If these industrialists never articulated how this economic development would affect Southern masculinity, New South spokesmen promoted the advent of self-made manhood. Of course, self-made manhood was not a new thing in the South, but the New South ―represented a dramatic attempt to make self-made manhood the hegemonic form of masculinity in the South, as it had become in the North‖ (Friend xv). Added to this, as Friend rightly remarks, the ―desolation and poverty of the South evidenced the incredible failure of the old communal manhood that pulled the region into the Civil War‖ (xv). In promoting industrial growth, New South advocates ―specifically pushed Southern masculinity away from its past,‖ so much that redefining masculinity actually became a crucial feature of the New South (Friend xv).85
One obvious cause for the redefinition of Southern manhood was that Northern victory in the Civil War and Reconstruction meant, as Silber explains, the ―final affirmation of
82 Rollin Osterweis, The Myth of The Lost Cause, 1865-1900, (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1973) 137.
83 Charles P. Roland, ―The Ever-Vanishing South.‖ The Journal of Southern History 48.1 (Feb 1982): 3-20.
84 Wilbur Joseph Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941).
85
Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover, eds., Southern Masculinity, Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004).
Northern men‘s superior model of manliness‖ (634).86
As a result, she argues, the Civil War was not only waged on the battlefield but also waged on the basis of regionally-competing versions of masculinity. Indeed, ―Northern antislavery advocates often assaulted the ‗brute force‘ and ‗pugnaciousness‘ of southern men, indicting them for their worship of seemingly ‗masculine‘ but extremely distasteful vices‖ (Silber 9). Northerners ―also attacked white southern men and women for their apparent disregard for any and every form of honorable labor, for their devotion to a system which rested on idleness and slothfulness‖ (9). Northern men, for instance, contrasted Southern idleness to their superior masculinity, which rested on ―hard-work and self-improvement [and] thus projected an image of two competing notions of masculinity … suggest[ing] that their Civil War victory had settled this contest once and for all‖ (Silber 616).
On that note and devoting a chapter of her book to the accused effeminacy of southerners, Nina Silber lists the ―[s]tories [that] circulated through the North in June 1865 concerning the Confederates‘ military inaptitude‖ (Silber 616). For instance, Whitelaw Reid, a Northern Journalist who toured the South in May 1865, portrayed the Confederates as concerned ―with feasting, and dancing, and love-making, with music improvised from the ball room,‖ taking an even impetuous, feminine approach to war and, as Silber explains, ―[t]he postwar questioning of Southern manhood involved much more than turning the rebels into whining and whimpering cowards‖ (qtd. in Silber 617). Northern postwar questioning of the Southern code of masculinity attacked the long and strong tradition of ―chivalric and heroic behavior [. . .] the Southern code of honor [that had] bec[o]me the standard by which Southern manhood, especially the aristocrat was judged‖ within Southern culture (Silber 617). Silber continues: ―[t]he Northern Victory, many claimed, proved that the assertions of
86
For more on the construction of middle-class masculinity in the antebellum north, see Charles Rosenberg, ―Sexuality, Class and Role in Nineteenth Century America.‖ American Quarterly 25 (May 1973): 131-53; and
antebellum southern men had been a sham that proved that all the talk about the Southern gentleman‘s strength and chivalry had been mere bravado‖ (620). According to Union Soldier John Phelps, Southern men ―knew nothing of true masculinity‖ for ―the Southern idea of manhood,‖ he asserts, was little more than ―a self-assured superiority and arrogance over the people of the South‖ (qtd. in Silber 620).
