JManly: Gouge and Bite: GornFrom:
Journal of Manly Arts: Apr 2001
"Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch:" The Social Significance of Fighting in
the Southern Backcountry
By Elliott J. Gorn
First published in The American Historical Review, volume 90, February to
December 1985, pages 18-43. Copyright © 1985 Elliott J. Gorn. Reprinted courtesy
Elliott J. Gorn. All rights reserved.

"I would advise you when You do fight Not to act like Tygers and Bears as these
Virginians do - Biting one anothers Lips and Noses off, and gowging one another
- that is, thrusting out one anothers Eyes, and kicking one another on the Cods,
to the Great damage of many a Poor Woman." [EN1] Thus, Charles Woodmason, an
itinerant Anglican minister born of English gentry stock, described the brutal
form of combat he found in the Virginia backcountry shortly before the American
Revolution. Although historians are more likely to study people thinking,
governing, worshiping, or working, how men fight -- who participates, who
observes, which rules are followed, what is at stake, what tactics are allowed -
reveals much about past cultures and societies.

The evolution of southern backwoods brawling from the late eighteenth century
through the antebellum era can be reconstructed from oral traditions and
travelers' accounts. As in most cultural history, broad patterns and uneven
trends rather than specific dates mark the way. The sources are often
problematic and must be used with care; some speculation is required. But the
lives of common people cannot be ignored merely because they leave few records.
"To feel for a feller's eyestrings and make him tell the news" was not just
mayhem but an act freighted with significance for both social and cultural
history. [EN2]

***

As early as 1735, boxing was "much in fashion" in parts of Chesapeake Bay, and
forty years later a visitor from the North declared that, along with dancing,
fiddling, small swords, and card playing, it was an essential skill for all
young Virginia gentlemen. [EN3] The term "boxing," however, did not necessarily
refer to the comparatively tame style of bare-knuckle fighting familiar to
eighteenth-century Englishmen. In 1746, four deaths prompted the governor of
North Carolina to ask for legislation against "the barbarous and inhuman manner
of boxing which so much prevails among the lower sort of people." The colonial
assembly responded by making it a felony "to cut out the Tongue or pull out the
eyes of the King's Liege People." Five years later the assembly added slitting,
biting, and cutting off noses to the list of offenses. Virginia passed similar
legislation in 1748 and revised these statutes in 1772 explicitly to discourage
men from "gouging, plucking, or putting out an eye, biting or kicking or
stomping upon" quiet peaceable citizens. By 1786 South Carolina had made
premeditated mayhem a capital offense, defining the crime as severing another's
bodily parts. [EN4]

Laws notwithstanding, the carnage continued. Philip Vickers Fithian, a New
Jerseyite serving as tutor for an aristocratic Virginia family, confided to his
journal on September 3, 1774:

By appointment is to be fought this Day near Mr. Lanes two fist Battles between
four young Fellows. The Cause of the battles I have not yet known; I suppose
either that they are lovers, and one has in Jest or reality some way supplanted
the other; or has in a merry hour called him a Lubber or a thick-Skull, or a
Buckskin, or a Scotsman, or perhaps one has mislaid the other's hat, or knocked
a peach out of his Hand, or offered him a dram without wiping the mouth of the
Bottle; all these, and ten thousand more quite as trifling and ridiculous are
thought and accepted as just Causes of immediate Quarrels, in which every
diabolical Stratagem for Mastery is allowed and practiced. [EN5]
The "trifling and ridiculous" reasons for these fights had an unreal quality for
the matter-of-fact Yankee. Not assaults on persons or property but slights,
insults, and thoughtless gestures set young southerners against each other. To
call a man a "buckskin," for example, was to accuse him of the poverty
associated with leather clothing, while the epithet "Scotsman" tied him to the
low-caste Scots-Irish who settled the southern highlands. Fithian could not
understand how such trivial offenses caused the bloody battles. But his
incomprehension turned to rage when he realized that spectators attended these
"odious and filthy amusements" and the fighters allayed their spontaneous
passions in order to fix convenient dates and places, which allowed time for
rumors to spread and crowds to gather. The Yankee concluded that only devils,
prostitutes, or monkeys could sire creatures so unfit for human society. [EN6]
Descriptions of these "fist battles," as Fithian called them, indicated that
they generally began like English prize fights. Two men, surrounded by
onlookers, parried blows until one was knocked or thrown down. But there the
similarity ceased. Whereas "Broughton's Rules" of the English ring specified
that a round ended when either antagonist fell, southern bruisers only began
fighting at this point. Enclosed not inside a formal ring - the "magic circle"
defining a special place with its own norms of conduct - but within whatever
space the spectators left vacant, fighters battled each other until one called
enough or was unable to continue. Combatants boasted, howled, and cursed. As
words gave way to action, they tripped and threw, gouged and butted, scratched
and choked each other. "But what is worse than all," Isaac Weld observed, "these
wretches in their combat endeavor to their utmost to tear out each other's
testicles." [EN7]

Around the beginning of the nineteenth century, men sought original labels for
their brutal style of fighting. "Rough-and-tumble" or simply "gouging" gradually
replaced "boxing" as the name for these contests. [EN8] Before two bruisers
attacked each other, spectators might demand whether they proposed to fight fair
- according to Broughton's Rules - or rough-and-tumble. Honor dictated that all
techniques be permitted. Except for a ban on weapons, most men chose to fight
"no holds barred," doing what they wished to each other without interference,
until one gave up or was incapacitated. [EN9]

The emphasis on maximum disfigurement, on severing bodily parts, made this
fighting style unique. Amid the general mayhem, however, gouging out an
opponent's eye became the sine qua non of rough-and-tumble fighting, much like
the knockout punch in modern boxing. The best gougers, of course, were adept at
other fighting skills. Some allegedly filed their teeth to bite off an enemy's
appendages more efficiently. Still, liberating an eyeball quickly became a
fighter's surest route to victory and his most prestigious accomplishment. To
this end, celebrated heroes fired their fingernails hard, honed them sharp, and
oiled them slick. "'You have come off badly this time, I doubt?'" declared an
alarmed passerby on seeing the piteous condition of a renowned fighter. "'Have
I,' says he triumphantly, shewing from his pocket at the same time an eye, which
he had extracted during the combat, and preserved for a trophy." [EN10]

As the new style of fighting evolved, its geographical distribution changed.
Leadership quickly passed from the southern seaboard to upcountry counties and
the western frontier. [EN11] Although examples could be found throughout the
South, rough-and-tumbling was best suited to the backwoods, where hunting,
herding, and semisubsistence agriculture predominated over market-oriented,
staple crop production. Thus, the settlers of western Carolina, Kentucky, and
Tennessee, as well as upland Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, became
especially known for their pugnacity. [EN12]

