Southern chivalry, or theCavalier myth, was a popular concept describing the aristocratichonor culture of theSouthern United States during theAntebellum,Civil War, and early Postbellum eras. The archetype of aSouthern gentleman became popular as achivalric ideal of the slaveowningplanter class, emphasizing bothfamilial and personalhonor in addition to the ability to defend either by force if necessary. Southern chivalry is today seen as an attempt to justify the racist and patriarchalstratification of Southern society, with the goal of maintaining or legitimizing the human rights abuses ofAmerican slavery.[1][2]
Prior to the Civil War this concept of a gentleman's honor was frequently used as a basis forduels and other forms ofextrajudicial violence, most notably thecaning of Charles Sumner byPreston Brooks, and contributed to the militarization of the South by encouraging young men to be taught at military schools.
By the later Antebellum era, the term had taken on an ironic meaning for Northerners andabolitionists, among whom it was used as a pejorative to describe what was perceived as the barbarism of Southern slave owners and their hostility and duplicity in dealing with the North, as was particularly seen in various political caricatures before and during the war.
In the modern era the romanticization of Southern chivalry became a core aspect of theLost Cause myth, which portrays theConfederate States of America as a morally and culturally superior civilization defending its honor against a materialistic and immoral North.
During the Antebellum period the culture of the Southern aristocracy was, according to some historians, loosely codified as a chivalricSouthern code, emphasizing the quasi-feudal ability of a Southern gentleman, or Cavalier,[a] to control hisdependents, including both white family members and blackchattel slaves.[2] A sense of rivalry against the rest of the Union is described as pervading much of Southern culture during the Antebellum years, when "Exuberant southerners meant to draw [Northerners' attentions] to such presumed aristocratic virtues as gallantry, classical education, polished manners, a high sense of personal and family honor, and contempt for money-grubbing."[1]
Young men of the upper class were expected to be educated in courage, conduct, and thehumanities from an early age, including both Victorian literature and theGreek classics.[1][2] Such men would then be expected to be sent to a military school, with many military leaders on either side of the Civil War having received their training from such institutions across the South.[2] "Knight" and "knightly" entered common parlance as impactful terms of admiration for virility and masculinity.[1]
Southern chivalry also placed great importance on upholding the strictgender roles seen among white Southerners of the time, encouraging a division between strong, educatedgentlemen and demure, submissivebelles. The Southern woman was seen as inferior to her husband but nonetheless an embodiment of grace and purity whose defense from disgrace was considered a core duty of the dominant gentleman,[3] such thatJulian S. Carr is reported as openly boasting how he had "horsewhipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds because [...] she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady."[4][b]
The use of the Cavalier myth ultimately cultivated a fictionalized image of whatEncyclopedia Virginia described as a "benevolent male authority" across the region's history, enforcing apatriarchal narrative of the upper classes at the expense of black slaves, free women, and other marginalized workers responsible for the economic successes of the South. Rather than expressing actual moral values of the South, the concept of a Southern gentleman is instead argued to have served to justify widespread slavery by recasting the relationship between master and slave as a noble, paternal one rather than the coercive and exploitative reality.[1][5] Southern encyclopedist Charles Reagan Wilson argues that "[e]lites used the mythology of Cavaliers and moonlight-and-magnolias plantations to construct a romantic region that obscured differences across the South's regions and among its social groupings."[3]
In 1945, Old South apologistRichard M. Weaver instead defended Southern chivalry as a necessary, if violent and culturally regressive, mechanism to preserve therules of war originally developed by the upper classes of various nations during their progression out of theEuropean Dark Ages, and lamented the breakdown of such rules during the Civil War as prophetic of theindustrialized warfare and mass killing of theworld wars era.[6]
