Southern chivalry

Southern chivalry, or the Cavalier myth, was a popular concept describing the aristocratic honor culture of the Southern United States during the Antebellum, Civil War, and early Postbellum eras. The archetype of a Southern gentleman became popular as a chivalric ideal of the slaveowning planter class, emphasizing both familial and personal honor in addition to the ability to defend either by force if necessary. Southern chivalry is today seen as an attempt to justify the racist and patriarchal stratification of Southern society, with the goal of maintaining or legitimizing the human rights abuses of American slavery.

Prior to the Civil War this concept of a gentleman's honor was frequently used as a basis for duels and other forms of extrajudicial violence, most notably the caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks, and contributed to the militarization of the South by encouraging young men to be taught at military schools.

By the later Antebellum era, the term had taken on an ironic meaning for Northerners and abolitionists, among whom it was used as a pejorative to describe what was perceived as the barbarism of Southern slave owners and their hostility and duplicity in dealing with the North, as was particularly seen in various political caricatures before and during the war.

In the modern era the romanticization of Southern chivalry became a core aspect of the Lost Cause myth, which portrays the Confederate States of America as a morally and culturally superior civilization defending its honor against a materialistic and immoral North.

During the Antebellum period the culture of the Southern aristocracy was, according to some historians, loosely codified as a chivalric Southern code, emphasizing the quasi-feudal ability of a Southern gentleman, or Cavalier, to control his dependents, including both white family members and black chattel slaves. A sense of rivalry against the rest of the Union is described as pervading much of Southern culture during the Antebellum years, when "Exuberant southerners meant to draw [Northerners' attentions] to such presumed aristocratic virtues as gallantry, classical education, polished manners, a high sense of personal and family honor, and contempt for money-grubbing."

Young men of the upper class were expected to be educated in courage, conduct, and the humanities from an early age, including both Victorian literature and the Greek classics. Such men would then be expected to be sent to a military school, with many military leaders on either side of the Civil War having received their training from such institutions across the South. "Knight" and "knightly" entered common parlance as impactful terms of admiration for virility and masculinity.

Southern chivalry also placed great importance on upholding the strict gender roles seen among white Southerners of the time, encouraging a division between strong, educated gentlemen and demure, submissive belles. The Southern woman was seen as inferior to her husband but nonetheless an embodiment of grace and purity whose defense from disgrace was considered a core duty of the dominant gentleman, such that Julian S. Carr is reported as openly boasting how he had "horsewhipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds because [...] she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady."

The use of the Cavalier myth ultimately cultivated a fictionalized image of what Encyclopedia Virginia described as a "benevolent male authority" across the region's history, enforcing a patriarchal narrative of the upper classes at the expense of black slaves, free women, and other marginalized workers responsible for the economic successes of the South. Rather than expressing actual moral values of the South, the concept of a Southern gentleman is instead argued to have served to justify widespread slavery by recasting the relationship between master and slave as a noble, paternal one rather than the coercive and exploitative reality. Southern encyclopedist Charles Reagan Wilson argues that "[e]lites used the mythology of Cavaliers and moonlight-and-magnolias plantations to construct a romantic region that obscured differences across the South's regions and among its social groupings."