The social base of rough-and-tumbling also shifted with the passage of time.
Although brawling was always considered a vice of the "lower sort,"
eighteenth-century Tidewater gentlemen sometimes found themselves in brutal
fights. These combats grew out of challenges to men's honor - to their status in
patriarchal, kin-based, small-scale communities - and were woven into the very
fabric of daily life. Rys Isaac has observed that the Virginia gentry set the
tone for a fiercely competitive style of living. Although they valued hierarchy,
individual status was never permanently fixed, so men frantically sought to
assert their prowess - by grand boasts over tavern gaming tables laden with
money, by whipping and tripping each other's horses in violent quarter-races, by
wagering one-half year's earnings on the flash of a fighting cock's gaff. Great
planters and small shared an ethos that extolled courage bordering on
foolhardiness and cherished magnificent, if irrational, displays of largess.
[EN13]

Piety, hard work, and steady habits had their adherents, but in this society
aggressive self-assertion and manly pride were the real marks of status. Even
the gentry's vaunted hospitality demonstrated a family's community standing, so
conviviality itself became a vehicle for rivalry and emulation. Rich and poor
might revel together during "public times," but gentry patronage of sports and
festivities kept the focus of power clear. Above all, brutal recreations
toughened men for a violent social life in which the exploitation of labor, the
specter of poverty, and a fierce struggle for status were daily realities.
[EN14]

During the final decades of the eighteenth century, however, individuals like
Fithian's young gentlemen became less inclined to engage in rough-and-tumbling.
Many in the planter class now wanted to distinguish themselves from social
inferiors more by genteel manners, gracious living and paternal prestige than by
patriarchal prowess. They sought alternatives to brawling and found them by
imitating the English aristocracy. A few gentlemen took boxing lessons from
professors of pugilism or attended sparring exhibitions given by touring
exponents of the manly art. [EN15] More importantly, dueling gradually replaced
hand-to-hand combat. The code of honor offered a genteel, though deadly, way to
settle personal disputes while demonstrating one's elevated status. Ceremony
distinguished antiseptic duels from lower-class brawls. Cool restraint and
customary decorum proved a man's ability to shed blood while remaining
emotionally detached, to act as mercilessly as the poor whites but to do so with
chilling gentility. [EN16]

Slowly, then, rough-and-tumble fighting found specific locus in both human and
geographical landscapes. We can watch men grapple with the transition. When an
attempt at a formal duel aborted, Savannah politician Robert Watkins and United
States Senator James Jackson resorted to gouging. Jackson bit Watson's finger to
save his eye. [EN17] Similarly, when a "low fellow who pretends to gentility"
insulted a distinguished doctor, the gentleman responded with a proper
challenge. "He had scarcely uttered these words, before the other flew at him,
and in an instant turned his eye out of the socket, and while it hung upon his
cheek, the fellow was barbarous enough to endeavor to pluck it entirely out."
[EN18] By the new century, such ambiguity had lessened, as rough-and-tumble
fighting was relegated to individuals in backwoods settlements. For the next
several decades, eye-gouging matches were focal events in the culture of
lower-class males who still relished the wild ways of old.

***

"I saw more than one man who wanted an eye, and ascertained that I was now in
the region of 'gouging,'" reported young Timothy Flint, a Harvard educated,
Presbyterian minister bound for Louisiana missionary work in 1816. His spirits
buckled as his party turned down the Mississippi from the Ohio Valley.
Enterprising farmers gave way to slothful and vulgar folk whom Flint considered
barely civilized. Only vicious fighting and disgusting accounts of battles past
disturbed their inertia. Residents assured him that the "blackguards" excluded
gentlemen from gouging matches. Flint was therefore perplexed when told that a
barbarous looking man was the "best" in one settlement, until he learned that
best in this context meant not the most moral, prosperous, or pious but the
local champion who had whipped all he rest, the man most dexterous at extracting
eyes. [EN19]

Because rough-and-tumble fighting declined in settled areas, some of the most
valuable accounts were written by visitors who penetrated the backcountry.
Travel literature was quite popular during America's infancy, and many
profit-minded authors undoubtedly wrote with their audience's expectations in
mind. Images of heroic frontiersmen, of crude but unencumbered natural men,
enthralled both writers and readers. Some who toured the new republic in the
decades following the Revolution had strong prejudices against America's
democratic pretensions. English travelers in particular doubted that the upstart
nation - in which the lower class shouted its equality and the upper class was
unable or unwilling to exercise proper authority - could survive. Ironically,
backcountry fighting became a symbol for both those who inflated and those who
punctured America's expansive national ego.

Frontier braggarts enjoyed fulfilling visitors' expectations of backwoods
depravity, pumping listeners full of gruesome legends. Their narratives
projected a satisfying, if grotesque, image of the American rustic as a
fearless, barbaric, larger-than-life democrat. But they also gave Englishmen the
satisfaction of seeing their former countrymen run wild in the wilderness.
Gouging matches offered a perfect metaphor for the Hobbesian war of all against
all, of men tearing each other apart once institutional restraints evaporated,
of a heart of darkness beating in the New World. As they made their way from the
northern port towns to the southern countrywide, or down the Ohio to
southwestern waterways, observers concluded that geographical and moral descent
went hand in hand. Brutal fights dramatically confirmed their belief that evil
lurked in the deep shadows of America's sunny democratic landscape.

And yet it would be a mistake to dismiss all travelers' accounts of backwoods
fighting as fictions born of prejudice. Many sojourners who were sober and
careful observers of America left detailed reports of rough-and-tumbles. Aware
of the tradition of frontier boasting, they distinguished apocryphal stories
from personal observation, wild tales from eyewitness accounts. Although gouging
matches became a sort of literary convention, many travelers compiled credible
descriptions of backwoods violence.

