Dichotomy in America

First off, let me simply say that THIS WEBSITE is one of the best I've encountered... ever.  I'm making a permanent link to it on this page.  There is more cool stuff on this one web site than there is on any ten others I've visited.

Having said that, if you visit the site, take the time to read the article series entitled "Manly Honor".  It is six parts long, probably 40,000 words total, and well worth the hour or so it will take you to read it.  It is this series that has gotten my brain working this morning, and I wanted to share my thoughts with you.

The article details both what honor was over the course of history and is today... and (more interestingly) how it has changed over those intervening centuries.  One of the more fascinating features of this essay is the manner in which the author ties the course of American history to America's changing attitude towards personal honor.

I know that countless volumes have been written about the "dichotomy" of the North and South in America, both pre-Civil War and post-Civil War... agrarian versus industrial, rich versus poor, modern versus traditional, liberal versus conservative... but in all I've read over the course of my life, I've never read, heard or seen anyone tie that dichotomy so completely to America's divided ideas on personal honor.

I'm going to give as brief an example as I can... just to make my point.

In 1860, there was a cultural divide in the North that (generally speaking) ran something like this:

Land owners and the "wealthy" segment of society constituted more than 78% of the officers in the Union Army, not based on education or ability so much as their status in society allowed them to avoid the draft by either buying commissions as officers or paying someone to serve for them.  This sort of "command structure" was very similar to that which existed in the UK... rich, landed gentry buying command positions in the Army, rather than ability dictating who was in command.  I'm not discounting experience (and neither is the author of the essays), since examples such as Grant, Sherman and Lee all show us that expereinced officers (general or otherwise) could and did hold vital positions in both armies, but the bulk of Union officers were neither experienced nor found "qualified" for the positions they held early in the war.

From extant sources, a clear picture emerges about exactly what the bulk of Northern "gentry" felt was defined as "personal honor":  calm, cool ability to control both personal and external impulses (swearing, drinking, living to excess, etc).  The modern idea of "private" honor is firmly taking root in the North, primarily in the wealthy side of society.

The poor people of the North, mainly immigrants and urban poor, make up the bulk of the conscripted Army, especially after 1862.  Being poor, and with so many hailing from regions like Ireland, the Low Countries, Wales, and Cornwall (where a more "public" sense of honor existed), status and respect stemmed from physical prowess and ability, and was tested in feats of strength and skill and was celebrated with such abandon by drinking, swearing, fighting and singing.

An interesting fact comes from this "divided" sense of personal honor:  by the end of the first full year of the war, more "soldiers" (meaning conscripts) were executed for assaulting officers then were tried for desertion.  The Union Army, simply put, was far too likely to fight amongst itself than was good for it, and the author of the series says this is reflected in the manner in which the War developed early on... very, very few Union victories against smaller Confederate forces.

In the South, the tendency today is to see the officer corps of the CSA as mainly slave-owning landholders.  Fact is, less than 10% of the South's officers actually owned ANY slaves, and less than 20% of the entire white population did, either... but more than 78% of ALL white men serving in the CSA owned productive land... officers and enlisted alike.  As land owners and (presumably) mostly farmers who worked their own land, these officers and enlisted men shared a very similar sense of personal honor.  That honor took the form of one far closer to the older, more traditional "chivalric" sort of code than anything seen in the officer ranks of the North.  There was a sense of respect that moved both ways in the South... up and down the ranks... that simply did not happen in the North, where the officers too often saw their soldiers as wild, undisciplined animals.  Washington himself encountered the same dichotomy in 1776 when he took command of the Continental Army and saw the differences between the Southern troops of Virginia and Maryland fight alongside troops from Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

I hope I'm making my point here as clear as I can... and I hope I encourage you all to read the essays.

More later...