Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation

I only picked this book up after reading the author's book on the founding of the Jamestown/Bermuda colonies. Southern sons/southern honor, subjects you never thought anyone would write a book about, but it helps enlighten the reader about the way people thought in the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries. This is a must read for serious students of civil war lit.

Fantastic book. Well written, interesting and insightful. Glover sheds light on how elite antebellum southern society, as many said at that time, "made men." She charts the development of how these spoiled rich children learned "self mastery", "autonomy", and "independence", yet conversely learned "duty", and "self sacrifice" and how these values shaped that generation who led the South to war in 1861. She argues that from childhood, to adolescence, and finally into adulthood, these elites advanced through a series of tests within a culture of honor and shame, hoping to finally reach the pinnacle of success as masters of themselves, their relations and their slaves. The only drawback is her limited source material. She only seems to use about a dozen or so families and their letters to draw her conclusions, but nevertheless, she balances her study with ample contextual secondary source material. It's a short book, but worth your time. Along with this text, try Bertram Wyatt-Brown's "Southern Honor: Behavior and Ethics in the Old South" to get the full picture.