“Has He Madeira of Fifty Years Standing?”: Gentility, medievalism, masculinity, and the allure of the Virginia Springs in the late antebellum South

ABSTRACT

This article begins a critical revision of a historiography that has overestimated themes of honor and race in understanding constructions of elite white masculinity in the antebellum South. Gentility, too, played a decisive role in framing appropriate manly behavior. By investigating the specific interaction between the Southern discourses of gentility, medievalism, and masculinity, this article indicates a direction for significant future study of Southern elites. It first addresses these themes in a broader, conceptual sense, before turning to the embodiment and apotheosis of gentility, medievalism, and gender roles in the South: the leisure resorts of the Virginia Springs.

KEYWORDS:

• Gentility
• medievalism
• masculinity
• Virginia Springs

In 1853, William J. Grayson claimed that one “true test of the gentleman is to entertain well and frequently,” with “Madeira of fifty years standing,” imported “pates de fois gras,” “choice” sherry and champagne, and a “well-furnished, commodious house.”¹ Grayson’s gentleman – “the refined product of a high civilization” – was a laudable social character who exhibited “a scrupulous regard to the feelings of others, a readiness to contribute to their comfort and happiness,” “considerate regard to the minor morals of social intercourse,” and a “nice tact with which the accomplished gentleman places every one at his ease with whom he associates.”² He was “necessarily an honorable man,” but never unduly sensitive, equally cultivating “truth, integrity, courage, forbearance, and deference to others, humanity, gentleness, calmness and self-possession, self-respect and piety.”³ Grayson’s standards were exacting, “the slightest failure or deficiency in manner spoils the whole effect.” “Nothing is more admirable and rare, even among gentlemen, than this perfection of manner.”⁴ Francis Lieber, in 1846, also extolled the gentlemanly character:

distinguished by strict honor, self-possession, forbearance, generous as well as refined feelings and polished deportment – a character to which all meanness, explosive irascibility and peevish fretfulness are alien, to which, consequently, veracity, courage, both moral and physical, dignity, self-respect, a studious avoidance of offending others, and liberality are habitual and have become natural.⁵

Lieber, too – in his 1846 Commencement Address at the University of Miami and in several subsequent published editions – set a demanding standard of gentlemanly conduct, warning his young audience that failure to comport oneself appropriately would attract such ignoble epithets as “the clown, the coward, the liar, braggart, swaggerer, bully, ruffian and the blackguard.”⁶ Grayson recognized the value in Lieber’s essay, the title of which he echoed, but was ultimately dissatisfied with his conclusions, suggesting that the essay:

has the fault of being fanciful, and inapplicable to the commonplace realities of the world; that it seems to belong to one of those imaginary republics which philosophers amuse themselves with contriving, rather than the communities in which we actually live.⁷

Lieber sketched a “Platonic Gentleman” but overlooked the practical standards “by which men ordinarily estimate others, and are estimated themselves.”⁸ Thus, the Madeira and other tangible markers of gentility.

This dialogue represented far more than idle philosophical chatter; elite Southern men intimately associated gentility with masculinity, in particular connection in the late antebellum period with an increasingly powerful, nostalgic, Romantic medievalism. The three discourses drew extensively on one another and were in many respects mutually reinforcing. Despite its centrality in elite Southern life and its concrete ramifications for identity construction, this specific intersection of tangled discourses has been understudied by scholars of the antebellum elite including Bertram Wyatt-Brown or Steven Stowe, who have instead emphasized precepts such as honor as the decisive ingredient in the flavor of elite life. This article will demonstrate that understanding elite Southern masculine ideals is impossible without properly considering the discourse of gentility, alongside the Southern historical imagination. Gentility – contested, precarious though it was – provided a script for manly performance; its muse, and often its stage, was the Southern sense of the medieval. The fascination with English and European genteel fashions appears stunningly misplaced in nineteenth-century America, where the English cultural and political yoke had been violently thrown off in favor of liberty and republican egalitarianism. However, as Ralph Ellison reflected on the passing of jazz’s “Golden Age,”

that which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history a tall tale told by inattentive idealists.⁹

Their Revolutionary repudiation and subsequent alienation from prevailing cultural currents allowed such ideas to be taken up and purged – actually very attentively – of their oppressive, exploitative connotations and presented anew to an elite South eager for valid heuristics and glamorous ideals. It was the very alterity of these discourses in the face of an increasingly clamorous Northern critique of “the Southern way” that gave them such emotional power. Elite Southern men congregated around the models they uncovered and repurposed in their medieval rummaging, which decisively shaped their sense of themselves and their responsibilities as men, and their perception of the necessity and function of a social elite.

This article begins a critical revision of our conceptualization and understanding of elite Southern masculinity. It highlights a notable gap in the existing literature, which has afforded honor a preeminent status, proposing instead that ideas about gentility, addressed in relationship with Southern Romantic medievalism, can reveal much about constructions of Southern masculinity. It first outlines how the three discourses of gentility, medievalism, and masculinity should be conceptualized in the elite Southern setting. It then touches on the place of Romantic medievalism in the South, its sources and its function, before turning to the more concrete evidence of medievalism and gentility in action in elite Southern life. Significantly, it investigates the remarkable setting of the Virginia Springs. These picturesque leisure resorts were the retreat and refuge of elites from across the South. They represented the apotheosis of Southern gentility and medievalism, and afforded the polite society in attendance a sense of fraternity, albeit within a profoundly competitive and often socially precarious environment. Here, against a backdrop laden with Romantic nostalgia, elite Southerners performed for one another, reaffirming their privileged status, while simultaneously absorbing new lessons about gendered expectations in the genteel South. Finally, it returns briefly to Grayson, showing how the discussion of the three discourses can be applied to his essay, and how Grayson himself betrayed assumptions about masculinity that fell beyond honor’s purview, and into that of a historicized and much-sought-after gentility.