"The indolence and dissipation of the middling and lower classes of Virginia are
such as to give pain to every reflecting mind," one anonymous visitor declared.
"Horse-racing, cock-fighting, and boxing-matches are standing amusements, for
which they neglect all business; and in the latter of which they conduct
themselves with a barbarity worthy of their savage neighbors." [EN20] Thomas
Anburey agreed. He believed that the Revolution's leveling of class distinction
left the "lower people" dangerously independent. Although Anburey found whites
usually hospitable and generous, he was disturbed by their sudden outbursts of
impudence, their aversion to labor and love of drink, their vengefulness and
savagery. They shared with their betters a taste for gaming, horse racing, and
cockfighting, but "boxing matches, in which they display such barbarity, as
fully marks their innate ferocious disposition," were all their own. Anburey
concluded that an English prize fight was humanity itself compared to Virginia
combat. [EN21]

Another visitor, Charles William Janson, decried the loss of social
subordination, which caused the rabble to reinterpret liberty and equality as
licentiousness. Paternal authority - the font of social and political order -
had broken down in America, as parents gratified their children's whims,
including youthful tastes for alcohol and tobacco. A national mistrust of
authority had brought civilization to its nadir among the poor whites of the
South. "The lower classes are the most abject that, perhaps, ever peopled a
Christian land. They live in the woods and deserts and many of them cultivate no
more land than will raise them corn and cabbages, which, with fish, and
occasionally a piece of pickled pork or bacon, are their constant food.. Their
habitations are more wretched than can be conceived; the huts of the poor of
Ireland, or even the meanest Indian wigwam, displaying more ingenuity and
greater industry." [EN22] Despite their degradation - perhaps because of it -
Janson found the poor whites extremely jealous of their republican rights and
liberties. They considered themselves the equals of their best-educated
neighbors and intruded on whomever they chose. [EN23] The gouging match this
fastidious Englishman witnessed in Georgia was the epitome of lower-class
depravity:

We found the combatants. fast clinched by the hair, and their thumbs endeavoring
to force a passage into each other's eyes; while several of the bystanders were
betting upon the first eye to be turned out of its socket. For some time the
combatants avoided the thumb stroke with dexterity. At length they fell to the
ground, and in an instant the uppermost sprung up with his antagonist's eye in
his hand!!! The savage crowd applauded, while, sick with horror, we galloped
away from the infernal scene. The name of the sufferer was John Butler, a
Carolinian, who, it seems, had been dared to the combat by a Georgian; and the
first eye was for the honor of the state to which they respectively belonged.
Janson concluded that even Indian "savages" and London's rabble would be
outraged by the beastly Americans. [EN24]
While Janson toured the lower South, his countryman Thomas Ashe explored the
territory around Wheeling, Virginia. A passage, dated April 1806, from his
Travels in America gives us a detailed picture of gouging's social context. Ashe
expounded on Wheeling's potential to become a center of trade for the Ohio and
upper Mississippi valleys, noting that geography made the town a natural rival
of Pittsburgh. Yet Wheeling lagged in "worthy commercial pursuits, and
industrious and moral dealings." Ashe attributed this backwardness to the town's
frontier ways, which attracted men who specialized in drinking, plundering
Indian property, racing horses, and watching cockfights. A Wheeling Quaker
assured Ashe that mores were changing, that the underworld element was about to
be driven out. Soon, the godly would gain control of the local government,
enforce strict observance of the Sabbath, and outlaw vice. Ashe was sympathetic
but doubtful. In Wheeling, only heightened violence and debauchery distinguished
Sunday from the rest of the week. The citizens' willingness to close up shop and
neglect business on the slightest pretext made it a questionable residence for
any respectable group of men, let alone a society of Quakers. [EN25]

To convey the rough texture of Wheeling life, Ashe described a gouging match.
Two men drinking at a public house argued over the merits of their respective
horses. Wagers made, they galloped off to the race course. "Two thirds of the
population followed: - blacksmiths, shipwrights, all left work: the town
appeared a desert. The stores were shut. I asked a proprietor, why the
warehouses did not remain open? He told me all good was done for the day: that
the people would remain on the ground till night, and many stay till the
following morning." Determined to witness an event deemed so important that the
entire town went on holiday, Ashe headed for the track. He missed the initial
heat but arrived in time to watch the crowd raise the stakes to induce a
rematch. Six horses competed, and spectators bet a small fortune, but the
results were inconclusive. Soon, the melee narrowed to two individuals, a
Virginian and a Kentuckian. Because fights were common in such situations,
everyone knew the proper procedures, and the combatants quickly decided to "tear
and rend" one another - to rough-and-tumble - rather than "fight fair." Ashe
elaborated: "You startle at the words tear and rend, and again do not understand
me. You have heard these terms, I allow, applied to beasts of prey and to
carnivorous animals; and your humanity cannot conceive them applicable to man:
It nevertheless is so, and the fact will not permit me the use of any less
expressive term." [EN26]

The battle began - size and power on the Kentuckian's side, science and craft on
the Virginian's. They exchanged cautious throws and blows, when suddenly the
Virginian lunged at his opponent with a panther's ferocity. The crowd roared its
approval as the fight reached its violent denouement:

The shock received by the Kentuckyan, and the want of breath, brought him
instantly to the ground. The Virginian never lost his hold; like those bats of
the South who never quit the subject on which they fasten until they taste
blood, he kept his knees in his enemy's body; fixing his claws in his hair, and
his thumbs on his eyes, gave them an instantaneous start from their sockets. The
sufferer roared aloud, but uttered no complaint. The citizens again shouted with
joy. Doubts were no longer entertained and bets of three to one were offered on
the Virginian.
But the fight continued. The Kentuckian grabbed his smaller opponent and held
him in a tight bear hug, forcing the Virginian to relinquish his facial grip.
Over and over the two rolled, until, getting the Virginian under him, the big
man "snapt off his nose so close to his face that no manner of projection
remained." The Virginian quickly recovered, seized the Kentuckian's lower lip in
his teeth, and ripped it down over his enemy's chin. This was enough: "The
Kentuckyan at length gave out, on which the people carried off the victor, and
he preferring a triumph to a doctor, who came to cicatrize his face, suffered
himself to be chaired round the ground as the champion of the times, and the
first rougher-and-tumbler. The poor wretch, whose eyes were started from their
spheres, and whose lip refused its office, returned to the town, to hide his
impotence, and get his countenance repaired." The citizens refreshed themselves
with whiskey and biscuits, then resumed their races.
Ashe's Quaker friend reported that such spontaneous races occurred two or three
times a week and that the annual fall and spring meets lasted fourteen
uninterrupted days, "aided by the licentious and profligate of all the
neighboring states." As for rough-and-tumbles, the Quaker saw no hope of
suppressing them. Few nights passed without such fights; few mornings failed to
reveal a new citizen with mutilated features. It was a regional taste,
unrestrained by law or authority, an inevitable part of life on the left bank of
the Ohio. [EN27]

***

By the early nineteenth century, rough-and-tumble fighting had generated its own
folklore. [EN28] Horror mingled with awe when residents of the Ohio Valley
pointed out one-eyed individuals to visitors, when New Englanders referred to an
empty eye socket as a "Virginia Brand," when North Carolinians related stories
of mass rough-and-tumbles ending with eyeballs covering the ground, and when
Kentuckians told of battles-royal so intense that severed eyes, ears, and noses
filled bushel baskets. Place names like "Fighting Creek" and "Gouge Eye"
perpetuated the memory of heroic encounters, and rustic bombast reached new
extremes with estimates from some counties that every third man wanted an eye.
[EN29] As much as the style of combat, the rich oral folklore of the backcountry
- the legends, tales, ritual boasts, and verbal duels, all of them in regional
vernacular - made rough-and-tumble fighting unique.