Interestingly, the Northern men‘s attacks on (or redefinition of) Southern masculinity did not stop when the war ended; quite the contrary. When the war stopped, Northern abolitionists were ―reinvigorating their cause with a spirit of manly virility,‖ hoping that ―Southern men would now recognize Northern masculine energy‖ (Silber 619). The Chicago Tribune emphasized that ―before the war, the Southern chivalry did not respect the Northern mudsills, and the Northern man did not come up to the Southern gentleman in his essential ideas of manhood … [I]n manly courage, a noble sense of honor, and statesmanlike qualities, a Northern man had no claims in the estimation of the South which the oligarchy were bound to respect‖ (2). But, now, as the Tribune explained, this gendered hierarchy has been turned on its head: ―Northern courage has commanded respectful consideration‖ (2).87
Studying the character of the Southern man, some Northern doctors, as Silber explains, even suggested that the pugnaciousness and exaggerated masculinity of Southern men was rooted in their ―nervous constitution, thus connecting Southern men to the same hysteria-prone physique which nineteenth century doctors frequently attributed to women‖ (622). In short, these doctors implied that Southern men, like many women, had ―lost control of their bodily, and hence emotional, powers‖ (Silber 622).88
In these times of crisis, Anthony E. Rotundo, ―Body and Soul: Changing Ideals of American Middle-Class Manhood, 1770-1920.‖ Journal of Social History 16 (1983): 23-38.
87
See John W. Phelps, John W. Phelps Papers 7:87, New York Public Library (NYPL); Chicago Tribune, 25 May 1865.
88 Dr. A. P. Dutcher, for instance, wrote: ―The great rebellion that has just closed was precipitated upon the nation, in a great measure, by the high nervous temperament of the Southern people, particularly their leaders‖. A. P. Dutcher, ―A Lecture on the Temperaments,‖ Medical and Surgical Reporter 15.1 (Dec. 1866): 451-52; For more on the 19th century views of woman‘s unstable biology, read Charles Rosenberg and Carroll-
Northerners therefore did not simply ignore Southern manhood. They redefined it in terms that made it ―obnoxious and offensive to the Northern understanding of respectability and self-control‖ (Silber 621).
As Silber remarks, when the war ended and when the nation was celebrating its reunification, most Northern men were even loathe to acknowledge any degree of ―distinctive‖ Southern masculinity:
Pride, indolence, luxury, and licentiousness…Manners are fantastic and fierce; brute force supplants moral principle…a sensitive vanity is called honor, and cowardly swagger, chivalry [. . .] Northerners were keenly aware that the Southern man laid claim to a certain aura of manliness, but by using the rhetoric of free-labor ideology, Northern men attempted to uncover the fallacy of those claims (620-621).
For Oliver Wendell Holmes, in particular, the notion of Southern manliness was to be discarded easily because it rested on falsehoods. Writing to Senator Albert Beveridge, he said: ―I hope that time will explode the humbug of the Southern gentleman in your mind … the Southern gentlemen generally were an arrogant crew who knew nothing of the ideas that make the life of the few thousands that may be called civilized‖ (qtd. in Aaron 166-7).89
Some Northerners, however, were less prone to discard completely the idea of a distinctive Southern manliness: Northern editor Josia Holland, for instance, was one of the few northerners who recognized that ―there was such a thing as manhood in the South‖ (qtd. in Silber 620).90 Yet again, seen in the eyes of these Northerners, Southern masculinity
Smith Rosenberg, ―The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Women,‖ No Other Gods: On Science and American Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) 54-70.
89 Letter of Oliver W. Holmes to Senator A. J. Beveridge; quoted in Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973) 166-67.
90 Diary of George Templeton Strong, 3: 583-84; John W. Phelps, Phelps Papers, 7: 87; quote of James M. Morey in Daniel Sutherland, The Confederate Carpetbaggers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987) 236.
became the subject of redefinitions; always, of course, according to Northern standards. The New York Tribune, for instance, stated Southern masculinity was linked to the ability to take up honest labor:
If there be any manhood among the ex-slaveholders, we shall soon find out. We mean the manhood which cheerfully attacks the difficulties of peace and wins victories not less renowned than those of war … The sooner all Southern employers, whether ‗gentlemen‘ or not, understand the new organization [of labor], the better for Southern production and prosperity (qtd. in Silber 621).