A literary gap

Scholars now recognize that “the study of ‘men as gendered beings’ remains vitally important to understanding the American past.”¹⁰ Indeed, Steven Stowe has identified as one of the planters’ “most inclusive, cherished beliefs” that “sex and gender (not race and class) was the most satisfying explanation for human values and action.”¹¹ While some attention has been given to nineteenth-century American masculinities, and to a lesser extent to American gentility, the deeply significant confluence of the three discourses of gentility, medievalism and masculinity has been unprofitably neglected. In 1827, the British traveler Margaret Hunter Hall commented that “the favorite word in America for expressing perfection of personal appearance is genteel. It is never out of their mouths.”¹² This genteel moment has not gone unstudied, with Richard Bushman’s The Refinement of America (1992) and John Kasson’s Rudeness & Civility (1990) notable analyses. Both usefully unpack cultural trends of gentility and sociability, manners and mores, and recognize gentility’s “extensive use and social power,” which afforded it “a central position in a far-reaching cultural system.”¹³ These, however, highlight urban, bourgeois, Northern milieux; they thus treat genteel manhood as an aspirational status governing middle-class life, leaving room to explicate manly gentility and its social and psychic implications in the elite, Southern context. In his seminal Southern Honor (1982), Bertram Wyatt-Brown did acknowledge the influence of a “Stoic-Christian” gentility in Southern ethics, though he remarked that “the exigencies of an inhospitable, dangerous world where masters had to rule in fear” preserved an older, “Indo-European,” “primal” honor that applied more urgently to many Southern lives.¹⁴ He correctly observed that, without gentility’s ameliorating influence, the South would have been “a bloodier, more repressive society than ever it was.”¹⁵ Crucially, he concluded that honor pointed “a way out of chaos” for Southerners, because it “established signposts of appropriate conduct.” In conferring meaning upon lives, “it existed not as a myth but as a vital code.”¹⁶ His work has indelibly shaped the discipline, but in situating honor so sturdily in an anthropological interpretation, in foregrounding the “primitive conditions of life” that produced the South’s “elemental social values,” Wyatt-Brown underplayed the psychic, higher order functions of gentility in the Southern setting.¹⁷ When gentility is scrutinized alongside Southern Romantic medievalism, this oversight becomes increasingly unfortunate.

In The Mind of the Master Class (2005), Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese interrogated elite Southern historical attitudes, concluding that Southerners “prized the literate culture of Western Civilization, claiming it as their own.”¹⁸ They rightly insisted that “Southerners did not delude themselves that they had or wanted a refurbished medieval society”; rather, they critically “searched the past for a template for what it meant to be human.”¹⁹ They displayed an incisive sense of the Southern understanding and repurposing of history, but then turned their analysis only to wider concerns of political economy. They indicated the currency Romantic nostalgia gained in the South – adrift in an increasingly industrialized, globalized and hostile world – where “the Middle Ages offered an indispensable foundation – and justification – for many cherished Southern beliefs [and] reassurances about the ubiquity of slavery, dependency, hierarchy.”²⁰ They did not, however, explore in any depth the impact of Southern medievalism on the psychic organization, the identity, of individuals. In nineteenth-century America, especially in the South, demands upon men to excel as men were abnormally potent. Thus, amid the established literature, there remains a crucial gap at the nexus of gentility, medievalism, and masculinity.

Class in the South was inherently unstable and regionally idiosyncratic: success could be transient, failure struck without ceremony, and constant fears of slave insurgency generated substantial anxiety among elites. Southerners “were clearer about how class worked than how it might be defined.”²¹ An exemplary demonstration of the flux of Southern class identity can be found in Stephanie McCurry’s Masters of Small Worlds (1995), which highlights the “uneasy alliance” forged between planters and yeomen on the basis of “a common set of assumptions and values engendered in the household,” namely, “that the control of property and dependents alone conferred the rights of freemen and masters.”²² McCurry describes how this accommodation was “ever on the verge of breaking down over, ironically, precisely the values and assumptions that masters shared.”²³ Slavery’s “legitimation of dependence and inequality in the private sphere,” she argues, laid the foundation for a male accommodation across classes, enabling men of all backgrounds to dominate their immediate environs.²⁴ The constitution and negotiation of class identity in the white South was delicate and complex. To some extent, the discourse of gentility tied together all but the poorest whites, representing an aspirational ideal for the burgeoning class of urban professionals and for upwardly-mobile yeomen. Nonetheless, gentility applied most urgently to planters at the pinnacle of Southern society.