It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of the spoken word in
southern life. Traditional tales, songs, and beliefs - transmitted orally by
blacks as well as whites - formed the cornerstone of culture. Folklore
socialized children, inculcated values, and helped forge a distinct regional
sensibility. Even wealthy and well-educated planters, raised at the knees of
black mammies, imbibed both Afro-American and white traditions, and charismatic
politicians secured loyal followers by speaking the people's language. Southern
society was based more on personalistic, face-to-face, kin-and-community
relationships than on legalistic or bureaucratic ones. Interactions between
southerners were guided by elaborate rituals of hospitality, demonstrative
conviviality, and kinship ties - all of which emphasized personal dependencies
and reliance on the spoken word. Through the antebellum period and beyond, the
South had an oral as much as a written culture. [EN30]

Boundaries between talk and action, ideas and behavior, are less clear in spoken
than in written contexts. Psychologically, print seems more distant and abstract
than speech, which is inextricably bound to specific individuals, times, and
places. In becoming part of the realm of sight rather than sound, words leave
behind their personal, living qualities, gaining in fixity what they lose in
dynamism. Literate peoples separate thought from action, pigeonholing ideas and
behavior. Nonliterate ones draw this distinction less sharply, viewing words and
the events to which they refer as a single reality. In oral cultures generally,
and in the Old South in particular, the spoken word was a powerful force in
daily life, because ideation and behavior remained closely linked. [EN31]

The oral traditions of hunters, drifters, herdsmen, gamblers, roustabouts, and
rural poor who rough-and-tumbled provided a strong social cement. Tall talk
around a campfire, in a tavern, in front of a crossroads store, or at countless
other meeting places on the southwestern frontier helped establish communal
bounds between disparate persons. Because backwoods humorists possessed an
unusual ability to draw people together and give expression to shared feelings,
they often became the most effective leaders and preachers. [EN32] But words
could also divide. Fithian's observation in the eighteenth century - that
seemingly innocuous remarks led to sickening violence - remained true for
several generations. Men were so touchy about their personal reputations that
any slight required an apology. This failing, only retribution restored public
stature and self-esteem. "Saving face" was not just a metaphor. [EN33]

The lore of backwoods combat, however, both inflated and deflated egos. By the
early nineteenth century, simple epithets evolved into verbal duels - rituals
well known to folklorists. Backcountry men took turns bragging about their
prowess, possessions, and accomplishments, spurring each other on to new heights
of self-magnification. [EN34] Such exchanges heightened tension and engendered a
sense of theatricality and display. But boasting, unlike insults, did not always
lead to combat, for, in a culture that valued oral skills, the verbal battle
itself - the contest over who best controlled the power of words - was a real
quest for domination:

"I am a man; I am a horse; I am a team. I can whip any man in all Kentucky, by
G-d!" The other replied, "I am an alligator, half man, half horse; can whip any
man on the Mississippi, by G-d!" The first one again, "I am a man; have the best
horse, best dog, best gun and handsomest wife in all Kentucky, by G-d." The
other, "I am a Mississippi snapping turtle: have bear's claws, alligator's
teeth, and the devil's tail; can whip any man, by G-d." [EN35]
Such elaborate boasts were not composed on the spot. Folklorists point out that
free-phrase verbal forms, from Homeric epics to contemporary blues, are created
through an oral formulaic process. The singer of epics, for example, does not
memorize thousands of lines but knows the underlying skeleton of his narrative
and, as he sings, fleshes it out with old commonplaces and new turns of phrase.
In this way, oral formulaic composition merges cultural continuity with
individual creativity. A similar but simplified version of the same process was
at work in backwoods bragging. [EN36]
A quarter-century after the above exchange made its way into print, several of
the same phrases still circulated orally and were worked into new patterns. "'By
Gaud, stranger,' said he, 'do you know me? - do you know what stuff I'm made of?
Clear steamboat, sea horse, alligator - run agin me, run agin a snag - jam up -
whoop! Got the prettiest sister, and biggest whiskers of any man hereabouts - I
can lick my weight in wild cats, or any man in all Kentuck!'" [EN37] Style and
details changed, but the themes remained the same: comparing oneself to wild
animals, boasting of possessions and accomplishments, asserting domination over
others. Mike Fink, legendary keelboatman, champion gouger, and fearless hunter,
put his own mark on the old form and elevated it to art:

"I'm a salt River roarer! I'm a ring tailed squealer! I'm a regular screamer
from the old Massassip! Whoop! I'm the very infant that refused his milk before
its eyes were open and called out for a bottle of old Rye! I love the women and
I'm chockful o' fight! I'm half wild horse and half cock-eyed alligator and the
rest o' me is crooked snags an' red-hot snappin' turtle.. I can out-run,
out-jump, out shout, out-brag, out-drink, an' out-fight, rough-an'-tumble, no
holts barred, any man on both sides the river from Pittsburgh to New Orleans an'
back ag'in to St. Louiee. Come on, you flatters, you bargers, you milk white
mechanics, an' see how tough I am to chaw! I ain't had a fight for two days an'
I'm spilein' for exercise. Cock-a-doodle-doo! [EN38]
Tall talk and ritual boasts were not uniquely American. Folklore indexes are
filled with international legends and tales of exaggeration. [EN39] But inflated
language did find a secure home in America in the first half of the nineteenth
century. Spread-eagle rhetoric was tailor-made for a young nation seeking a
secure identity. Bombastic speech helped justify the development of unfamiliar
social institutions, flowery oratory salved painful economic changes, and lofty
words masked aggressive territorial expansion. In a circular pattern of
reinforcement, heroic talk spurred heroic deeds, so that great acts founded
heightened meaning in great words. Alexis de Tocqueville observed during his
travels in the 1830s that clearing land, draining swamps, and planting crops
were hardly the stuff of literature. But the collective vision of democratic
multitudes building a great nation formed a grand poetic ideal that haunted
men's imaginations. [EN40]
The gaudy poetry of the strapping young nation had its equivalent in the
exaggeration of individual powers. Folklore placing man at the center of the
universe buttressed the emergent ideology of equality. Tocqueville
underestimated Americans' ability to celebrate the mundane, for ego
magnification was essential in a nation that extolled self-creation. While
America prided itself on shattering old boundaries, on liberating individuals
from social, geographic, and cultural encumbrances, such freedom left each
citizen frighteningly alone to succeed or fail in forging his own identity. To
hyperbolize one's achievements was a source of power and control, a means of
amplifying the self while bringing human, natural, and social obstacles down to
size. The folklore of exaggeration could transform even the most prosaic
commercial dealings into great contests. Early in the nineteenth century,
legends of crafty Yankee peddlers and unscrupulous livestock traders abounded.
[EN41] A horse dealer described an animal to a buyer in the 1840s: "Sir, he can
jump a house or go through a pantry, as it suits him; no hounds are too fast for
him, no day too long for him. He has the courage of a lion, and the docility of
a lamb, and you may ride him with a thread. Weight did you say, Why, he would
carry the national debt and not bate a penny." The most insipid marketplace
transactions were transfigured by inflated language, legends of heroic
salesmanship, and an ethos of contest and battle. [EN42]

