This reinterpretation of Southern life and custom explores the meaning and expression of the ancient code of honor as whites--both slaveholders and non-slaveholders--applied to their lives. Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that Southern ethical habits and traditions are the basis of regional distintiveness and helped to justify the South's most cherished peculiarity: the institution of slavery. Using both literature and anthropology, Wyatt-Brown shows how honor affected family loyalty and community defensiveness. The work begins with a study of Hawthorne's story, "My kinsman, Major Molineux." and ends with an acccount of an authentic lynching. In between, Wyatt-Brown deals with such topics as childbearing, marital patterns, gentility, legal traditions, duelling, hospitality, slave discipline, lynch-law, and insurrectionary panic.--From publisher description.