In Masters of the Big House (2003), William Scarborough identified 338 planters who owned at least 250 slaves in the 1850s. This group – “well-bred, cosmopolitan in background and outlook, intellectually curious, broadly educated, articulate, trained for leadership, and gifted with exceptional entrepreneurial skills” – constituted for Scarborough the slaveholding elite.²⁵ By contemporary estimates, ownership of twenty slaves was sufficient for designation as a “planter” – approximately 12% of slaveowners. This heterogenous group included countless successful yeomen and many of the 27,000 planter-professionals identified by James Oakes. Elite status as marked by ownership of 100 or more slaves was obtained by around 2300 slaveholding families, or less than 1% of slaveowners.²⁶ Though primarily a commodity traded in and preoccupying these elites, gentility’s influence did trickle down the Southern class ladder. Thus, while this article loosely focuses on the social and intellectual culture of those elites possessing 100 slaves, these men should not be treated as an explicit case study. Those grappling with gentility undoubtedly spanned more than this group. Its effects in stimulating identity construction and providing a model of manly conduct should be considered as applying with contrasting intensity to white men of various classes. I should finally note that this is not an investigation of slaves nor slavery; what is often missed in assessments of elite white society is that “what mattered most to [planters] was the interchanges of whites among themselves.”²⁷ White supremacy was a given, the foundation upon which this interchange was built. One of the key scripts regulating this white social world, men’s performance for their peers, was drawn upon extensively by Grayson in delineating his gentlemanly ideal. As a component of masculine identity, it had a long heritage and had come to acquire great currency in the United States. This script was gentility.

Conceptualizing gentility, masculinity and medievalism

Gentility, gentlemanly character, is an elusive asset, involving “mastery of quite subtle marks of status – the proper accent, the right choice of words and conversational topics, the appropriate attire, an acquaintance with various kinds of social properties and other rules not easy to follow with aplomb.”²⁸ Bushman proposed that “delicacy,” “sensibility,” and “taste” were at the heart of Northern genteel culture; this is also a reasonable, if simplistic, characterization of planter gentility.²⁹ Edwin Cady, I suggest, was closer to the mark in the “constellation of six main ideas” offered in The Gentleman in America (1949). “There are,” he wrote, “the shaping, background factors of birth and wealth. There are the three inward attributes of being which mark the essential gentleman: character, courtesy, and cultivation. Sixth, there is the idea of the function of the gentleman in society.”³⁰ Cady’s classification more robustly pinpoints gentlemanly status as an internal, psychic identity marker, but one nonetheless with a vital social role. Critically, it indicates that the “inward attributes” – those wholly constituting Bushman’s gentility – were not alone sufficient to gentlemanly designation, and that the communal function, the recognition by society as a gentleman, was equally significant.

The discourse of “the gentleman” stretches to at least 1528, when Baldassare Castiglione celebrated the virtues of noble birth, reputation, adept horsemanship, and denounced “the taint of affectation” that “always robs everything of grace.”³¹ Southerners recognized that, between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, a complex of social and political factors wrought a fundamental shift in the manly ideal from that of knighthood, the chevalier, into that of the courtier, the gentleman. Chivalric masculinity realigned toward “a reputation for loyalty, generosity, courtesy, justice, and general Christian bearing.”³² Ultimately, drawing and building upon these concepts, he was the antebellum Southern gentleman who entertained his fashionable society in handsomely furnished domestic milieux. He was well, if not ostentatiously dressed, had good taste in wines and cigars, an appropriately tempered enthusiasm for the pleasures of horses, drink, and cards, and he was, of course, a plantation owner. For Grayson, the sine qua non of the antebellum gentleman was “exemption from labor, from the spade, the symbol of all labor.”³³ The demands of gentility were indeed various and sometimes contradictory. But, as Grayson appreciated, even in the underachievement of such a rigorous ideal as Lieber’s Platonic Gentleman, “the moderate degree of success that may attend the larger number” in the pursuit, “will secure them from great errors in principle and conduct.”³⁴

Scholars of masculinity likewise recognize the stubborn persistence, and fundamental necessity, of an aspirational ideal in gendered identity construction. This ever-evolving paradigm has reflected “those behaviors, languages and practices, existing in specific cultural and organizational locations,” framing appropriate male conduct. Critically, masculinities “exist as both a positive, inasmuch as they offer some means of identity signification for males, and as a negative, inasmuch as they are not the Other (feminine).”³⁵ Masculinity is inherently precarious, contingent: those who fall short of masculine ideals can have their very status as a man abruptly revoked by community consensus. Another peculiarity of masculinity is the fundamental performativity of its social aspect. Michael Kimmel, in an insightful exposition of the role of fear and shame in gendered identity construction, describes how men “are under the constant careful scrutiny of other men. Other men watch us, rank us, grant our acceptance into the realm of manhood. Manhood is demonstrated for other men’s approval.”³⁶ Similarly, David Leverenz has recognized that “ideologies of manhood have functioned primarily in relation to the gaze of male peers and male authority.”³⁷ The metaphor of performance should not be understood as reflecting artifice or pomp. Rather, masculine identity is “something one does, an active corralling of practices, events, desires, contingencies, a regulatory semiotic and material operation.”³⁸ While men sometimes perform for their perceived status inferiors, this is unusual. Ratification of manhood can only be sustained by one’s peers or betters; for elite antebellum whites, the idea that social or racial inferiors could comprehend, never mind cast meaningful judgement upon, their enacted masculinity was risible.

