The Chivalric Tradition in the Old South

Author(s): Eugene D. Genovese

Source: The Sewanee Review , Spring, 2000, Vol. 108, No. 2 (Spring, 2000), pp. 188-205
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27548832

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 THE CHIVALRIC TRADITION
IN THE OLD SOUTH
EUGENE D. GENOVESE

IN Malory's LesaysMorte
school, Sir Ector over the Darthur, which southerners read in
body of Launcelot?that
epitome of knightly virtues: "Thou was the mekest man and
the jentyllest that ever ete in halle emonge ladyes, and thou
were the sternest knyght to thy moral foo that ever put spere
in the reeste." This medieval ideal combined attitudes that
might seem incompatible but were discretely necessary as
well as admirable. Its significance, as C. S. Lewis cogently
observes in "The Necessity of Chivalry," lies in the double
demand it makes on human nature: "It taught humility and
forebearance to the great warrior because everyone knew how
much he needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the ur
bane and modest man because everyone knew he was likely
as not to be a milksop."
Gentleness implies a sympathy for others that avoids con
temptuous condescension. Its spirit is of "there, but for the
grace of God, go I." Educated southerners, in describing the
men they most admired, drew upon their favorite ancient au
thors, whom they read in accordance with their own Chris
tian sensibility. In so doing, they combined romantic flour
ishes with tough-minded realism. When?however improb
ably?college professors regularly assigned Ovid to their stu
dents, they were following medieval practice. For during the
Middle Ages the exponents of chivalry had turned to Ovid
as well as Virgil to support their notions of courtly love. That
neither Virgil nor Ovid intended his work to be read in a chi
valric spirit is beside the point. Some such questionable read
ing influenced southerners, especially those who read him in
cleaned up, bowdlerized translations. And if southerners
learned from Ovid and his medieval admirers that they ought
? 2000 by Eugene D. Genovese

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 EUGENE D. GENOVESE 189

to take a sympathetic view of women's sensibilities and just

claims to recognition, they learned from Xenophon, among
other ancient writers, to praise men who combined generosity
toward friends with ferocity toward enemies. And they knew
the declaration of Caesar?whose Gallic Wars every school
boy had to read-?that it was contrary to Roman practice to
abandon loyal allies.
In aspiring to the chivalric virtues, southerners knew that
with the shift in the function of the knight between the elev
enth and fourteenth centuries came a shift in the knightly
ideal. So long as virtual anarchy lasted, the knight fought for
himself, usually to the death, and he could not afford to be
chivalrous. But as knights were drawn into the armies of kings
and lords, they had to behave mercifully toward defeated
foes, for their side might lose the next round. They main
tained their penchant for fearlessness?indeed recklessness?
in the service of others, for it provided the main spur to the
fame they coveted. But they increasingly put faith in a repu
tation for loyalty, generosity, courtesy, justice, and general
Christian bearing. That is, they depended upon the quali
ties celebrated in such southern favorites as Froissart, who
especially contributed to the glorification of the medieval
knights, whose lapses from the chivalric ideal he noticed
barely, if at all. Needless to say, the rules rarely applied to the
treatment of the lower classes, and knights hardly scrupled
when they had a chance to rape peasant girls. Indeed, at least
on a few occasions, they were known to rape women of the
privileged classes.
Educated southerners also knew the chansons de geste,
especially The Song of Roland. No doubt the wandering min
strels who sang the praises of the knights and the courtiers
exaggerated their largesse, for the minstrels largely depended
upon the largesse of the courts they entertained. But they
stamped on the consciousness of Europe an image of knightly
generosity and Christian virtue that passed into the modern
age, nowhere more strongly than in the Old South.
For the stern but necessary complement to meekness, turn
to the southern reactions to Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered and

