Southern Manhood

White Manhood in the Old South

By the eighteenth century, white southern men applied at least five definitions of manhood. One, the ideal of paternalism, called for benevolent men to rule as fathers over extended families and ultimately over society. A second, the notion of independence, suggested that white men should work for themselves and associated taking orders with women, slaves, and children. Another definition involved honor, which focused on the need to prove one's character and protect one's reputation among equals. A fourth, imbued with racist meanings, suggested that white men should assert mastery over black men and could claim sexual authority over black women. Finally, there was the image of the “helluvafella,” a term the historian W. J. Cash used to describe the man whose focus was “to toss down a pint of raw whiskey in a gulp, to fiddle and dance all night, to bite off the nose or gouge out the eye of a favorite enemy, to fight harder and love harder than the next man” (Cash, 52).

These dimensions of white southern manhood grew out of the conditions and experiences of early southern life. The large majority of males in the first generations of English settlers in Virginia struggled against each other, against Native Americans, and against the environment in their attempts to become independent and, increasingly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, slaveholding landholders. By the early nineteenth century, white southern men measured their manhood by the degree to which they had achieved freedom from dependent labor and credit. Among slaveholding whites, ownership of land and slaves (and paternalistic control over the latter) were also markers of manhood.

Notions of honor and paternalism worked together to suggest that powerful men deserved their authority. Beginning in the mid–eighteenth century, slave owners imagined themselves as patriarchs who treated their dependents kindly and received respect and affection in return. The abolitionist movement prompted slave owners to argue that rule by benevolent father figures protected a harmonious, hierarchically arranged, organic society against excessive individualism, crime, vice, and disorder. Notions of honor suggested that elite men should protect their reputations and family names from any criticism.

Meanwhile, among white indentured servants, the rough and often temporary nature of early colonial life in the South often encouraged frontier rashness, a characteristic apparent in the floating saloons catering to that group. By the late colonial period, southerners and nonsoutherners writing about the southern frontier began producing helluvafella images of lower-class southern whites as fun-loving rustics fond of boastful talk, ready to fight, and expert at hunting and other physical skills. In the mid–nineteenth century, southwestern humor writers built on these descriptions to create long-lasting images of rural white southerners as uncouth men of nature who lived beyond the rules of polite society.

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