If manhood was a performance, and gentility a central script thereof in the antebellum South, an essential muse, and a frequent backdrop to the action – intellectually and practically – was Southern Romantic medievalism. This was vulnerable to pillory – from contemporaries and subsequent commentators alike – on grounds of pretension, escapism and florid excess. Critics such as Mark Twain shared Voltaire’s distaste for the Middle Ages as a period when “barbarity, superstition, and ignorance covered the face of the world.”³⁹ But Southerners, feeling their culture at large under siege, especially in the later antebellum period, saw it as a simple, harmonious time, which shared and celebrated their own values. They thus imbued the medieval with profound meaning, overloading that which it bequeathed the nineteenth century with significance. Frankly, it little mattered that the historical continuities Southerners extended between the European Middle Ages and themselves were, at best, flimsy. Nor that most of the supposedly aristocratic, medieval values they extolled originated largely with the commercial bourgeoisie of the Renaissance. As Michael Kammen astutely observed, “what people believe to be true about their past is usually more important in determining their behavior and responses than truth itself”; this was certainly so in the South, where an enthusiastic group of, essentially, amateurs constructed a wide-ranging discourse framing everything from architectural forms to the appropriate leisure pursuits for gentlemen.⁴⁰ The very epistemology and language with which the Middle Ages were conceptualized and grappled presented devotees with an uphill struggle: as David Matthews notes, “to describe a ‘Middle’ period is in the same moment to say that one is no longer in that middle.” Implicit in the term is reference to a “grotesque forbear of modernity,” from which an enlightened, civilized culture has emerged.⁴¹ However, as Matthews remarks, “the Middle Ages was never simply a chronological concept, never simply a past time firmly fixed in the past. It was an ideological state of being.”⁴² It was a state of being that many elites in the late antebellum South inhabited, constructing a medieval history fit for the purpose of legitimating their civilization and social status in the face of clamorous external critique.

Walter Scott and Romantic medievalism

As part of a “Newtonian” moment in the nineteenth century, the medieval came to exert a peculiar emotional power which, notably, had “little to do with knowledge and lots to do with feeling.”⁴³ Eighteenth century thinkers, prostrated at the shrine of Enlightenment rationality and empiricism, disdained the medieval as backwards and superstitious. But numerous events – most infamously the trauma of the French Revolution and its aftermath – disillusioned countless Western elites with secularism and rationality. Fearing similar bloody turmoil in their own countries, they overcompensated, retreating into conservative, nostalgic Romanticism. This drastic shift was aptly immortalized by Edmund Burke’s famous lament that “the age of chivalry is gone … . All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.”⁴⁴ The subsequent Romantic backlash – particularly attractive to elite Southerners for its sense of a lost golden age displaced by an unfamiliar and unfriendly new world – prized the antediluvian medieval, mining it exhaustively for a useable, meaningful tradition. “In one sense,” argues John Fraser “fictions lay at the very center of the chivalric,” and, indeed, Southerners primarily owed their medieval ideals to literary sources, the majority of which were not even of medieval provenance.⁴⁵ Such literary packaging was significant in broadly disseminating medievalism across the South; it imbued the medieval with color and romance, rendering it yet more attractive to an audience increasingly disenchanted with the cultural fashions prevailing in an industrializing, globalizing world. While Froissart and Chretien de Troyes had their audience, Southerners favored Shakespeare, Malory, and Cervantes, among others. Above all, their sweetheart was Sir Walter Scott. “While the rest of America read Scott with enthusiasm,” wrote Rollin Osterweis with only a little hyperbole, “the South assimilated his works into its very being.”⁴⁶

Scott’s immense impact on late antebellum Southern culture need only be sketched here, with particular reference to Ann Rigney’s work on his reception. His readership was certainly ravenous. The precipitous decline in the prices of the Waverley novels indicates a glut of cheap reprints and reflects their eventual ubiquity in Southern life. In 1828, for instance, his novels could be obtained for seventy-five cents a volume; by 1845, all twenty-eight Waverley books could be secured for only two-and-a-half dollars!⁴⁷ Dubbing Southern Romantic medievalism the “Walter Scott disease,” Mark Twain only partly in jest concluded, “Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.”⁴⁸ More broadly, Twain famously lambasted the South for its “romantic juvenilities” and “windy humbuggeries,” for its love affair with “dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.”⁴⁹ He did not, safe to say, share the view that the nineteenth century could learn much from the medieval. Twain’s critique of Southern medievalism rings false in its assumption that Scott and others were read uncritically, that their lessons and values were absorbed prima facie. It is unfair to assume that the majority of Southern, or indeed any, readers, brought so uncritical an eye to their literary consumption. Indeed, Rigney persuasively describes how Scott’s flagship novel, Ivanhoe (1819), was in fact invoked by Southerners “in blithe and reductive neglect of the story as a whole.”⁵⁰ By giving intellectual authenticity a back seat to the exigencies of extracting meaningful ethics and cultural vocabularies from the source material, medievalism shaped cultures and prompted identity formation around a set of literary ideals. In the elite South, as the medieval became an increasingly powerful cultural resource, texts such as Scott’s were diligently trawled for such practical significance.