The oral narratives of the southern backcountry drew strength from these
national traditions yet possessed unique characteristics. Above all, fight
legends portrayed backwoodsmen reveling in blood. Violence existed for its own
sake, unencumbered by romantic conventions and claiming no redeeming social or
psychic value. Gouging narratives may have masked grimness with black humor, but
they offered little pretense that violence was a creative or civilizing force.
[EN43] Thus, one Kentuckian defeated a bear by chewing off its nose and
scratching out its eyes. "They can't stand Kentucky play," the settler
proclaimed, "biting and gouging are too hard for them." Humor quickly slipped
toward horror, when Davy Crockett, for example, coolly boasted, "I kept my thumb
in his eye, and was just going to give it a twist and bring the peeper out, like
taking a gooseberry in a spoon." To Crockett's eternal chagrin, someone
interrupted the battle just at this critical juncture. [EN44]

Sadistic violence gave many frontier legends a surreal quality. Two Mississippi
raftsmen engaged in ritual boasts and insults after one accidentally nudged the
other toward the water, wetting his shoes. Cheered on by their respective gangs,
they stripped off their shirts, then pummeled, knocked out teeth, and wore skin
from each other's faces. The older combatant asked if his opponent had had
enough. "Yes," he was told, "when I drink your heart's blood, I'll cry enough,
and not till then." The younger man gouged out an eye. Just as quickly, his
opponent was on top, strangling his adversary. But in a final reversal of
fortunes, the would-be victor cried out, then rolled over dead, a stab wound in
his side. Protected by his clique, the winner jumped in the water, swam to a
river island, and crowed: "Ruoo-ruoo-o! I can lick a steamboat. My fingernails
is related to a sawmill on my mother's side and my daddy was a double breasted
catamount! I wear a hoop snake for a neck-handkerchief, and the brass buttons on
my coat have all been boiled in poison." [EN45]

The danger and violence of daily life in the backwoods contributed mightily to
sanguinary oral traditions that exalted the strong and deprecated the weak.
Early in the nineteenth century, the Southwest contained more than its share of
terrifying wild animals, powerful and well-organized Indian tribes, and
marauding white outlaws. Equally important were high infant mortality rates and
short life expectancies, agricultural blights, class inequities, and the
centuries-old belief that betrayal and cruelty were man's fate. Emmeline
Grangerford's graveyard poetry - set against a backdrop of rural isolation
shattered by sadistic clan feuds - is but the best-known expression of the deep
loneliness, death longings, and melancholy that permeated backcountry life.
[EN46]

At first glance, boisterous tall talk and violent legends seem far removed from
sadness and alienation. Yet, as Kenneth Lynn has argued, they grew from common
origins, and the former allowed men to resist succumbing to the latter. Not
passive acceptance but identification with brutes and brawlers characterized
frontier legendry. Rather than be overwhelmed by violence, acquiesce in an
oppressive environment, or submit to death as an escape from tragedy, why not
make a virtue of necessity and flaunt one's unconcern? To revel in the lore of
deformity, mutilation, and death was to beat the wilderness at its own game.
[EN47] The storyteller's art dramatized life and converted nameless anxieties
into high adventure; bravado helped men face down a threatening world and
transform terror into power. To claim that one was sired by wild animals, kin to
natural disasters, and tougher than steam engines - which were displacing
rivermen in the antebellum era - was to gain a momentary respite from fear, a
cathartic, if temporary, sense of being in control. Symbolically, wild boasts
overwhelmed the very forces that threatened the backwoodsmen.

But there is another level of meaning here. Sometimes fight legends invited an
ambiguous response, mingling the celebration of beastly acts with the rejection
of barbarism. By their very nature, tall tales elicit skepticism. Even while men
identified with the violence that challenged them, the folklore of eye gouging
constantly tested the limits of credibility. [EN48] "Pretty soon I got the
squatter down, and just then he fixed his teeth into my throte, and I felt my
windpipe begin to loosen." [EN49] The calculated coolness and understatement of
this description highlights the outrageousness of the act. The storyteller has
artfully maneuvered his audience to the edge of credulity.

Backwoodsmen mocked their animality by exaggerating it, thereby affirming their
own humanity. A Kentuckian battled inconclusively from ten in the morning until
sundown, when his wife showed up to cheer him on:

"So I gathered all the little strength I had, and I socked my thumb in his eye,
and with my fingers took a twist on his snot box, and with the other hand, I
grabbed him by the back of the head; I then caught his ear in my mouth, gin his
head a flirt, and out come his ear by the roots! I then flopped his head over,
and caught his other ear in my mouth, and jerked that out in the same way, and
it made a hole in his head that I could have rammed my fist through, and was
just goin' to when he hollered: 'Nuff!'" [EN50]
More than realism or fantasy alone, legends stretched the imagination by
blending both. As metaphoric statements, they reconciled contradictory impulses,
at once glorifying and parodying barbarity. In this sense, gouging narratives
were commentaries on backwoods life. The legends were texts that allowed plain
folk to dramatize the tensions and ambiguities of their lives: they hauled
society's goods yet lived on its fringe; they destroyed forests and game while
clearing the land for settlement; they killed Indians to make way for the white
man's culture; they struggled for self-sufficiency only to become ensnared in
economic dependency. Fight narratives articulated the fundamental contradiction
of frontier life - the abandonment of "civilized" ways that led to the ultimate
expansion of civilized society. [EN51]
***