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Popular concepts of a Southern aristocracy originated with the heritage of the "Old South" as the colonial possessions of theBritish Empire, when the meteoric growth of the plantation industry led to the entrenchment of wealthy landowners as a dominant socially and politically conservative planter class.[2][4] This aristocracy modeled itself after the old British gentry, with the Cavalier and Southern gentleman myths developing in response to a wider 19th-century nostalgia for the knightly aristocracy of theEnglish Middle Ages.[4][c] Later nationalist narratives in particular claimed white Southerners' descent from the Norman knights ofWilliam the Conqueror, "a race [...] renowned for its gallantry, chivalry, its honour, its gentleness, and its intellect".[7][8]
The concept of the Cavalier was instead introduced to the continent through theVirginia Cavaliers and otherRoyalists of theEnglish Civil Wars, who the Cavalier myth incorrectly states fled to Virginia en masse after their defeat. This original historical archetype of the Old South Royalist, now indicating a gentleman distinguished by his gallantry and code of conduct rather than the original political inclination,[d] was further elevated to afolk hero orstock character by American "Cavalier" fiction as it and other forms of Anglo-Saxon nostalgia flourished throughout the 1800s.Theodore Goodridge Roberts andMolly Elliot Seawell dealt with the Virginia Cavaliers directly in their fiction,[5] which became influential in the South alongside the more general strain ofMedievalist writers likeWalter Scott.[9]
The knightly and Christian values described in such works were seen by proponents as arising to a unique degree in the Southern states as opposed to the more bourgeois North, allowing the gentlemen planters to be easily reimagined as landed knights defending the white Southerners' wealth and culture.[1][6] Northerners, in response, quickly co-opted Medievalist language as a point of derision against a South they saw as a rural backwater led by regressive aristocrats "[as] idle, ignorant, dissolute, and ferocious as that medieval chivalry to which they are fond of comparing themselves", a negative view which has since been supported by many mainstream historians.[1]
Dueling was as present in the 19th-Century Southern states as elsewhere in the English-speaking world, causing many deaths among upper-class gentlemen in spite of increasingly strict regulations against such violence.[2][6] While the practice remained in vogue across the United States it turned particularly deadly in the South, where martial ability was extolled as a measure of a Cavalier's worthiness and refusing a challenge would lead to "posting," a type of publicostracism as a coward; "[D]ueling remained the preferred way to defend one's honor -- or even to commitmurder. A jilted lover need only wait for a rival's insult, or even manufacture one. He was then free to challenge and kill the rival without condemnation."[9] Duels were also restricted to contests between gentlemen of equal rank, with Weaver comparing these formal arrangements to the knightly tournaments of the Middle Ages to argue that such gentlemen saw this gamification of combat as the line of separation between themselves and the various "uncivilized" peoples they opposed.[6] Congressional politics were no stranger to the spectacle, though Southern politicians preferred to challenge one another over their Northern opponents, believing those less honorable than themselves could not be trusted to follow the formal rules of dueling.[9]
Some of the most enduring invocations of Southern honor in both the original and ironic senses come from theBrooks-Sumner affair, which occurred after abolitionistCharles Sumner gave a charged speech on the admission of territories asslave states, titled "the Crime Against Kansas."[e] Sumner's speech personally attacked South Carolina SenatorAndrew Butler for his activity in favor of thisslave power, seeking to present Butler's defense of slavery as a deluded obsession while arguing his sense of chivalry to be closer to that of the satiricalAlonso Quijano fromDon Quixote than heroes of the actual Medieval romances favored by the Southern elite:
The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean theharlot, Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator. The frenzy of Don Quixote, in behalf of hiswench,Dulcinea del Toboso, is all surpassed.[10]