Wilbur Cash would later take up Twain’s mantle in denigrating the Southern penchant for the medieval, assuming it to be “a superficial and jejune thing,” which squandered imaginative potential on “puerilities, on cant and twisted logic, in rodomontade and the feckless vaporings of sentimentality.”⁵¹ Michael O’Brien was more nuanced in his assessment, diplomatically suggesting that the South’s “warm and reassuring” Cavalier theory “was vulnerable to evidence.”⁵² Despite his sterling efforts to make sense of a Southern intellectual culture in which he evidently saw much to admire, O’Brien was ultimately unsympathetic to those who had “helped to invent, administer, and advance an imperial regime of ruthless ambition, which had conquered an empire, enslaved millions, and had seldom hesitated to shed others’ blood for the sake of its own comfort.”⁵³ The reader gets the sense that the Cavalier theory was a charming, if misguided, distraction from the more serious business of overseeing this regime. Despite the recent attentions of less cynical specialists, medievalism is all too rarely taken seriously.

One reflects that such critiques are themselves ideologically overloaded, that in casting Southern medievalism as no more than a cynical prop in the slaveholders’ vindictive scheme of racial and sexual oppression, they fail to treat planters as human actors contending with psychological and temperamental idiosyncrasies. They appear instead as plotting dogmatists, who go so far as to erect a complex, multi-layered literary and esthetic culture simply to justify the perpetration of racial violence. Violence which, it might be noted, has been carried out in plenty of settings lacking such elaborate ideological underpinnings. We may disapprove the values Southerners collected from their historical rummaging, but it does not avail – and, frankly, is utterly banal – to criticize these on the basis of our external morality, laden with the advantages of ethical-historical development. Southern medievalism was never a blueprint to be followed to the letter; it nonetheless merits study because it “opened up the past as an imaginative resource” from which elite Southern men derived tangible lessons about gentility and about masculinity.⁵⁴

Medievalism and gentility in action

Practically, the medieval was arguably unsurpassed as an imaginative resource in the intimate Southern social world. In its concrete lessons for genteel manhood, it can be shown to have had genuine utility. A particularly interesting example is that of the Southern revival tournament. In their history of the tournament, Richard Barber and Juliet Barker note how “in the grey world of everyday life, the light and color of pageantry has always offered an escape from mundane reality.”⁵⁵ They also describe the tournament’s evolving social function, shifting from mock-warfare, to an “elaborate social occasion” on which the “quest for individual prowess” before a crowd took center stage.⁵⁶ This admixture of pageantry and prowess proved a heady brew in the South. Revival tournaments represented both a stage and a school of manhood, where elite men could unashamedly display the “handsome equipage, fine carriage, good horses [and] proper servants” demanded of the gentleman, besides giving vent to their Romantic longings for fraternity, for sociability and, above all, for performance.⁵⁷ The inaugural Southern revival tournament came in 1840, at the Baltimore estate of one William Gilmor, an attendee of the Eglinton Tournament a year prior.⁵⁸ Though dated, Esther and Ruth Crooks’s The Ring Tournament in the United States (1936) effectively sketches the Southern ubiquity of this form and its subtle geographic variations, which reflect the unique demands of manly display in different settings. They recognize both the appeal of the pageantry – “this sport has a strong interest for a people that loves horses and to breed fine stock, and that takes pride in horsemanship” – and of the fundamental social utility – “the atmosphere of amicable rivalry and social intercourse coincides with their idea that life does not merely consist of serious struggle but that it should contain also leisure for friendship and for the renewal of physical and spiritual strength.”⁵⁹

Closely tied to the enthusiasm for tournaments, and underpinning daily interaction, were the Southern cults of women and of manners, both of which had clear medieval antecedents. Scott had a hand here, too, explaining in The Talisman (1825) that the true knight considered his “sole object in life to fulfil [his lady’s] commands, and, by the splendor of his own achievement, to exalt her fame.”⁶⁰ Cash described how a cult of “downright gyneolatry” developed around “the South’s Palladium”: the Southern belle.⁶¹ While he overreached in his assertion that the “ranks of the Confederacy went rolling into battle in the misty conviction that it was wholly for her that they fought,” he spoke to what many elite Southern men felt was an essential truth of their manhood: their reverence of the fairer sex.⁶² Taking their cue from such models of manly excellence as Thomas Malory’s Sir Launcelot – eulogized by Sir Ector as “head of all christen knights! … Thou were the meekest man and the gentlest that ever eate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortall foe that ever put speare in the rest” – they saw no contradiction in refined, genteel sociability in the company of ladies complementing accomplished, performative prowess among male peers.⁶³ Medievalism offered both of these frameworks through the provision of exemplars and exhortation of Southern men, insisting that, with hard work, they too could win such plaudits as Launcelot. More tangibly, the antebellum genteel culture compassed explicit reference to social manners and behavior. Arthur Schlesinger, for instance, in an incomplete tally of etiquette manuals in the United States, found “aside from frequent revisions and new editions, twenty-eight different manuals appeared in the 1830s, thirty-six in the 1840s and thirty-eight more in the 1850s – an average of over three new ones annually.”⁶⁴ These provide clear evidence of a practical interest in genteel manners and mores, for these were hardly texts one read disinterestedly. Thus, medievalism indelibly shaped the Southern discourse of gentility, imbuing daily practices and special occasions alike with Romantic luster, as well as conveying, in the material exhortations of etiquette guides, important lessons for elite manhood.