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190 THE CHIVALRIC TRADITION

to its code of honor. The best educated southerners read

Tasso with much enthusiasm. He turns up in southern literary
journals, including such college publications as Virginia Uni
versity Magazine, which ranked him among the great figures
of world literature. His admirers included Isaac Harby, Hugh
Legare, Richard Furman, Augusta Jane Evans, and other cele
brated southern men and women.
Mary Chesnut's social circle discussed Jerusalem Delivered,
which posed the moral problem of the limits of Christian
charity in the duel. Do you kill an opponent whose sword has
been broken? Christian charity would reject so mean a vic
tory, and Tasso has Tancredi do everything possible to spare
his pagan adversary. But Argante scorns the offer of mercy
and charges anyway. Tancredi must kill him. For when your
adversary is a fanatic who lives outside the code?when, that
is, he behaves like a Yankee?even the most devout Christian
gentleman must respond ferociously.
The haughty planters of the South Carolina low country
styled themselves "The Chivalry"?and more and more slave
holders even in the remote Southwest claimed the title for
themselves. Southerners everywhere invoked the term chi
valrous as the mark of the special kind of gentlemen they
believed themselves to be. Even in far-off California the
southern-born faction of the Democratic Party called itself
The Chivalry. Hear Parson Brownlow of East Tennessee, a
plebeian to his core and a self-conscious spokesman for the
plain folk. In a debate with an abolitionist minister in Phila
delphia, he defiantly proclaimed, "Yes, gentlemen, ours is the
land of chivalry, the land of the muse, the abode of statesmen,
the home of oratory; the dwelling place of the historian and
the hero."
Southern expressions of admiration for chivalry carried an
open attack on the bourgeois values that replaced it. When
William Gilmore Simms defended medieval chivalry, he
clearly had his eye on his beloved South. For Simms, as for
many southerners, the Chevalier Bayard stood as the paragon
of knightly chivalry and Christian piety and virtue. Simms
dedicated his biography of Bayard to John Izard Middleton:

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 EUGENE D. GENOVESE 191

"You will not be displeased, at least, that in pursuing the ca

reer of so perfect a character as that of the Chevalier, dis
tinguished par excellence as without reproach, I should, at
the same time, have naturally thought of yours." Simms
opened his biography by referring to the sixteenth century as
a time in which chivalry was at low ebb in Christian Europe:
"When the fine affections of the order, erring always on the
side of generosity and virtue?its strained courtesies, its over
wrought delicacies, its extravagant and reckless valor?every
thing, in short, of that grace and magnanimity which had
constituted its essential spirit and made of it a peculiar in
stitution?had given way to less imposing and less worthy
characteristics."
In the language that became steadily more popular, south
ern youth worthy of admiration were "knights." Typically,
when one man praised another, he would describe him as
"knightly." Clergymen did so as readily as others, as when
the Reverend Benjamin Morgan Palmer hailed Wade Hamp
ton as "the Chevalier Bayard of the South?the chivalrous
knight 'without fear and without reproach.'" The theme per
sisted long after the war. Jefferson Davis invoked the term
frequently in his Rise and Fall of the Confederate Govern
ment, finding, for example, no more appreciative way to
describe General John Macgruder than the word knightly.
In later years Rabbi Barnett Elzas declared, "South Carolina
has stood for culture, for chivalry, and for exalted citizenship,
for higher ideals than which no people ever possessed."
Exuberant southerners meant to draw attention to such
presumed aristocratic virtues as gallantry, classical education,
polished manners, a high sense of personal and family honor,
and contempt for money-grubbing. These themes appeared
frequently in publications and orations, most notably in col
lege commencement addresses, for which the Middle Ages
provided an especially favorite topic. And never mind that
many of these virtues, in the forms then extolled, arose with
the commercial, urban grande bourgeois and the courtiers of
the Renaissance and the early modern national states. South
erners read Castiglione, among others, as they chose; and

