The Cavalier Southern Community

Contents

• Locating the Cavalier South
• The Rhetorical Challenge to the Plantation South
• The Rhetorical Characteristics of Cavalier Rhetoric
• Three arenas of Cavalier Discourse
• Rhetoric of Cavalier Community evolved Southern Identity
• Exercises

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Locating the Cavalier South

• It is a mistake to talk about a Southern public or community. The communities we have been studying were active in the South too.
• Also present in the South, however, was the cavalier community
• One of three periods in American history when a great concentration of power was possessed by only a few
• Aristocratic, large plantation and slave owners with political and economic power
• Authority from inheritance and wealth
• Strict barriers to entry, but sense of duty violated could leave you out
• Cavalier community created a distinct public sphere
• Their public arena was the drawing room
• They saw themselves as the protectors of the true American democracy

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The Rhetorical Challenge to the Plantation South

• To establish and maintain the power of plantation wealth. This was a class that wielded economic and political power over others. This included not only slaves, but other white and black freedmen of the South.
  • In 1860 census, 10,000 people owned more than 50 slaves. This is a rough indicator of the number in this class. The population of the South in that year was about 8 million.
  • A minority ruling a vast majority.
• To develop identity of "the South." Ultimately, they sought to develop sufficent identity for nationhood and to fight the Civil War.
• To develop a rhetoric of war. We talked about the necessities for this as we talked about the revolution. Ultimately, they had to motivate sacrifice. The sacrifice of war was widespread. Fully a quarter of the males of productive age in the South died in the Civil War.

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Rhetorical Characteristics of the Cavalier Community

Public Life Happened in an Insular Community

• Access was controlled by inheritance. Members inherited plantations and slaves, but most important they inherited their surnames. Public life revolved around the established families.
• Authority was established by the reciting of one's famous ancestors aftern introduction with surname.
• It was a closed community with authority diminishing rapidly as you moved away from core families.

Built Code which Motivated Sacrifice

• Key ideographs were <duty> and <honor>
• These ideographs defined motivation through responsibility to one's ancestors and their community.
• Pride of family rather than a celebration of individual characteristics
• Moral inheritance on steroids. Appeal to the moral values and commitments of ancestors celebrated continually and heart of public motivation.

Developed a Romantic Rhetoric of Resistance

• to turn material differences between North and South into national division
  • Labor system: wage versus slave
  • Economic orientation: domestic versus international
  • Land tenure: small farms and city lots versus large plantations
• transformed these differences into a rhetoric of defense.
  • Aggressive North seeking to impose its systems and orietnations on the South
• sublimated the clashes over these issues into defense of threatened principles of past generations
• <States rights> became important ideograph. This captured Henry's critique of the Constitution: that the national government was undermining
• Portrayed themselves as defenders of the Southern <way of life>
  • Threats to slavery were converted into threats to their "institutions"
  • Threats to their "institutions" were converted into threats to their <way of life>
• Thus, they portrayed themselves as defenders rather than aggressors
• A romantic rhetoric: They were motivated as the last defenders of a lost (and better) world now under attack.
  • Romance reinforced by moral inheritance
  • Saw the South as true inheritors of American revolution (as defined by the Constituiton, not the Declaration with its promise of equality)
  • Code celebrated the republican notion of government by leaders who assumed responsibility
• Thus, a sectionalism became a rhetoric of "right and wrong"
  • "Yankees are invaders who threaten our rights."

A Positive Defense of Slavery

• Based in a racism: belief that graded the races and placed white race higher than black. Racism existed both north and south, but unlike in North, became justification for slavery in South
• Used a "family" metaphor to define a paternalism fulfilled by slavery.
  • A responsibility of the superior slaveowner to the inferior black slave. Reinforced by Biblical injunctions to treat slaves well.
  • Located cruelty of slavery to those outside this community.

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Three arenas of discourse

The Parlor

• A main room of the plantation house where hours of talk among those admitted performed the rhetoric of their public life.
• Particularly important in regulating admission to public life
• Identity was constructed face-to-face
• Externalized guilt for problems to outsiders: the North
• Built a code of duty, honor, country to motivate sacrifice
• Rehearsed the authority of inheritance
• Developed the romance of their cause. Over and over the subjects in the motivational form that would develop identity and create the North as enemies.

Political Arena

• The political arena in the South was dominated by the Cavalier Community
• Motivated to hold the political offices by their <duty> and its <honor>
• Politicians acted in the context of, and on behalf of, the Cavalier Community
• State politics gave a platform for carrying their rhetoric beyond the parlor to motivate the larger community
  • Celebrated sectionalism rather than national
• National politics converted differences into offenses

Religious Arena

• Religion and nationhood have long been intertwined. The Catholic church controlled monarchs in its membership. The reformation permitted the emergence of nation-states which identified with protestant movements. Freedom of religion emerged with Madison's idea of factions in democracy. The result in America is a secular-religion contract: the state permits religious diversity in exchange for churches returning loyalty to the government.
• Evangelical Christianity united religion in 1820s and 1830s. Third Great Awakening intensified religious experience. By 1861, the three major evangelical denominations -- Methodists (45%), Baptists (37%), and Presbyterians (12%) -- had 94% of the churches in the South.
• By 1840, churches had begun to split into Northern and Southern Churches. This encouraged the myth of peaceful succession, became a precedent for sectional independence, and allowed development of different rhetorics of pulpit in North and South.
• From the pulpit, the Southern clergy developed a justification for slavery. Built around Christian duty and responsibility of master and slave. Abolition was depicted as a secular attack on religion.

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Rhetoric of the Cavalier Community evolved Southern identity

• It permitted:
• a rhetoric of race. Attributed material difference to superiority of the white race. Motivated power in the paternalism of racial responsibility.
• a rhetoric of power differential. Material success proved superiority and justified exercise of power of cavalier class.
• a rhetoric of responsibility of power rather than a rhetoric of equality
• It provided a motivation for sacrifice.
• Duty, honor, and country
• The responsibility of superiority
• The intergenerational responsibility for democracy
• Ultimately, the rhetoric of the South fails
• States rights became important to construct a nation & undercut nationhood.
• The South cannot motivate national commitment sufficient to win the war

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Exercises

• You are going from Georgia to attend college at the College of William and Mary. There you wish access to the parlors of Williamsburg and the college. How will you go about gaining that access?
• It is the spring of 1861. You are in a parlor on the tidewater of Virginia debating whether Virginia should secede from the union to join the Southern Confederacy. Write a short speech in support of secession. Write a short speech against.
• It is 1855 and you are in a Southern White Church. The sermon today is "The Responsibility of Our Race." What are some of the themes that you might hear?

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