorable—or noble—emotions. To gain and maintain one’s social status, one was expected to follow these emotional guidelines. Third, honor proved irreplaceable in identifying and achieving life goals (such as a good marriage, financial or political success, or military valor). White southerners struggled to achieve them via honorable emotional expression and, if necessary, reappraised their goals and renegotiated their idea of honorable behavior. In sum honorable emotions were not simply physical occurrences but powerful, goal-oriented performances with considered content and form.

This book also seeks to show that because both honor and honorable emotions were such fluid concepts, they both changed gradually. Despite the quintessential nature of honor, historians have overlooked how the notion of what was considered honorable behavior and emotion and their modes of expression transformed in the mid-nineteenth century. That process was influenced by the Civil War, Reconstruction, and particularly the abolition of slavery. After the war not only men of property but also members of the lower classes reshaped honor and honorable emotional expressions, integrating more violence, racism, and fear of shame with them than in the antebellum period.

This book is, however, rather than a theoretical treatment of the relationship of honor and emotion, a narrative. Its protagonist, James Chesnut, used honor-related emotional expressions in a way that clarifies and highlights the role of honor in southern society. Chesnut’s experience, naturally, does not reflect the experience of all southern white men—not even all elite men. Rather he served as a paragon of honorable emotion, shaping others’ ideas and behavior in his social circles, in South Carolina, and later as a member of Confederate high society.

James Chesnut was born in Camden, South Carolina, in 1815. He served as a longtime member of the South Carolina legislature and a US senator and became a leading figure in the South’s secession from the Union in 1861. At the beginning of the war, he served in the provisional Confederate Congress and in the committee drafting the Confederate constitution. In 1862 Chesnut was appointed as the chief of the Military Department of South Carolina, a member of the state’s infamous Executive Council. Later he served as an aide to President Jefferson Davis and a Confederate general. In spite of his central position in South Carolina politics, Chesnut, a moderate politician, has not attracted wide attention in the scholarly literature.²⁴

Nonetheless he is significant precisely for that reason. When examining the political climate on the eve of the Civil War, historians have paid too little attention to moderate southerners’ conversion into secessionists. The master class’s influence on non-slaveholders, as historians have shown, was considerable. Lower-class men, for example, were stirred up by political culture created by the elites to defend the South and slavery. Examining how honor and honorable emotional practices affected white southerners, particularly Chesnut, can clarify how those concepts pushed them and him toward secession.²⁵

To fully grasp the significance of southern honor, it is beneficial to follow an individual throughout his life, which is what current research on honor almost without exception fails to do.²⁶ Chesnut’s version of honor was that of gentlemanly honor, the leading, ruling version of it, because of his social position as member of a wealthy South Carolinian planter family. The South Carolina planters compared themselves to the European aristocracy and thought of themselves as the American nobility, even though many of them were only a generation removed from being poor immigrants. Therefore they used many strategies to strengthen their identity as the nobility, such as hierarchy and deference both in society and the household. Chesnut’s hometown was Camden, in the Carolina midlands, where most of the wealthiest slaveowners of the state lived. His father, James Chesnut Sr., had made himself one of the richest planters in South Carolina before the Civil War.²⁷ Wealth, however, was not everything. In the best sense of noblesse oblige, the Chesnuts also cultivated excellent manners and gentlemanly behavior.

James Chesnut carefully managed his every word, action, and expression so as not to overstep any limits. He would have recognized sociologist Erving Goffman’s idea of the social world as a stage, where actors take different roles and make dramatic presentations of themselves to others. These kinds of presentations upheld the structure of society in the South. They required what sociologist Arlie Hochschild has called emotional labor—constructing emotions in oneself in order to induce them in others. To align emotional behavior with cultural values and behavioral models, southerners performed great emotional labor.²⁸ Chesnut leaned on his education and refinement in all situations; his manner was so mild and polite that he was sometimes seen as serious, proud, and even haughty. Because of his upper-class pedigree and excellent education, he did not have any need to consult behavior manuals. Yet his family educated him in honor, and he later carefully watched his peers to determine the honorable way to act.

Despite being a vaunted orator, Chesnut disliked public speaking and did not want to push himself forward. A very private man, he liked staying at home and reading rather than spending time with his fellow men, who often bored and frustrated him. Yet he was naturally amiable, gentle, and generous; he was always ready to loan his friends and acquaintances money or his best horse. On the other hand, his good nature allowed strong-willed people, such as his father, to push him around. James Chesnut Sr. was disappointed that his son did not show the same kind of ambition and downright voracity in business and politics as he did. James Jr. was intelligent and not without ambition, but he was, because of his personal traits, dedicated to close, calm, quiet attention to business rather than rousing crowds.²⁹ He expected this approach to bring him recognition and glory but was often disappointed. In a revolution, Mary Chesnut huffed after her husband’s failure to attain an army commission or political post, shy men are run over. No one stops to pick them up.³⁰ Instead of action, even with his great power of reasoning, his accomplishments and learning he is, as he always was, inclined to stand back, and let the world flow by him, as Mary Chesnut wrote of her husband in the late 1870s.³¹

Until now, our understanding of James Chesnut has largely been based upon Mary Chesnut’s diary, a staple for scholars of the nineteenth-century South and the Civil War for more than a hundred years. Not restricted by the duties of a plantation mistress or a mother, she was free to accompany her husband to locations where some of the most important events of the Civil War took place. At leisure to write, she recorded the behind-the-scenes life of their