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192 THE CHIVALRIC TRADITION

they cherished the courtly virtues as products of the Middle

Ages and, specifically, of feudal and manorial life.
Hostile contemporaries, not to mention modern historians?
not all of them damn Yankees?have had great sport in ridi
culing these pretensions. Thus disgruntled yeomen used the
term derisively for their political adversaries among the gentry.
Frances Kemble's low-country planter husband responded to
her objection that Philadelphia was not at all aristocratic by
telling her that she would have to go to Charleston to meet an
aristocracy. In a way she did, fuming that the low-country
planters were as "idle, ignorant, dissolute, and ferocious as that
medieval chivalry to which they are fond of comparing them
selves." She compared the planters to "the ignorant, insolent
and barbarous iron-clad robbers of the middle ages." Yet she
told a stunning story. She asked a planter if he were not proud
of his son for remaining calm, exercising firmness, and risking
his life to save people gripped by panic. The planter replied,
"I am glad, madam, my son was not selfish."
An antislavery northerner, writing in Knickerbockers Maga
zine in 1843, described these planters of South Carolina as
follows: "Finer horsemen, more skilled marksmen, hardier
frames for pugilistic feats, the world cannot produce. They
are generally men also of liberal learning and generous dispo
sitions; frank and courteous; much like that hot-blooded chi
valry upon which they are too apt to pride themselves, noble
and humane in all their impulses."
No doubt much pretense went into the making of the slave
holders' self-image, which entranced some visitors, but that
hardly rendered unworthy the ideal of the chivalric gentle
man as a standard of conduct. Pretense and posturing or no,
the chivalric ideal provided invaluable support to the pater
nalism that mediated master-slave relations. It encouraged ac
ceptance by masters of duties and responsibilities and of a
code that made the ultimate test of the gentleman the humane
and Christian treatment of his slaves.
The ancient writers whom southerners most loved?Xeno
phon and Cicero, for example?taught that a gentleman must
be a good master, always just toward even the humblest. For

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 EUGENE D. GENOVESE 193

a gentleman was expected to have an ideal knight's commit

ment to justice. With Ciceronian spirit Philip St. George
Cocke's Plantation and Farm Book (1852), which planters
used to keep their records, advised masters to remember,
"Like master, like man," and to set a proper example for their
slaves. "'Tis but just and humane, when they have done their
duty, to treat them with kindness, and even sometimes with
indulgence."
Note the tombstones in the old graveyards: how often they
identify a "kind" and "affectionate" master. No doubt many
of their slaves would not have agreed. How often, after all,
did anyone bother to ask them, and how often were they in a
position to answer frankly? But we are still left with masters
who knew what God and their consciences expected of them
and what they assumed their neighbors expected or should
have expected. Tombstones speak especially to families, to
grandchildren and generations to come. We find on them
what the survivors wanted to teach, if only in the manner of
venerable priestly principle, "Do as I tell you, not as I do."
What did the slaveholders say to themselves and each
other? "Many of the Negroes enquired kindly for you," R. F.
W. Allsten wrote his young son in 1860. "You must try to be
a good boy, in order to treat them judiciously and well, when
Papa is gone." Judge Daniel Coleman of the Alabama Su
preme Court, commending his soul to Christ, left a last letter
to his wife and children: "The children must be obedient to
their Mother, and loving and kind to their brothers and sisters,
kind to the servants and just to everybody." John Berkley
Grimball commented on the death of a friend: "Mr. Tillman
was a kind man to the Negroes?and his death is a matter of
sincere regret to me." J. H. Adams wrote, "Mr. Vinson was
always a strictly moral man discharging with fidelity all the
duties of life?an affectionate husband, a kind parent, a hu
mane master & an honest man." John Belton O'Neall, the much
admired jurist and scholar who crusaded for a humane refor
mation of the slave codes, offered biographical sketches of the
eminent men of the South Carolina bench and bar that coupled
"kind master" with affectionate husband or father as a su

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194 THE CHIVALRIC TRADITION

preme tribute to his subject's character. Stephen Miller, in his

book on the bench and bar of Georgia, wrote of Augustus S.
Clayton, "As a husband, father, and master, none could have
been more kind, affectionate, and gentle." Kate Stone of north
ern Louisiana wrote, "We admire Dr. Carson greatly. He is
such a humane master and good Christian."
Now a chivalrous concern for dependents was expected to
coincide with enlightened self-interest, and the good sense
prompted by self-interest blended nicely with Christian teach
ing. Much of Thomas ? Kempis's Imitation of Christ?a book
much admired by well educated southerners?preached
meekness as the great Christian virtue, and preached it in
a manner readily assimilated to the chivalric tradition as un
derstood in the South. From the Supreme Court of North
Carolina, the cautiously antislavery William Gaston agreed
with the staunchly proslavery Thomas Ruffin that the pro
gress of Christianity, combined with a heightened sense of
self-interest, was engendering milder treatment of slaves.
Visiting the plantation of James Couper, reputedly one of the
best planters on St. Simon's Island, Frederika Bremer praised
his humane treatment of his slaves, but for all that she found
him a strict disciplinarian who did not meet her standards of
a reformer. He was, she thought, tactful and smart enough to
know that a measure of benevolence served his interests.
Bremer did not understand that slaveholders defended their
system precisely as one that blended self-interest with the
humane treatment of labor.
The slaves learned directly that in southern idealism, as in
medieval idealism, meekness complemented sternness, al
though the slaves neither perceived the balance as their mas
ters did, nor accepted their masters' notion of justice. The
Reverend Charles Pettigrew of North Carolina hoped that the
day would come when "there was not a slave in the world."
He also believed that "there is no such thing as having an
obedient & useful Slave, without the painful exercise of un
due and tyrannical authority." He wrote his sons: "To manage
negroes without the exercise of too much passion, is next to
an impossibility. I would therefore put you on your guard, lest