Foreign travelers might exaggerate and backwoods storytellers embellish, but the
most neglected fact about eye-gouging matches is their actuality. [EN52] Circuit
Court Judge Aedamus Burke barely contained his astonishment while presiding in
South Carolina's upcountry: "Before God, gentlemen of the jury, I never saw such
a thing before in the world. There is a plaintiff with an eye out! A juror with
an eye out! And two witnesses with an eye out!" If the "ringtailed roarers" did
not actually breakfast on stewed Yankee, washed down with spike nails and Epsom
salts, court records from Sumner County, Arkansas, did describe assault victims
with the words, "nose was bit." The gamest "gamecock of the wilderness" never
really moved steamboat engines by grinning at them, but Reuben Cheek did receive
a three-year sentence to the Tennessee penitentiary for gouging out William
Maxey's eye. [EN53] Most backcountrymen went to the grave with their faces
intact, just as most of the southern gentry never fought a duel. But as an
extreme version of the common tendency toward brawling, street fighting, and
seeking personal vengeance, rough-and-tumbling gives us insight into the deep
values and assumptions - the mentalité - of backwoods life. [EN54]

Observers often accused rough-and-tumblers of fighting like animals. But eye
gouging was not instinctive behavior, the human equivalent of two rams vying for
dominance. Animals fight to attain specific objectives, such as food, sexual
priority, or territory. Precisely where to draw the line between human
aggression as a genetically programmed response or as a product of social and
cultural learning remains a hotly debated issue. Nevertheless, it would be
difficult to make a case for eye gouging as a genetic imperative, coded behavior
to maximize individual or species survival. Although rough-and-tumble fighting
appears primitive and anarchic to modern eyes, there can be little doubt that
its origins, rituals, techniques, and goals were emphatically conditioned by
environment; gouging was learned behavior. Humanistic social science more than
sociobiology holds the keys to understanding this phenomenon. [EN55]

What can we conclude about the culture and society that nourished
rough-and-tumble fighting? The best place to begin is with the material base of
life and the nature of daily work. Gamblers, hunters, herders, roustabouts,
rivermen, and yeomen farmers were the sorts of persons usually associated with
gouging. Such hallmarks of modernity as large-scale production, complex division
of labor, and regular work rhythms were alien to their lives. Recent studies
have stressed the premodern character of the southern uplands through most of
the antebellum period. Even while cotton production boomed and trade expanded, a
relatively small number of planters owned the best lands and most slaves, so
huge parts of the South remained outside the flow of international markets or
staple crop agriculture. Thus, backcountry whites commonly found themselves
locked into a semisubsistent pattern of living. Growing crops for home
consumption, supplementing food supplies with abundant game, allowing small
herds to fatten in the woods, spending scarce money for essential staples, and
bartering goods for the services of part-time or itinerant trades people, the
upland folk lived in an intensely local, kin-based society. Rural hamlets,
impassable roads, and provincial isolation - not growing towns, internal
improvements, or international commerce - characterized the backcountry. [EN56]

Even men whose livelihoods depended on expanding markets often continued their
rough, premodern ways. Characteristic of life on a Mississippi barge, for
example, were long periods of idleness shattered by intense anxiety, as deadly
snags, shoals, and storms approached. Running aground on a sandbar meant
backbreaking labor to maneuver a thirty-ton vessel out of trouble. Boredom
weighed as heavily as danger, so tale telling, singing, drinking, and gambling
filled the empty hours. Once goods were taken on in New Orleans, the men began
the thousand-mile return journey against the current. Before steam power
replaced muscle, bad food and whiskey fueled the gangs who day after day,
exposed to wind and water, poled the river bottoms or strained at the cordelling
ropes until their vessel reached the tributaries of the Missouri or the Ohio.
Hunters, trappers, herdsmen, subsistence farmers, and other backwoodsmen faced
different but equally taxing hardships, and those who endured prided themselves
on their strength and daring, their stamina, cunning, and ferocity. [EN57]

Such men played as lustily as they worked, counterpointing bouts of intense
labor with strenuous leisure. What travelers mistook for laziness was a refusal
to work and save with compulsive regularity. "I have seen nothing in human form
so profligate as they are," James Flint wrote of the boatmen he met around 1820.
"Accomplished in depravity, their habits and education seem to comprehend every
vice. They make few pretensions to moral character; and their swearing is
excessive vice. They make few pretensions to moral character; and their swearing
is excessive and perfectly disgusting. Although earning good wages, they are in
the most abject poverty; many of them being without anything like clean or
comfortable clothing." A generation later, Mark Twain vividly remembered those
who manned the great timber and coal rafts gliding past his boyhood home in
Hannibal, Missouri: "Rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific hardships with
sailorlike stoicism; heavy drinkers, course frolickers in moral sties like the
Natchez-under-the-hill of that day, heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one,
elephantinely jolly, foul witted, profane; prodigal of their money, bankrupt at
the end of the trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts; yet, in the
main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often picaresquely
magnanimous." Details might change, but penury, loose morality, and lack of
steady habits endured. [EN58]

Boatmen, hunters, and herdsmen were often separated from wives and children for
long periods. More important, backcountry couples lacked the emotionally intense
experience of the bourgeois family. They spent much of their time apart and
found companionship with members of their own sex. The frontier town or
crossroads tavern brought males together in surrogate brotherhoods, where rough
men paid little deference to the civilizing role of women and the moral uplift
of the domestic family. On the margins of a booming, modernizing society, they
shared an intensely communal yet fiercely competitive way of life. Thus, where
work was least rationalized and specialized, domesticity weakest, legal
institutions primitive, and the market economy feeble, rough-and-tumble fighting
found fertile soil. [EN59]

Just as the economy of the southern backcountry remained locally oriented, the
rough-and-tumblers were local heroes, renowned in their communities. There was
no professionalization here. Men fought for informal village and county titles;
the red feather in the champion's cap was pay enough because it marked him as
first among his peers. Paralleling the primitive division of labor in backwoods
society, boundaries between entertainment and daily life, between spectators and
participants, were not sharply drawn. "Bully of the Hill" Ab Gaines from the Big
Hatchie Country, Neil Brown of Totty's Bend, Vernon's William Holt, and
Smithfield's Jim Willis - all of them were renowned Tennessee fighters, local
heroes in their day. Legendary champions were real individuals, tested gang
leaders who attained their status by being the meanest, toughest, and most
ruthless fighters, who faced disfigurement and never backed down. Challenges
were ever present; yesterday's spectator was today's champion, today's champion
tomorrow's invalid. [EN60]