Preston Brooks, a relative of Butler's, became determined to defend Butler's honor; He originally intended to challenge Sumner to a duel, but was convinced by a fellow representative that "A duel was the means by which social equals proved their honor; social inferiors, on the other hand, could be more summarilybeaten with a cane."[11] Brooks then attacked Sumner on the floor of theOld Senate Chamber on May 22nd, terming his speechlibel against South Carolina. The uproar over the event in the North portrayed Sumner as a martyr and the attack as an act of dishonor and hypocrisy, withJohn L. Magee's particularly famous political caricature depicting Brooks as a savage and faceless assailant assisted or jeered on by fellow Southerners alongside a caption noting the perceived dissonance between the beliefs of the Southern gentlemen and their actions.[12]
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By the outbreak of the Civil War, Weaver argues, the concept of Southern chivalry had become well known among both Northerners and Southerners; Like the gentlemanly duels of the Antebellum era, many Southerners had hoped for the war to be a test of their masculinity against that of the North, leading to premature declarations of a Confederatemoral victory as early asFirst Manassas/First Bull Run and subsequent expressions of dismay at the conflict's eventual degeneration intototal warfare in place of the "Christian soldiery" attempted by Southern troops. Weaver attempts to distinguish between high-born Confederates likeJohn Gordon,Lee, orDavis, who balked at unconventional forms of warfare, espoused admiration forGrant and other Unionists thought to have proven themselves in battle, or sought to preserve the honor of white Northerners under their occupation, and low-born officers likeMosby orStonewall Jackson, who instead conformed to the Northern middle-class view of the war as a "simple destruction" of one's opponents.[6][f]
Confederate leaders made heavy use of the same Medievalist language that had defined the Antebellum aristocracy, with Davis and others referring to the Confederacy's generals as 'knights' or 'Cavaliers' both during and after the war.[1] A journalist termedP. G. T. Beauregard a "Sir Galahad" of the South's values.[13]
Forsyth provided an understanding of Postbellum readings ofWilliam Shakespeare'sOthello as a paradoxically sympathetic "Southern hero", one who is, in spite of his race, so bound by a gentleman's duty to preserve the honor of the white women around him that he ends the play by murderingDesdemona for what he believes to be her infidelity.[14]First-wave feminist and former slaveownerRebecca Latimer Felton cited chivalric values, namely the duty of gentlemen to provide and care for a lady, when petitioning forwomen's suffrage in 1915,[15] and public figures extolled states like South Carolina as standing "for culture, for chivalry, and for exalted citizenship, for higher ideals than which no people ever possessed" well into the Postbellum years.[1]
The swashbuckling,plume-hatted Virginia Cavalier endures as a popular symbol of the state, including theVirginia Cavaliers sports teams of theUniversity of Virginia.[5]
Lost Cause proponents seek to present the Southerners astragic heroes fighting for the supposed moral ideals of the Confederacy, arguing that the Northern military victory came about due to an overwhelming industrial and numerical advantage where the Confederacy instead won its victories through the superior prowess and mettle of the average Rebel soldier and his noble leaders.[16] TheNew Georgia Encyclopedia closely compares the Lost Cause to asocial religion,[17] whileLaura Brodie identified the early canonization ofRobert E. Lee as a Messianic "Saint of the South" with the Victorian English "cult of mourning" in the wake of the death of Prince Albert.[4]
Assertions of an honorable lost cause of the Confederacy became ubiquitous as the country attempted to rebuild the union between North and South, including the rebranding of the Civil War as a "War of Northern Aggression" to fallaciously argue that "while southerners were a people of honor and purity, Northerners were invaders, a people consumed by lust for power." Works of popular culture likeGone with the Wind (1939) repeatedly extolled the Antebellum South as a lost country of "Cavaliers and Cotton Fields".[17]
HistorianRollin G. Osterweis identified the "chivalric planter", alongside the Southern belle, theUncle Remus, and the Confederate veteran, "once a knight of the field and saddle", as the founding stock characters of what later coalesced into the Lost Cause myth.[18]
Confederate apologia additionally flourished during theGolden Age of Fraternalism that manifested in large part in the universities of the South, including theKnights of the White Camelia from Louisiana and theKappa Alpha Order of Virginia.[4] TheKu Klux Klan also made frequent use of terms like "Knight" or "Empire" in theirinternal vocabulary and hierarchy.[19]
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