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 EUGENE D. GENOVESE 195

their provocations should on some occasions transport you

beyond the limits of decency and Christian morality." Petti
grew insisted on good treatment, but he reiterated that there
could be none without firmness. In response to an insurrec
tion scare in 1802, he called for stern repression: "I wish it
may be properly quelled?leniency will not do it?it will only
make it worse."
Somehow every southern slaveholder was expected to meet
the demands to protect and treat his slaves with humanity,
while he functioned as a modern man of business in a highly
competitive market. Somehow he was supposed to resist the
pressures to maximize the exploitation of labor. Somehow his
ability to resolve the attendant contradictions would measure
the quality of his character. While getting out the crop, pay
ing his bills, and running his laborers' lives, he must be gentle,
forbearing, and kind toward his subordinates. Simultaneously
he must be severe when duty, dignity, and the defense of his
authority required it.
From the perspective of the slaves and to our own cold
eye, the degree of protection offered by the internalization
of Christian and chivalric values may be questioned, but we
may wonder what life would have been like without it. How
ever much the slaveholders violated their own rules of con
duct, not to mention their rationally calculated social and
economic interests, the struggle of the many to justify them
selves to themselves made them immeasurably better and less
dangerous men than they otherwise would have been. Hence,
when James Petigru pleaded with Benjamin Allsten to save
a slave family from separation, Petigru quite naturally ap
pealed directly to Allston's chivalry.
In any case the slaveholders, like the feudal aristocracy,
sought an ethos that would bind other classes to themselves?
to bring the Christian life down to earth and to carry their
own souls up to heaven. The chivalrous Christian knight,
above all others, embodied this ethos. Meekness in the fero
cious warrior, ferocity in the meekest of men: this medieval
ideal shaped the values of southern gentlemen. During the
eighteenth century a gentleman of Charleston wrote: "A man's

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196 THE CHIVALRIC TRADITION

word must be better than his bond, because unguaranteed.

A woman's name must never pass his lips except in respect;
a promise, however foolish, must be kept." He elaborated,
"If he wrongs any man he must offer his life in expiation. He
must always be ready to fight for his State or his lady."
Yet Edmund Kirke, an antislavery northerner, insisted that
no chivalric southerner was ashamed to weep "like a woman."
In 1861 the Reverend Robert L. Dabney described a con
tingent of Methodists and Presbyterians on its way to the
front: "a stalwart set of fellows, sun-burnt, raw-boned, and
bearded; but they all wept like children. They will fight none
the less for that." During the war he reported that the troops
wept at his sermon, but not with "unmanly tears." When
James Johnson Pettigrew fell in battle during the war, a friend
described him in a manner both stereotyped and personally
accurate: "gentle and soft as a woman in all offices of friend
ship, yet true as steel to all his obligations and duties."
Southerners characterized the subjects of their memoirs
and eulogies as men of feminine softness, confident that their
fellow southerners would understand feminine softness as a
proper complement to manly strength. And the characteriza
tion appeared everywhere. Hence southerners frequently in
voked "womanly" to praise strong men, much in the manner
of the chivalric warriors of earlier times, who invoked Mary
as well as Moses and Jesus to capture the ideal combination
of gentleness, humility, and fierceness in battle. Recall that in
chapter 12 of the Book of Numbers, it is written, "Now the
man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were
upon the face of the earth." And recall that, in The Song of
Roland, Charlemagne, emulated by his doughty warriors,
breaks down in tears upon hearing of the death of Roland?
indeed he faints.
Among the South's leading moral philosophers, Thomas
Roderick Dew regarded medieval chivalry as a great civiliz
ing force, guided by the "spirit of honor" that turned the love
of arms and the romantic urge to adventure toward the pro
tection of women and the weak. An admirer of "progress,"
Dew noted with mixed feelings that gunpowder ended the

