Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation

By Lorri Glover

Book Overview

Between the generations of Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, the culture of white Southerners experienced significant changes, including the establishment of a normative male identity that exuded confidence, independence, and power. Southern Sons, the first work in masculinity studies to concentrate on the early South, explores how young men of the southern gentry came of age between the 1790s and the 1820s. Lorri Glover examines how standards for manhood came about, how young men experienced them in the early South, and how those values transformed many American sons into southern nationalists who ultimately would conspire to tear apart the republic they had been raised to lead. This was the first generation of boys raised to conceive of themselves as Americans, as well as the first cohort of self-defined southern men. They grew up believing that the fate of the American experiment in self-government depended on their ability to put away personal predispositions and perform prescribed roles. Because men faced demanding gender norms, boys had to pass exacting tests of manhood-in education, refinement, courting, careers, and slave mastery. Only then could they join the ranks of the elite and claim power in society. Revealing the complex interplay of nationalism and regionalism in the lives of southern men, Glover brings new insight to the question of what led the South toward sectionalism and civil war.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801898218
• ISBN13: 9780801898211
• Release Date: October 2010
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 22 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

read this book first before studying the civil war

I only picked this book up after reading the author's book on the founding of the Jamestown/Bermuda colonies. Southern sons/southern honor, subjects you never thought anyone would write a book about, but it helps enlighten the reader about the way people thought in the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries. This is a must read for serious students of civil war lit.

Insightful study

Fantastic book. Well written, interesting and insightful. Glover sheds light on how elite antebellum southern society, as many said at that time, "made men." She charts the development of how these spoiled rich children learned "self mastery", "autonomy", and "independence", yet conversely learned "duty", and "self sacrifice" and how these values shaped that generation who led the South to war in 1861. She argues that from childhood, to adolescence, and finally into adulthood, these elites advanced through a series of tests within a culture of honor and shame, hoping to finally reach the pinnacle of success as masters of themselves, their relations and their slaves. The only drawback is her limited source material. She only seems to use about a dozen or so families and their letters to draw her conclusions, but nevertheless, she balances her study with ample contextual secondary source material. It's a short book, but worth your time. Along with this text, try Bertram Wyatt-Brown's "Southern Honor: Behavior and Ethics in the Old South" to get the full picture.