In the same column, the journalist and novelist John De Forest suggested that the brand of Southern masculinity rested mainly ―on an overblown notion of virility and the sins of riotous and ungoverned living,‖ and he added scornfully, ―the central trait of the ‗chivalrous southron‘ is an intense respect for virility. He will forgive almost any vice in a man who is ‗manly‘ but this admiration is actually for ―vices which are but exaggerations of the masculine‖ (qtd. in Silber 622).91
The critical attention to Southern men, however, was soon complemented by a strong focalization on Southern woman. If Southern masculinity could be discarded or redefined according to Northern standards, the strength of southern women posed an entirely different problem to Northern mentality, for the women ―displayed an attachment to the Confederacy, and a hostility toward the union, that far surpassed the disloyalty of Southern men‖ (Silber 623). Northern Journalist Sidney Andrews remarked: ―the men who did the fighting are everywhere the men who most readily accept the issues of the war‖ (318).92
For the women, however, accepting defeat was far from being a reality. A visionary Lippincott‘s writer (in
91
New York Tribune, 12 May 1865, 4; John W. DeForest, A Union Officer in the Reconstruction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948) 183, 185.
1860) said that the women ―would hear no truce and no peace‖ (Andrews 187). Textbook writer James Schouler added: ―Southern women inspired the cause of Southern secession and scarcely an order was seen emanating from Confederate generals for exciting hatred of the North that did not allude to the softer sex‖ (319-20, qtd. in Silber 624).93
Eventually, as Silber notes, ―the intransigence of Southern women became a potent symbol in Northerners‘ postwar political discourse, suggesting the bitterness and anger Northerners would encounter in the postwar settlement‖ and making ―Southern women the very foundation of the Confederacy—its main supporters and defenders‖ (623-624). Paradoxically, ―this feminine sectionalism again confirmed the weakness of Southern masculinity as it pointed to the failure of Southern leaders to assert their control over their womenfolk‖ (Silber 624).
Northerners took the issue of Southern gender even further, by displaying images of an emasculated and femininized Jefferson Davis, and later, through ―their depictions of weak and effeminate southern men who were mired in their impotent devotion to the lost cause‖ (Silber 9). Seen in that light, ―Davis became a symbol of all the Southern rulers‘ deceptive claims to manliness and chivalric courage [, and] Southerners clearly recognized in the Davis imagery an assault on their manhood‖ (Silber 629). The New York Independent portrayed the former president of the Confederacy as someone ―[w]ho is yonder aged, lean-faced female, flying through the woods with skirts lifted of the wind, and with cloven feet disclosed in boots. That is no other than the masculine hero who promised never to desert the fortunes of the Southern Confederacy‖ (2, qtd. in Silber 629).94
By playing up Davis‘s flight disguised as 92 Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War, as Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in
Georgia and in the Carolinas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1866). 93
Silber mentions the circulation of a cartoon representing Jefferson Davis, the ―petticoated president,‖ dressed in the clothes of an old women, a reference to the disguise Davis is said to have worn in fleeing the Union forces, and adds that ― the wide circulation of the cartoons, as well as Barnum‘s display, suggest ways in which an initially middle-class image of inadequate Southern manliness reached a broader audience in the North‖ (626).
a Southern female, Northerners pictured the Southern male as an imposter of manliness no longer able to protect the women (Silber 632). Such images also found a way to ―stifle this feminine hostility, to squelch that aspect of the rebellion that could not be defeated on the battlefield‖ (Silber 631). Ultimately, the depictions of a female-led and feminine-inspired Confederacy, offered Northern men more than just ―a vehicle for subduing Southern women‘s intransigence‖ (Silber 632); it also provided Northerners the opportunity to turn ―the assertions of Southern men on their heads‖ (Silber 630).