Gentility was an indispensable cultural discourse in the South, governing relations between classes, between genders, and to some extent internally regulating behavioral standards. Stowe notes that “legitimacy and dominance made up the knot that the planters had to keep tight if they were to survive, and … if their survival was to have the strength of tradition.”⁶⁵ By bolstering such treasured Southern schema as hierarchy and the legitimacy of social elites, the nexus of gentility and medievalism played a vital role in the psychic and social lives of planters. Bushman has recognized that “gentility heightened self-consciousness, not in any deep philosophical sense, but in the common meaning of becoming aware of how one looked in the eyes of others.”⁶⁶ Southerners, molding large parts of their identity around constructs of gentility and masculinity, grappled with contingency. They found every word, every deed, subject to scrutiny and judgement. This criticism was not only “directed outward to others, but people had to watch themselves through the eyes of others. They had to perform for themselves and suffer from their own self-criticism. Performance was unrelenting.”⁶⁷ To some extent, medieval ideation vented these pressures, but not much. Indeed, they were a necessary precursor to a primary social function of gentility: the gentleman distinguished himself from the pretender by his equanimity in the face of such anxieties. There is no space here to unpack them in depth, but these tensions were palpable in Daniel R. Hundley’s Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860), which pitted the “genuine Southern Gentleman” against the “ridiculous and contemptible,” vulgar and ill-bred “Cotton Snob.”⁶⁸ These were ideal types, and one might suggest there was less, besides geography, separating the two than Hundley imagined, but they indicate that elite Southern men, drawing on the unstable commodity of gentility, did sketch a hierarchy of genteel forms.

It can be useful to frame gentility’s practical function as akin to George Fredrickson’s model of herrenvolk democracy, which extended a “racially circumscribed affirmation of democracy and equality” to all whites, thus sustaining a “proslavery or anti-abolitionist solidarity” even among the majority without a material stake in the Peculiar Institution.⁶⁹ While, for Fredrickson, skin color provided a clear line of division, the line of demarcation between gentility or genteel-adjacency (i.e., a preoccupation with, or aspiration toward, gentility) and rudeness was less distinct. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that once the blurry threshold to genteel-adjacency had been crossed – which in practical terms meant being accepted as nominal equal by a given community of peers above this threshold – gentility was a discourse that bound together all white men of the middle, professional, and upper classes, while simultaneously denoting a clear hierarchy between these groups, some of whom aspired to gentility, while others obtained and relished it. In O’Brien’s words, gentility was “a republican society’s way of legitimating distinctions of status.”⁷⁰ Southerners, having borne witness in Froissart and Castiglione, Malory and Scott, to the transfiguration of the manly quintessence from the cavalier to the courtier, achieved such distinctions by the pursuit of a genteel manly ideal that did not demand constant, assertive, public demonstrations of physical strength, excessive consumption, and aggressive sexual virility. In thus regulating multiple dimensions of planter interaction, gentility was essential in the creation of polite Southern society. Planter elites, as individuals and a notional class, built confidence in their validity as an elite, and supposedly underpinned their hegemony with evidence that they behaved as gentle hegemons ought to.

The Virginia Springs

While gentility discouraged violence, exalting in its place social smoothness and ease, it by no means inhibited manly performativity. On the contrary, as Bushman recognized, “genteel society created beautiful stage sets on which people performed” – and were critically scrutinized – “in public view.”⁷¹ At the nexus of gentility, medievalism and masculinity stood the leisure resorts of the Virginia Springs. Nowhere did elite men experience more urgently the demands of gentility and masculinity, and nowhere was the pull of the medieval stronger. The Springs represent the apotheosis of this article’s concerns. Charlene Boyer Lewis’s Ladies and Gentlemen on Display (2001) characterizes the Springs as a liminal space, “the one stable, unchanging place in the midst of a constantly changing and increasingly unstable world.”⁷² Their appeal to Southern elites desperately seeking stability and legitimation in the late antebellum period is easily imagined. In the “eminently aristocratic” environment, gender roles were exaggerated, and this prominence “defined and reaffirmed what it meant to be an elite Southern lady or gentleman”; thus, Springs society “simultaneously acted as both a ‘stage’ and a ‘school’” for visitors.⁷³ For instance, while those elites whose behavior reflected class ideals were admired as paragons, one swiftly won opprobrium for misbehavior. Lewis relates an account of an “invalid” toward whom guests were sympathetic. “But, when the man replied to a slave’s offer of assistance by using an ‘epithet’ and ‘saying that when he wanted him he would send for him,’ he lost this sympathy.”⁷⁴ The man clearly transgressed expectations of behavior in polite company and exposed himself as an unsound gentleman. His standing diminished in the eyes of his peers, and there were immediate social – and doubtless psychic – consequences to be suffered. Despite the Springs’ “aggressively leisured” atmosphere, behavioral expectations were higher than ever; the looming potential for censure and exclusion from polite company generated much disquiet.⁷⁵ As Lewis’s invalid demonstrates, genteel, manly status was deeply contingent, ever vulnerable to challenge and prone to withdrawal at the slightest misstep. Planter society during the Springs social season was at once the most, and arguably the least, relaxed setting in which planters found themselves. It was somewhere their genteel, masculine standing might be reaffirmed and indeed elevated, conferring pride and confidence, or devastated at a stroke, leaving egos and profoundly important structures of identity decimated.