Given the lives these men led, a world view that embraced fearlessness made
sense. Hunters, trappers, Indian fighters, and herdsmen who knew the smell of
warm blood on their hands refused to sentimentalize an environment filled with
threatening forces. It was not that backwoodsmen lived in constant danger but
that violence was unpredictable. Recreations like cockfighting deadened men to
cruelty, and the gratuitous savagery of gouging matches reinforced the daily
truth that life was brutal, guided only by the logic of superior nerve, power,
and cunning. [EN61] With families emotionally or physically distant and civil
institutions weak, a man's role in the all-male society was defined less by his
ability as a breadwinner than by his ferocity. The touchstone of masculinity was
unflinching toughness, not chivalry, duty, or piety. Violent sports, heavy
drinking, and impulsive pleasure seeking were appropriate for men whose lives
were hard, whose futures were unpredictable, and whose opportunities were
limited. Gouging champions were group leaders because they embodied the basic
values of their peers. The successful rough-and-tumbler proved his manhood by
asserting his dominance and rendering his opponent "impotent," as Thomas Ashe
put it. And the loser, though literally or symbolically castrated, demonstrated
his mettle and maintained his honor. [EN62]

Here we begin to understand the travelers' refrain about plain folk degradation.
Setting out from northern ports, whose inhabitants were increasingly possessed
by visions of godly perfection and material progress, they found southern
upcountry people slothful and backward. Ashe's Quaker friend in Wheeling,
Virginia, made the point. [EN63] For Quakers and northern evangelicals, labor
was a means of moral self-testing, and earthly success was a sign of God's
grace, so hard work and steady habits became acts of piety. But not only Yankees
endorsed sober restraint. A growing number of southern evangelicals also
embraced a life of decorous self-control, rejecting the hedonistic and
self-assertive values of old. During the late eighteenth century, as Rhys Isaac
has observed, many plain folk disavowed the hegemonic gentry culture of
conspicuous display and found individual worth, group pride, and transcendent
meaning in religious revivals. By the antebellum era, new evangelical waves
washed over class lines as rich and poor alike forswore such sins as drinking,
gambling, cursing, fornication, horse racing, and dancing. But conversion was
far from universal, and for many in backcountry settlements like Wheeling, the
evangelical idiom remained a foreign tongue. Men worked hard to feed themselves
and their kin, to acquire goods and status, but they lacked the calling to prove
their godliness through rigid morality. Salvation and self-denial were
culturally less compelling values, and the barriers against leisure and
self-gratification were lower here than among the converted. [EN64]

Moreover, primitive markets and the semisubsistence basis of upcountry life
limited men's dependence on goods produced by others and allowed them to
maintain the irregular work rhythms of a precapitalist economy. The material
base of backwoods life was ill suited to social transformation, and the cultural
traditions of the past offered alternatives to rigid ideals. Closing up shop in
mid-week for a fight or horse race had always been perfectly acceptable, because
men labored so that they might indulge the joys of the flesh. Neither a
compulsive need to save time and money nor an obsession with progress haunted
people's imaginations. The backcountry folk who lacked a bourgeois or Protestant
sense of duty were little disturbed by exhibitions of human passions and were
resigned to violence as part of daily life. Thus, the relative dearth of
capitalistic values (such as delayed gratification and accumulation), the
absence of a strict work ethic, and a cultural tradition that winked at lapses
in moral rigor limited society's demands for sober self-control. [EN65]

Not just poor whites but also large numbers of the slave-holding gentry still
lent their prestige to a regional style that favored conspicuous displays of
leisure. As C. Vann Woodward has pointed out, early observers, such as Robert
Beverley and William Byrd, as well as modern-day commentators, have described a
distinctly "southern ethic" in American history. Whether judged positively as
leisure or negatively as laziness, the southern sensibility valued free time and
rejected work as the consuming goal of life. Slavery reinforced this tendency,
for how could labor be an unmitigated virtue if so much of it was performed by
despised black bondsmen? When southerners did esteem commerce and enterprise, it
was less because piling up wealth contained religious or moral value than
because productivity facilitated the leisure ethos. Southerners could therefore
work hard without placing labor at the center of their ethical universe. In
important ways, then, the upland folk culture reflected a larger regional style.
[EN66]

Thus, the values, ideas, and institutions that rapidly transformed the North
into a modern capitalist society came late to the South. Indeed, conspicuous
display, heavy drinking, moral casualness, and love of games and sports had deep
roots in much of Western culture. As Woodward has cautioned, we must take care
not to interpret the southern ethic as unique or aberrant. The compulsions to
subordinate leisure to productivity, to divide work and play into separate
compartmentalized realms, and to improve each bright and shining hour were the
novel ideas. The southern ethic anticipated human evil, tolerated ethical
lapses, and accepted the finitude of man in contrast to the new style that
demanded unprecedented moral rectitude and internalized self-restraint. [EN67]

***

The American South also shared with large parts of the Old World a taste for
violence and personal vengeance. Long after the settling of the southern
colonies, powerful patriarchal clans in Celtic and Mediterranean lands still
avenged affronts to family honor with deadly feuds. [EN68] Norbert Elias has
pointed out that postmedieval Europeans routinely spilled blood to settle their
private quarrels. Across classes, the story was the same:

Two associates fall out over business; they quarrel, the conflict grows violent;
one day they meet in a public place and one of them strikes the other dead. An
innkeeper accuses another of stealing his clients; they become mortal enemies.
Someone says a few malicious words about another; a family war develops.. Not
only among the nobility were there family vengeance, private feuds, vendettas..
The little people too - the hatters, the tailors, the shepherds - were all quick
to draw their knives.
Emotions were freely expressed: jollity and laughter suddenly gave way to
belligerence; guilt and penitence coexisted with hate; cruelty always lurked
nearby. The modern middle-class individual, with his subdued, rational,
calculating ways, finds it hard to understand the joy sixteenth century
Frenchmen took in ceremonially burning alive one or two dozen cats every
Midsummer Day or the pleasure eighteenth-century Englishmen found in watching
trained dogs slaughter each order. [EN69]
Despite enormous cultural differences, inhabitants of the southern uplands
exhibited characteristics of their forebears in the Old World. The Scots-Irish
brought their reputation for ferocity to the backcountry, but English migrants,
too, had a thirst for violence. Central authority was weak, and men reserved the
right to settle differences for themselves. Vengeance was part of daily life.
Drunken hilarity, good fellowship, and high spirits, especially at crossroads
taverns, suddenly turned to violence. Traveler after traveler remarked on how
forthright and friendly but quick to anger the backcountry people were. Like
their European ancestors, they had not yet internalized the modern world's
demand for tight emotional self-control. [EN70]