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 EUGENE D. GENOVESE 197

era of medieval chivalry by making the common man the

equal of any knight in battle. Dew and other southerners
praised chivalry for rescuing women from their miserable
status as objects of exploitation and for treating them as pre
cious human beings to be protected and cherished.
Some northern visitors and sojourners reinforced southern
attitudes by praising them extravagantly. The Reverend W. H.
Milburn, a northern Methodist who spent six years in Ala
bama, referred to Thackeray's praise of the South to under
score his own paean to the chivalric attitude toward women.
Nowhere, he wrote, do men treat women so reverently and
courteously as in the South, addressing them with simple re
spect rather than with affectation or condescension.
Yes, there was plenty of blather. Since we have slaves to do
menial work, Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi told the
House of Representatives in 1854, "The wives and daughters
of our mechanics and laboring men stand not an inch lower
in the social scale than the wives and daughters of our plant
ers, governors, and judges." One presumes that some nitwits,
North and South, believed him.
To the abundant evidence of lapses from prescribed norms
and even hypocrisy, the strongly proslavery William Henry
Holcombe of Natchez added criticisms of both medieval and
southern chivalry. He attacked dueling, impatience with legal
restraint, indisposition to industry, and the pursuit of pleasure.
Holcombe considered southerners to be cavaliers by blood
and instinct, but he recognized that slavery provided the so
cial basis for "the tone, bearing, and superiority of a gentle
man of elevated position." Despite his criticism he respected
the South's attachment to chivalry and its success in preserv
ing more of it than was true anywhere else. Holcombe praised
the South for resisting the commercial and industrial spirit,
which "destroys the ideal and reduces everything to a utili
tarian standard." And he attacked the Yankees for a religious
fanaticism that "endeavors to abolish all human institutions
and create an illusory spiritual kingdom upon earth." He saw
in the North skepticism and infidelity?"that mocking spirit
which derides alike religion and honor?and is thoroughly

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198 THE CHIVALRIC TRADITION

mercenary, sensual, and devilish." All the Yankeeisms, he con

cluded, militate against the spirit of chivalry.
Southerners read, admired, and often quoted Edmund
Burke. Outraged over the fate of Marie Antoinette, Burke
wrote, "The age of chivalry is gone: that of sophisters, econo
mists and calculators has succeeded: and the glory of Europe
is extinguished forever." James Johnston Pettigrew observed
in 1859 that chivalry had become a term of reproach in much
of the transatlantic world, but not in the South. He hoped the
next age would rediscover its virtues.
The palm for chivalric knight par excellence went to
Turner Ashby of Virginia, whose wartime heroics struck ter
ror into the Yankees and reached such heights of daring?or
recklessness?that even the bold Stonewall Jackson had to
rein him in. Since Ashby descended from English cavaliers,
royalist refugees from Cromwell's regime, he would seem the
perfect representative of Virginia's chivalry. The Ashbys, alas,
had fallen on hard times and qualified as middling folk.
Turner Ashby himself proved a good and morally upright
student and eventually owned a farm and slaves. But he spent
many years as a small merchant.
When he fell, tributes to his chivalric virtues poured in
from a host of military officers, politicians, soldiers, writers,
and ladies. The celebrated John Esten Cooke referred to him
as "that perfect mirror of chivalry." From Jefferson Davis:
"that stainless, fearless cavalier." From Thomas DeLeon:
"True knight?doughty leader?high-hearted gentleman . . .
Chivalric?lion-hearted?strong armed." Margaret Jimkin
Preston and Mary Boykin Chesnut led countless laments from
the ladies. At the tournaments Ashby was peerless. It may be
doubted that any young man in Virginia ever crowned as
many Queens of Love and Beauty. He usually rode without
bridle or saddle. A joyful fox hunter and sportsman, he put his
extraordinary horsemanship, unflinching courage, and care
ful study of cavalry tactics to good use during the war.
Although the endless tales of Ashby's chivalric demeanor
doubtless contain the usual quotient of romance, they none

