"Consider the readings you have done in Brown and Friend, and answer the following question in a three (full) pages essay. How did notions of masculinity change from the colonial period to the antebellum period in the South?"

Masculinity (what it means to “be a man”), far from being a universally

understood “fact of life”, is actually a very fluid cultural construction differing

remarkably through time and across cultures. The formulation of masculinity in the early

history of the United States and its predecessor colonies is no exception to this rule.

While the evolution of American masculinity can be difficult to delineate due to the

persistence of certain features of colonial masculine identity through to the antebellum

period, reconfigurations in the ideological underpinnings of masculinity can nevertheless

be identified.

Many aspects of masculinity remained constant during the nearly 250 years of

Southern history before the Civil War: an emphasis on honor and respectability, the right

to carry arms, the equation of servitude with emasculation and, most importantly, the

exclusion of slaves and free blacks. Yet a few changes can be discerned. The most salient

difference between masculinity as formulated in the colonial period and that formulated

in the antebellum period is that the class-based, dual manifestation of colonial

masculinity was conflated in later years into one masculinity shared by both classes. In

the initial years of the colonial period, upper class elite whites held one set of values and

assumptions about what it meant to be a man while lower-class whites, mostly indentured

servants and former servants, held a different set of values. The differences between the

two groups rested on their respective historical legacies in the old country as well as their

everyday experiences as lived out in the English colonial frontier. Elites compared

themselves to the landed English gentry and nobility of their mother country and sought

to legitimate their status in the New World by emphasizing their lineage, which often

extended back to the earliest years of colonization. As elites, they were also expected,

consistent with English custom, to hold office and govern the colony. Honor and

respectability were important facets in the very public nature of elite masculinity. Lower-

class whites, on the other hand, had a more practical basis for their conception of

manhood as providers and defenders of their family and property. The ability and right to

kill any person who threatened their rights as property-owner or head of household were

paramount compared to any other determination of their masculinity. The right to bear

arms was, therefore, necessary for lower-class whites to maintain their reputation as men.

However, elites perceived the existence of an armed, and hence powerful, populace as a

threat to their own conception of masculinity as the power-wielding governors of the

colony.

Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 brought this class conflict to a head and in its

aftermath a compromise was reached between the two classes based on mutual

recognition of the validity each others’ masculinities (including lower-class whites’ right

to bear arms) and the exclusion of slaves and free blacks from any right to express

masculinity as lower-class whites conceived it. Laws were passed that systematically

denied slaves and free blacks access to those privileges that defined white masculinity,

namely property ownership, the right to bear arms and access to white women.

Though this compromise allowed for the codification of the racial basis of Southern

masculinity, the division of white masculinity by class remained. It was not until the

American Revolution that class distinctions became less important, allowing for the

formation of a shared conception of masculinity. The Revolution and its ideological

slogan of “all men are created equal” had the effect of “egalitarianizing” masculinity.

Additionally, the racial basis of masculinity was strengthened through comparison of the

threat of English “enslavement” of Americans to the system of slavery practiced by

Americans themselves. Surely, the English denial of American freedom was as

emasculating as was a slave-owner’s denial of his slave’s freedom and, therefore, his

masculinity.

In the post-Revolutionary South, masculinity came to be defined on the same

terms for all whites. Individual freedom, property-ownership and the ability and right of a

man to defend himself against slights to his own or his family’s honor became hallmarks

of Southern masculinity in the antebellum period. Aside from the decreased importance

of class to definitions of masculinity, the importance of violence to conceptions of

Southern masculinity changed from the colonial period to the antebellum period as well.

Lower-class men on the frontiers of colonial Virginia had a very real, practical need to

carry guns and exercise violence over others: in the nearly lawless colonial frontier, raids

by Indians or fellow colonials against isolated homesteads were common. Violence as a

signifier of masculinity was determined by the everyday, lived experience of men. The

Revolutionary War only emphasized to men the necessity of the right to bear arms and

this facet of masculinity was codified in the new nation’s Bill of Rights. In the

antebellum period, however, the importance of violence to masculinity (at least among

lower-class whites) ceased to be based on the practical role of man as protector. Laver’s

analysis of the militia experience in Kentucky, for example, shows that the symbolic re-

enactment of violence (as performed in the militia muster) validated men’s notions of

their masculinity through association with the values of their Revolutionary fathers and

grandfathers who had fought for their freedom from England. In effect, the tools of

violence became more important as a marker of masculinity than violence itself.

Paradoxically, among elites, the right to inflict violence did become an important marker

of their masculinity as a practical necessity arising from their experiences as slaveholding

planters. In the colonial period, the “patriarchal” nature of elite authority meant a more

violent exercise of male authority over women and non-masculine “others” that included

slaves and property-less whites. With the stabilization of elite power in the aftermath of

Bacon’s Rebellion, a more “paternalistic” style of male authority evolved that de-

emphasized violence within the household (partly because of the desire for self-mastery

in the maintenance of a masculine identity) at the expense of greater violence in the

plantation fields. Even though the spread of evangelical religion in the South after the

Revolutionary War sensitized many slave-owners to the situation of their slaves as

brethren in Christ, the right of violent exercise of white male power over black slaves

remained an important element of Southern masculinity throughout the antebellum

period.