The Springs excelled above all the South in their historical proclivity. Private cottages favored Greek Revival style, English landscape gardening was widely practiced, and “fancy” balls were held, for which attendees masqueraded as a panoply of characters inspired by the broad sweep of Southern historical enthusiasms. Mary J. Windle described a ball at Red Sweet Springs in 1856 as “enchantment. Noble lords, Indian princesses, Italian peasants, Turkish sultans, Di Vernons, and stately dames of the olden times, passed before us in rapid succession.”⁷⁶ While the always obstreperous Edmund Ruffin – a pragmatic, as opposed to Romantic historical consumer – deemed such events absurd on the grounds that many dancing partners represented characters “who never possibly could have come together,” it seems that most guests appreciated the spectacle.⁷⁷ The crowning event of any Springs season was, naturally, a tournament. Spread across several days, Springs tournaments featured foxhunts, feasts, masquerades, jousts, and all the concomitant pomp and lavish pageantry. Tournaments satisfied the dual demands of gentility, combining “refinement and beauty with competition and display,” and thus “represented the ultimate manifestation not only of the Southern elite’s attachment to medievalism but also of the characteristics of Virginia Springs society.”⁷⁸ While women were integral as discerning onlookers, these events were focused on men – participants and spectators, winners and losers alike. They were about display, competition, social status and manly prowess, and were imbued with tremendous significance.

The “knights” “presented an imposing and brilliant spectacle” with their “peculiar and picturesque costumes” and “tall lances glittering in the sunbeams.” They pursued “a manly and active sport” before an enthusiastic audience constituted of “men & women & children, horsemen without number, and gangs of country folk,” who had traveled “from all quarters to revel in the display.”⁷⁹ Tournaments, especially in the Springs setting, reminded men of their masculine paragons and duties, while also reaffirming their embodied sense of themselves as active, chivalrous gentlemen through their conspicuous – but never affected – performance. While these events, as Lewis concluded, provided amusement and recreation, they more importantly “allowed the gentry to perform not only for each other … but also for the other elements in Southern society.” These witnesses “affirmed the participants’ elite status,” and also “reaffirmed the roles that Southern society assigned to each gender through the exaggerated performances of cavaliers and maidens.” Ultimately, “the Southern elite sought to link their lives to a chivalric medieval past, establishing themselves as courtly lords and ladies worthy of controlling a society.”⁸⁰ The aristocratic, mannered, historically-minded Springs environment maximally exaggerated all cultural currents therein; thus, despite their general lack of scholarly attention, their role in defining, reaffirming, stressing, and strengthening elite Southern ideas about manners, history, and gender cannot be understated. It was at the Springs, more than anywhere, that the deeply significant intersection of Southern gentility, medievalism and masculinity became prominent, inviting much future study.

Conclusion

What is often missed in assessments of planter medievalism and the closely associated but much-overlooked discourse of gentility is that it provided elite men with both aspirational ideals of manhood and tangible codes of behavior to observe in their pursuit. From their consumption and repurposing of history, planters absorbed valuable lessons about gendered behavior, while the inherent posturing fit neatly into their schema of performative masculinity. Practically, gentility “bestowed concrete social power on its practitioners,” provided a functional code that “inspired very large numbers of men … to think of something other than themselves,” and above all, afforded a “definition [of self, and of community] in the confusing fluidity of democratic society.”⁸¹ Though it could degenerate into snobbery and blind pretension, gentility wrought more fair than foul, both in its applied, tangible lessons, and in the vital psychic integration it bought men who were well-placed, in moments of instability, to do untold harm to their dependents. Similarly, the Romantic cluster of ideals, literature, and re-enactment associated with medievalism furnished the essential foundation for many of the themes of genteel masculinity extolled by Southerners. It also played a vital hand in gendered identity construction; by providing elite Southerners with models of manhood and manly behavior, with exquisite stage sets on which to perform, and with a supposedly historicized validation of their way of life, medievalism – particularly at the Virginia Springs – underpinned deeply significant social and psychic processes of identity construction and affirmation. Recent commentators have likened these discourses to those associated with the mythopoetic “Men’s Movement” of the 1990s, centered around such figures as Robert Bly, whose Iron John (1990) amassed quite the cult following in the United States. Michael Kimmel has described how such masculinists as Bly “spoke eloquently to men’s spiritual hunger, a deep longing for lives of meaning and resonance … to [the need to] break down the isolation and emotional repression that invariably attended” unfulfilled manhood.⁸² Kimmel’s words might equally describe the antebellum Southern penchant for the medieval in the face of the increasingly industrialized, modernized and stridently critical North. Where Bly deployed mythic, Jungian archetypes, planters turned, with no less emotional impact, to the concrete literary models in Scott, Malory, and Froissart.

