Southern Violence Revisited

Edward Ayers has made a distinguished contribution to the venerable debate over the relationship between southerners and the laws. Perhaps even more important, however, his consideration of crime and punishment in the nineteenth-century South illuminates central questions concerning the character of the region in an era of fundamental change. Ayers's findings about rates and types of crime and patterns of conviction and punishment portray a distinctive section transformed by the experience of war and Reconstruction. Vengeance and Justice brings new evidence and a refreshing perspective to current disagreements about the "capitalist" or "precapitalist" nature of the Old South, about the ties between honor and slavery, about the effects of war and emancipation. Ayers begins his study with a consideration of southern violence that allows him to characterize antebellum southern society more generally. Bertram Wyatt-Brown's recent work on honor occupies an influential place here, but Ayers has revised these earlier arguments to imbed honor in a social-structural context that he contends Wyatt-Brown neglected. "Slavery," Ayers asserts, "generated honor" (p. 26), and honor, in turn, produced violence and a sense of the limited applicability of law. An "overweening concern with the opinions of others" (p. 19), honor is in Ayers's view the product of economically undiversified, localized, explicitly hierarchical societies "where one standard of worth can reign" (p. 26). Slavery insulated the Old South from the market development and cultural diversity associated with capitalism and its system of values. In the North and other more developed areas, honor came to be supplanted by dignity, an internal rather than external gauge of self-worth -"the conviction that each individual at birth possessed an intrinsic value . .. theoretically equal to that of every other person" (p. 19). The importance of self-control, discipline, and autonomy within the wider notion of dignity indicates its close connection to "the transformations