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 EUGENE D, GENOVESE 199

theless ring true. One may suffice. Before the war he hosted
a party to which he invited a visiting Yankee, known to be
antislavery and a Republican. Another guest, a hotspur im
properly instructed in the rules of respect, abused the Yankee
verbally and then challenged him to the field of honor. Ashby
intervened. A Virginia gentleman did not countenance dis
courtesy toward his guests. He regarded any such insult as
directed at himself. Ashby, whose skill with weapons approxi
mated his skill with horses, insisted that he be the one to
accept the challenge. The young hotspur, apparently in his
?ups but not suicidal, beat a discreet retreat.
Turner Ashby emerged as the ideal southern chivalric war
rior: the fierce but gentle knight who would lead men into
battle but protect weak or wronged men as readily as he
would protect women. According to testimonials from all
over the South, Ashby's life did embody the highest ideals of
southern chivalry. Taxed with no youthful excesses, he lived
without fear and without reproach: pious, moral, gallant,
honorable. A veritable modern knight. A legend in his own
time. Whether Ashby and those who tried to emulate him
should be judged saints may be left to God. That they repre
sented the hope of a proud and determined people for a great
southern future should nonetheless be clear.
A debate among twentieth-century conservatives over the
relative merits of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and
Nathan Bedford Forrest illuminates certain features and con
sequences of the chivalric ideal in the Old South and in our
own time. Allen T?te, who wrote wildly inaccurate but re
markably acute biographies of Jefferson Davis and Stonewall
Jackson, planned to write one on Lee. He gave up. The more
he studied Lee's career, the more disgusted he became. For
T?te, as for Andrew Lytle, Lee sacrificed the South's chance
for victory by fighting a gentlemen's war in the great chivalric
tradition. The war, T?te and Lytle argued, was not a gentle
men's war but a war of a new type: a people's war that re
quired revolutionary ruthlessness toward civilians as well as
soldiers. Jackson and Forrest, like Grant and Sherman, knew

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200 THE CHIVALRIC TRADITION

as much and were prepared to do whatever was necessary to

win. Since the fate of the southern nation hung in the balance,
T?te thought that they were right and Lee was wrong.
The historical accuracy of the portrayal and of the criticism
it drew from Richard Weaver may be questioned. At the least,
we must protest against the silence on the atrocities com
mitted against black troops, whose very humanity the Con
federate Army ignored on a number of occasions. But then
the chivalric knights of the Middle Ages were not known for
their Christian compassion toward rebellious peasants. The
slaughter of black troops by the Confederates at Fort Pillow
sickened even some of the perpetrators. Nor were such atro
cities committed only against troops. In refugeeing blacks
during the war, some planters preferred to shoot recalcitrant
slaves rather than let them flee. Recalcitrance constituted im
pudence, disobedience, ingratitude, insufferable presumption.
It therefore placed the perpetrators outside the sphere of chi
valric concern.
Walter Herron Taylor, Lee's adjutant, wrote his sister in
the summer of 1863 to express dismay and outrage over the
prospect of black troops in a Union army of occupation. Tay
lor could not understand the black troops whom the Con
federates were confronting: "No doubt the majority of them
had once lived with their masters in happy Virginia homes."
He thereupon justified the lack of quarter shown them on the
battlefield. "Damn you," another Confederate soldier cried
out, "you are fighting against your master."
Richard Weaver focused on the Union Army's having
fought a modern war, largely free of the restraints previously
expected?a war deliberately designed to break the will of
a whole people at any cost. The Confederate Army, he in
sisted, fought in an older manner. Let us suspend disbelief
and consider Weaver's defense of Lee. In defending Lee,
Weaver extolled the "the splendid tradition of chivalry" for
its "formal cognizance of the right to existence not only of
inferiors but also of enemies." He assailed the modern formula
of unconditional surrender, which was "first used against
nature and then against peoples." That formula "impiously

