Southern chivalry
[1][2] 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.
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.
"[4][b] 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.
[6] Popular concepts of a Southern aristocracy originated with the heritage of the "Old South" as the colonial possessions of the British Empire, when the meteoric growth of the plantation industry led to the entrenchment of wealthy landowners as a dominant socially and politically conservative planter class.
[1][6] Northerners, in response, quickly co-opted Medievalist language as a point of derision against a South they saw as a rural backwater led by regressive aristocrats "[as] idle, ignorant, dissolute, and ferocious as that medieval chivalry to which they are fond of comparing themselves", a negative view which has since been supported by many mainstream historians.
[9] Some of the most enduring invocations of Southern honor in both the original and ironic senses come from the Brooks-Sumner affair, which occurred after abolitionist Charles Sumner gave a charged speech on the admission of territories as slave states, titled "the Crime Against Kansas.
[13] Forsyth provided an understanding of Postbellum readings of William Shakespeare's Othello as a paradoxically sympathetic "Southern hero", one who is, in spite of his race, so bound by a gentleman's duty to preserve the honor of the white women around him that he ends the play by murdering Desdemona for what he believes to be her infidelity.
[14] First-wave feminist and former slaveowner Rebecca Latimer Felton cited chivalric values, namely the duty of gentlemen to provide and care for a lady, when petitioning for women's suffrage in 1915,[15] and public figures extolled states like South Carolina as standing "for culture, for chivalry, and for exalted citizenship, for higher ideals than which no people ever possessed" well into the Postbellum years.
[16] The New Georgia Encyclopedia closely compares the Lost Cause to a social religion,[17] while Laura Brodie identified the early canonization of Robert E. Lee as a Messianic "Saint of the South" with the Victorian English "cult of mourning" in the wake of the death of Prince Albert.
[17] Historian Rollin G. Osterweis identified the "chivalric planter", alongide the Southern belle, the Uncle Remus, and the Confederate veteran, "once a knight of the field and saddle", as the founding stock characters of what later coalesced into the Lost Cause myth.
