Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies: Southern Violence and White Supremacy in the Civil War Era

Hear from Dr. James “Trae” Wellborn as he details the clash between Preston Smith Brooks and Charles Sumner in the Senate in 1856 and the fermenting sectional differences that led to that moment. Welborn will analyze the ideology of righteous honor and its increasing dominance across the American South in the buildup to the Civil War, as white Southerners sought to cloak a war fought in defense of slavery in the language of honor and Christian piety.

Wellborn’s book, Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies, was released by UVA Press in 2023.

Speaker: Dr. James Hill Wellborn III, Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Georgia College & State University

About the Book 

How did white Southerners in the nineteenth century reconcile a Christian faith that instructed them to turn the other cheek with a pervasive code of honor that instructed them to do just the opposite—to demand satisfaction for perceived insults? In Edgefield, South Carolina, in the 1830s, white Southerners combined these seemingly antithetical ideals to forge a new compound: a wrathful moral ethic of righteous honor. Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies investigates the formation and proliferation of this white supremacist ideology that merged masculine bellicosity with religious devotion.

In 1856, when Edgefield native Preston Smith Brooks viciously beat the abolitionist Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, the ideology of righteous honor reached its apogee and took national center stage. Welborn analyzes the birth of this peculiar moral ethic in Edgefield and traces its increasing dominance across the American South in the buildup to the Civil War, as white Southerners sought to cloak a war fought in defense of slavery in the language of honor and Christian piety.

Learn more about Wellborn’s process of bringing research to page.

About the Speaker

James Hill Welborn III (Trae) completed his Ph.D. at the University of Georgia in May 2014. He studies the moral ethics of honor and religious piety in the 19th-Century South, with a particular focus on the evolving cultural meanings of and reactions to masculine vice and violence. His dissertation, entitled “Drinkin’, Fightin’, Prayin’: The Southern White Male in the Civil War Era,” used Edgefield, South Carolina as a window into the development of righteous honor, the ethical ideal he argues was at the heart of southern manhood and identity during the era. He has co-authored an article with Stephen Berry entitled “The Cane of his Existence: Depression, Damage, and the Brooks-Sumner Affair” published in Southern Cultures. Another article entitled “Dispensing the Progressive State: Benjamin Tillman’s South Carolina State Dispensary” was published in The Social History of Alcohol & Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He has reviewed works for The Journal of American Ethnic History, The Journal of Southern Religion, Southern Historian, The Journal of the Civil War Era, The North Carolina Historical Quarterly, Civil War History, and The Civil War Monitor. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia. He manages and publishes a website dedicated to Georgia’s BBQ trails that invites followers to savor the diverse and dynamic flavor of Georgia’s culture and history through stories the unique lens of BBQ with colleague Craig S. Pascoe.