Cartoons and the Honor Wars

By Jane Smiley, Huffington Post. Posted February 7, 2006.

Ten years ago, when I was researching for my pre-Civil War novel, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, I ran across a book by former NYT reporter Fox Butterfield, called All God's Children, about the family and culture of a boy who committed murder -- the youngest person ever to be convicted of murder in the state of New York at the time the book was written.

What was interesting to me about Butterfield's book, in the context of my novel (which was set in Kansas Territory in the 1850s, a scene of considerable sectarian violence that was damped down for a while before erupting again in 1861 in the east) was his analysis of the different cultures of Massachusetts and South Carolina in the antebellum U.S.. Butterfield's view was that honor in South Carolina was defined more or less by status -- insults had to be answered immediately, usually with violence, in order to save face.

This led to a lot of dueling, and he cites statistics on the persistence of dueling and other forms of violence and fighting in South Carolina well into the twentieth century. By contrast, honor in the entirely different culture of abolitionist Massachusetts was more like what we think of today as self-respect -- the primary marker of self-respect was not to respond, but to remain stoic and dignified in the teeth of insults.

For most of ante-bellum American history, it happened that hot-blooded slaveholding South Carolinians and passionate abolitionist citizens of Massachusetts, who agreed on nothing culturally or politically, didn't have much contact with one another. Geographically, they were separated by the more mixed and moderate states of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, etc. They constituted extremist wings of an American political culture that was forming itself through many types of dialogue, confrontation, and discourse.

In the Kansas Territory in 1855 and 1856, though, they ran head on into each other, unmediated by more moderate types, as a result of the Kansas Nebraska Act. In 1854, Congress had decided to let Kansas and Nebraska Territories decide for themselves whether to be slave or free, and the result was that the most extreme slave partisans and the most extreme abolitionists headed for Kansas Territory in order to settle the land and, more or less, stuff the ballot boxes.

When these two groups got to Kansas and saw one another, they hated what they saw. The Massachusetts settlers saw dirty, barefoot, ignorant, uneducated, and violent southerners, and the South Carolinians saw pompous, self-satisfied, elitist, mercenary, and cowardly snobs. To the Massachusetts settlers, the fact that the South Carolinians would fight and kill at the slightest provocation was a sign of their immature and low natures. To the South Carolinians, the fact that the Massachusetts settlers wouldn't fight was a sign not of self-respect but of cowardice and failure to actually believe in what they said they believed in.

There were lots of skirmishes, some open voter fraud, and one real terrorist attack -- John Brown's attack on five slave-owning Kansans. John Brown was an abolitionist who believed that God was telling him to free the slaves at any cost and that it was divinely ordained that the South was to pay for its sins through suffering, blood, and fire. When he was chased out of Kansas, he went to Maryland, and, many say, sparked the Civil War at Harper's Ferry.

Jane Smiley's most recent book is Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.

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