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 EUGENE D. GENOVESE 201

puts man in the place of God by usurping unlimited right to

dispose of the lives of others." In contrast "chivalry was a
most practical expression of the basic brotherhood of man."
Our own age, Weaver wrote, has exceeded the worst of previ
ous ages known for their brutality and sheer cruelty.
Weaver considered war itself an ineradicable consequence
of human nature. He therefore argued that the rules of war
fare imposed by chivalry constituted the only alternative to
the barbarism of the twentieth century. He was aghast at the*
very idea of total war and was sickened to learn that the great
and once chivalrous state of South Carolina was engaged in
the production of nuclear weapons. Weaver described the
"Christian soldier" as one who remembers "that there is a
higher law by which both he and his opponent will be
judged."
Southerners who presented themselves as the Chivalry
echoed Alaric the barbarian conqueror of Rome. In battle
they declared their readiness to find either a kingdom or a
grave. To be sure, they often failed to live up to their pro
fessed standards. But to say that is merely to say what Gibbon
said of the "fearless and fanatic" knights of the Crusades:
"They neglected to live, but they were prepared to die, in the
service of Christ." That the practice of an ideal need not fol
low its preaching goes without saying, but only extraordinary
naivete could dismiss the effect of the ideal on the lives of the
men, high and low, who aspired to fame or simply to think of
themselves as decent. Josef Stalin, the Genghis Khan of the
twentieth century, probably never performed a chivalrous
deed in his life; but he knew how to instill in his followers a
chivalric spirit that would make millions sacrifice their lives
for a cause. Stalin hailed G. I. Kotovski, a Bolshevik cavalry
officer and military hero, for knowing how to "pulverize" the
enemy. Kotovski was, he said, "the bravest among our most
modest commanders and the most modest among the brave."
Without a trace of Stalin's cynicism, Nathaniel Macon of
North Carolina advised a young follower: "Remember, you
belong to a meek state and just people."
The southern rage for ring tournaments, much ridiculed in

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202 THE CHIVALRIC TRADITION

the North, laid bare the nature and extent of a chivalric tra
dition intended to temper the culture of a modern people.
Those educated southerners who read medieval history and
literature knew something of the checkered relation of the
tournaments to Christianity. Long before Renaissance hu
manists like Petrarch sneered at the tournaments as absurd
and pointless, the Roman Catholic Church had roundly con
demned them?roundly but not effectively, if we may judge
by the indisputable evidence of their growing popularity and
the periodic repetition of the condemnations. In the eyes of
the church, the tournaments, breeding a cult of violence, in
vited the commission of every one of the seven deadly sins,
and, in truth, unlike later imitations, medieval tournaments
were often murderous.
The church had itself to blame. Its noble work in promoting
the Truce of God and Peace of God to curb feudal warfare
also curbed the income and sport of the knights, who?ro
mance aside?largely lived off violence and plunder. With
warfare reduced, the tournaments served as virtually indis
pensable schools for military training and displays of prowess.
Descriptions of the early tournament battles read very much
like those of actual knightly warfare: bloody as well as rau
cous, marked with corpses and maimed bodies. And they pro
vided a marvelous opportunity for the settlement of personal
scores in a manner not merely legal but in accord with reign
ing mores.
The tournaments slowly softened with the general softening
of late medieval society, and in the end they contributed to
the spread of chivalry. Notwithstanding much strutting in
front of the ladies, the tournaments promoted the evolving
knightly virtues of largesse, courtesy, and honesty together
with physical prowess. Over time the element of play crowded
out the murderously martial, but something of the old spirit
of feudal warfare lingered. In the United States tournaments
were southern events. The North had its own, but no one
thought them comparable in extent, spirit, or significance. For
southerners the tournaments recaptured the original mean
ing of chevalier as mounted warrior.