Finally, I return to Grayson’s paradigmatic Southern gentleman. Though he likened the American “gentry” to “figures on the wrong side of tapestry hangings,” he knew that, ultimately, “the distinguishing ingredients in the character here and with [English gentlemen] are somewhat similar.”⁸³ The gentleman, he claimed, did not rest his social hegemony on “law, custom, or privilege,” for his “social claims supersede all gradations of rank, office, or title.”⁸⁴ In the elite South, such social claims were firmly rooted in the elaborate interaction of the three discourses of gentility, medievalism, and masculinity. Fundamental contemporary conceptions of the social and psychic role of masculinity in the elite South cannot be adequately understood without reference to the Southern sense of history, to their nostalgic Romanticism, and to their admiration of the genteel, counterposed against their odium of the vulgar and affected. Grayson knew that “asserting male identity involved the use of sectional, class, ethnic, and racial difference to legitimate one masculine ideal at the expense of another,” that the marks of the gentleman – be they distinctions of character, of manners, of horsemanship, or of sufficiently aged Madeira – were not spontaneously generated in the American setting.⁸⁵ They emerged, rather, as the product of the intersecting discourses explored in this article. The constellation of gentility, medievalism and masculinity will not deliver a skeleton key to elite Southern society, culture, and psychology; however, given the present lack of serious scholarly scrutiny, there is much it can yet teach us about elite Southern men and masculinity.

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Notes on contributors

Callum Arthurs

Callum Arthurs is a second-year PhD student at the University of Manchester, where his research focuses on the place of medievalism and the “chivalric” in elite constructions of masculinity in the late antebellum South.

Notes

1 Grayson, “The Character of the Gentleman,” 72.

2 Ibid., 55–6.

3 Ibid., 57, 59–60.

4 Ibid., 56–7.

5 Lieber, The Character of the Gentleman, 6–7.

6 Ibid., 7.

7 Grayson, “The Character of the Gentleman,” 66.

8 Ibid.

9 Ralph Ellison, Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 2.

10 Rindfleisch, “‘What It Means to Be a Man,’” 862.

11 Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South, xvii.

12 Hall, The Aristocratic Journey, 56.

13 Bushman, The Refinement of America, 62.

14 Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 26, 34.

15 Ibid., 87.

16 Ibid., 114.

17 Ibid., xiii.

18 Fox-Genovese and Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, 1.

19 Ibid., 306, 7.

20 Ibid., 328.

21 O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 364.

22 McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 92–3.

23 Ibid., 104–5.

24 Ibid., 228.

25 Scarborough, Masters of the Big House, 6, 1.

26 Brown and Webb, Race in the American South, 106–7; Oakes, The Ruling Race, 61.

27 Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, xii.

28 Ibid., 88–9.

29 Bushman, The Refinement of America, 81.

30 Cady, The Gentleman in America, 19.

31 Castiglione, The Courtier, 62, 86.

32 Genovese, “The Chivalric Tradition in the Old South,” 189.

33 Grayson, “The Character of the Gentleman,” 67.

34 Ibid., 80.

35 Whitehead and Barrett, “The Sociology of Masculinity,” in The Masculinities Reader, ed. Whitehead and Barrett, 15–16.

36 Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity,” in The Masculinities Reader, ed. Whitehead and Barrett, 277.

37 Leverenz, “The Last Real Man in America,” 769.

38 Ferguson, The Man Question, 159.

39 M. de Voltaire, Essai sue les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756), quoted in Burrows, “Unmaking ‘the Middle Ages,’” 129.

40 Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 38–9.

41 Matthews, Medievalism, 20–1.

42 Ibid., 46.

43 Muccigrosso, “Ralph Adams Cram,” 21; Trilling, “Medievalism and Its Discontents,” 219.

44 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 65–6.

45 Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry, 39.

46 Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, 41.

47 Landrum, “Sir Walter Scott and His Literary Rivals,” 258.

48 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 469.

49 Ibid., 416, 467.

50 Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott, 116.

51 Cash, The Mind of the South, 97, 100.

52 O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 319.

53 Ibid., 1199.

54 Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott, 4.

55 Barber and Barker, Tournaments, 1.

56 Ibid., 8, 110.

57 Grayson, “The Character of the Gentleman,” 72.

58 Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott, 110.

59 Crooks and Crooks, The Ring Tournament in the United States, 160.

60 Scott, The Talisman, quoted in Fraser, Patterns of Chivalry, 18.

61 Cash, The Mind of the South, 89.

62 Ibid.

63 Malory, La Mort d’Arthure, 352.

64 Schlesinger, Learning to Behave, 18.

65 Stowe, Intimacy and Power, xv.

66 Bushman, The Refinement of America, xiv.

67 Ibid.

68 Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States.

69 Fredrickson, “Aristocracy and Democracy,” 138.

70 O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 375.

71 Bushman, The Refinement of America, xiv.

72 Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 10.

73 Latrobe, “Trip to the Virginia Springs,” quoted in Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 105; Ibid., 103.

74 Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 109.

75 Ibid., 11.

76 Windle, Life at the White Sulphur Springs, quoted in Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 202.

77 Ruffin, Diary of Edmund Ruffin, quoted in Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 202.

78 Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 201.

79 Baltimore Herald, 2 August 1848; Samuel Hoffman to Louisa Hoffman, 20 and 28 August 1840, Samuel Hoffman Papers, both quoted in Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 203–4.

80 Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 206.

81 Bushman, The Refinement of America, xix; Girouard, The Return to Camelot, 270.

82 Kimmel, Manhood in America, 229.

83 Grayson, “The Character of the Gentleman,” 73–4.

84 Ibid., 55.

85 Rindfleisch, “Contested Masculinity,” 862.