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 EUGENE D. GENOVESE 203

Virginia led the South and the United States in lavish medi
eval-style tournaments, with South Carolina not far behind.
The most celebrated were held at the Virginia Springs, at
which the elite from across the South congregated every sum
mer for extended family vacations. Amid ladies and lances,
hounds and hunters, one tournament followed another at
those celebrated spas. The knights rode at a ring instead of
each other and wore bright silk instead of shining armor, but
otherwise they were as close as possible to their medieval
models. The more fashionable ladies dressed in the medieval
spirit, with appropriate sleeves, bodices, and skirts. George
James, the novelist who served as British consul in Virginia,
remarked that the tournaments primarily provided an oc
casion to display horsemanship and to collect and entertain
lovely ladies.
But they did more than that. If the medieval tournaments
served as military training schools, the southern reinforced
the regional martial spirit. Yes, the "knights" rode at the ring
rather than at each other, but the ring was no easy conquest.
A young man had to practice all year round. To prevail and
to honor his lady, he had to perform perfectly. Riding at full
speed, he had to lift the ring without jarring the hook on
which it rested. Thomas Roderick Dew and Nathaniel Bever
ley Tucker, among other prominent Virginians, delivered the
ceremonial orations. Speaking seriously to the young men
and their ladies, Dew spelled out the significance of the medi
eval ritual for modern southerners. He charged the southern
"knights" to remember that knighthood had grown out of the
Dark Ages, which failed to recognize the rights of woman
hood, and that it was created "to arrest the downward pro
gress of civilization; that all true knights must be honorable,
courteous, liberal, clement, loyal, devoted to woman, to arms,
to religion." Before we dismiss those words as so much piffle,
we should recall that Dew, among others, was engaged in a
generally successful campaign to provide high-quality acad
emy and college education for southern women.
The tournaments spread westward with the migration of
the gentry. Tallahassee, Florida, celebrated Washington's

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204 THE CHIVALRIC TRADITION

birthday with a ring tournament that had a frontier touch:

the participants dressed as Indians, and the winner was
dubbed the Knight of Miccosukie. In Alabama, in which
tournaments were thriving at state fairs by the 1850s, a small
town like Greensboro attracted folks from miles around to
tournaments and balls that offered a chance to parade the
latest fashions, including those imported from Paris. At fairs
like those in Jackson, Mississippi, tournaments were held for
boys under thirteen and for those between thirteen and nine
teen. In 1859, the palm in a youthful contest went to John
Ravencroft Green, the son of the bishop of Mississippi's Prot
estant Episcopal Church.
The tournament's grip on the southern mind burst forth
anew after the war. Almost immediately after Appomattox,
notwithstanding the trauma of defeat, frustration, impoverish
ment, and military occupation, southerners flocked to agri
cultural fairs and other events that advertised tournaments.
Confederate troops returned from the war to have a good
time in a manner that connected them to the past and to their
community's self-image. Returning cavalrymen especially
throve on them. To be sure, the tournaments eventually
waned in North Carolina and probably elsewhere when the
blacks did what they had done so often and in so many ways
during slavery times: they started to hold their own tourna
ments, thereby simultaneously satirizing the whites and claim
ing the chivalric mantle for themselves.
White southerners of all ranks flocked to the postwar tourn
aments in unprecedented numbers. John Houston Bills, a
planter in western Tennessee, whiled away his spare hours
early in 1866 by reading tales of the crusades, and in October
he reported: "To day the great and long expected 'Tourna
ment' comes off?1200 to 1500 persons attend it?the Tilting
is Very spirited, a dozen or more Knights enter the Contest?
Brewer of Holly Springs wins the prize, a fine horse?Betty
Neely was crowned queen of Love & Beauty."
The editors of the Nation, then as now exemplars of New
York provincialism and effrontery, exploded:

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 EUGENE D. GENOVESE 205

Any country in which it is the custom, in our day, to as

semble in great crowds to watch men doing these things
in broad daylight, dressed up in fantastic costumes, and
calling themselves "disinherited knights," "knights of the
sword," "knights of the lone star," and pretending to wor
ship a young woman from a modest wooden house in the
neighborhood as the "queen of love and beauty," and to
regard the bestowal of a shabby theatrical coronet by her
as the summit of earthly felicity, we need not have the
least hesitation in pronouncing semi-civilized.

The editors of the Nation could not be contradicted. What,

after all, could be more absurd than the spectacle of a de
feated and occupied people who insisted that their ideals and
aspirations had not died with their political and military
cause??than the defiant prancing of young men who had
courageously fought a ghastly four-year war but lost?
Think of their bad taste in treating young ladies from mod
est wooden houses as if they were queens of love and beauty.
Imagine their rustic confusion of shabby theatrical coronets
with those diamond-studded tiaras which a war-profiteering
New York bourgeoisie could now afford to flaunt.
Above all, what could be said about their commission of
these atrocities in broad daylight?
How else except "semi-civilized" should we describe people
who reveled in such embarrassments? For without question,
they lacked the fine discrimination of those sophisticated
Yankees who were launching the Gilded Age?who, at that
very moment, were unfolding?to an astonished world?the
true meaning of elegance, refinement, modernity, and pro
gress?of civilization as we have come to know it.

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