Above all, the ancient concept of honor helps explain this shared proclivity for
violence. According to the sociologist Peter Berger, modern men have difficulty
taking seriously the idea of honor. American jurisprudence, for example, offers
legal recourse for slander and libel because they involve material damages. But
insult - publicly smearing a man's good name and besmirching his honor - implies
no palpable injury and so does not exist in the eyes of the law. Honor is an
intensely social concept, resting on reputation, community standing, and the
esteem of kin and compatriots. To possess honor requires acknowledgment from
others; it cannot exist in solitary conscience. Modern man, Berger has argued,
is more responsive to dignity - the belief that personal worth inheres equally
in each individual, regardless of his status in society. Dignity frees the
evangelical to confront God alone, the capitalist to make contracts without
customary encumbrances and the reformer to uplift the lowly. Naked and alone man
has dignity; extolled by peers and covered with ribbons, he has honor. [EN71]

Anthropologists have also discovered the centrality of honor in several
cultures. According to J.G. Peristiany, honor and shame often preoccupy
individuals in small-scale settings, where face-to-face relationships
predominate over anonymous or bureaucratic ones. Social standing in such
communities is never completely secure, because it must be validated by public
opinion whose fickleness compels men constantly to assert and prove their worth.
Julian Pitt-Rivers has added that, if society rejects a man's evaluation of
himself and treats his claim to honor with ridicule or contempt, his very
identity suffers because it is based on the judgment of peers. Shaming refers to
that process by which an insult or any public humiliation impugns an
individual's honor and thereby threatens his sense of self. By risking injury in
a violent encounter, an affronted man - whether victorious or not - restores his
sense of status and thus validates anew his claim to honor. Only valorous
action, not words, can redeem his place in the ranks of his peer group. [EN72]

Bertram Wyatt-Brown has argued that this Old World ideal is the key to
understanding southern history. Across boundaries of time, geography, and social
class, the South was knit together by a primal concept of male valor, part of
the ancient heritage of Indo-European folk cultures. Honor demanded clan
loyalty, hospitality, protection of women, and defense of patriarchal
prerogatives. Honorable men guarded their reputations, bristled at insults, and,
where necessary, sought personal vindication through bloodshed. The culture of
honor thrived in hierarchical rural communities like the American South and grew
out of a fatalistic world view, which assumed that pain and suffering were man's
fate. It accounts for the pervasive violence that marked relationships between
southerners and explains their insistence on vengeance and their rejection of
legal redress in settling quarrels. Honor tied personal identity to public
fulfillment of social roles. Neither bourgeois self-control nor internalized
conscience determined status; judgment by one's fellows was the wellspring of
community standing. [EN73]

In this light, the seemingly trivial causes for brawls enumerated as early as
Fithian's time - name calling, subtle ridicule, breaches of decorum, displays of
poor manners - make sense. If a man's good name was his most important
possession, then any slight cut him deeply. "Having words" precipitated fights
because words brought shame and undermined a man's sense of self. Symbolic acts,
such as buying a round of drinks, conferred honor on all, while refusing to
share a bottle implied some inequality in social status. Honor inhered not only
in individuals but also in kin and peers; when members of two cliques had words,
their tested leaders or several men from each side fought to uphold group
prestige. Inheritors of primal honor, the southern plain folk were quick to take
offense, and any perceived affront forced a man either to devalue himself or to
strike back violently and avenge the wrong. [EN74]

The concept of male honor takes us a long way toward understanding the meaning
of eye-gouging matches. But backwoods people did not simply acquire some
primordial notion without modifying it. Definitions of honorable behavior have
always varied enormously across cultures. The southern upcountry fostered a
particular style of honor, which grew out of the contradiction between equality
and hierarchy. Honorific societies tend to be sharply stratified. Honor is
apportioned according to rank, and men fight to maintain personal standing
within their social categories. Because black chattel slavery was the basis for
the southern hierarchy, slave owners had the most wealth and honor, while other
whites scrambled for a bit of each, and bondsmen were permanently impoverished
and dishonored. [EN75] Here was a source of tension for the plain folk. Men of
honor shared freedom and equality; those denied honor were implicitly less than
equal - perilously close to a slave-like condition. But in the eyes of the
gentry, poor whites as well as blacks were outside the circle of honor, as both
groups were subordinate. Thus a herdsman's insult failed to shame a planter
since the two men were not on the same social level. Without a threat to the
gentleman's honor, there was no need for a duel; horsewhipping the insolent
fellow sufficed. [EN76]

Southern plain folk, then, were caught in a social contradiction. Society taught
all white men to consider themselves equals, encouraged them to compete for
power and status, yet threatened them from below with the specter of servitude
and from above with insistence on obedience to rank and authority. [EN77] Cut
off from upper-class tests of honor, backcountry people adopted their own. A
rough-and-tumble was more than a poor man's duel, a botched version of genteel
combat. Plain folk chose not to ape the dispassionate, antiseptic, gentry style
but to invert it. While the gentleman's code of honor insisted on cool
restraint, eye gougers gloried in unvarnished brutality. In contrast to
duelists' aloof silence, backwoods fighters screamed defiance at the world. As
their own unique rites of honor, rough-and-tumble matches allowed backcountry
men to shout their equality at each other. And eye-gouging fights also dispelled
any stigma of servility. Ritual boasts, soaring oaths, outrageous ferocity,
unflinching bloodiness - all proved a man's freedom. Where the slave acted
obsequiously, the backwoodsman resisted the slightest affront; where human
chattels accepted blows and never raised a hand, plain folk celebrated violence;
where blacks could not jeopardize their value as property, poor whites proved
their autonomy by risking bodily parts. Symbolically reaffirming their claims to
honor, gouging matches helped resolve painful uncertainties arising out of the
ambiguous place of plain folk in the southern social structure. [EN78]

Backwoods fighting reminds us of man's capacity for cruelty and is an excellent
corrective to romanticizing premodern life. But a close look also keeps us from
drawing facile conclusions about innate human aggressiveness. Eye gouging
represented neither the "real" human animal emerging on the frontier, nor nature
acting through man in a Darwinian struggle for survival, nor anarchic disorder
and communal breakdown. Rather, rough-and-tumble fighting was ritualized
behavior - a product of specific cultural assumptions. Men drink together,
tongues loosen, a simmering old rivalry begins to boil; insult is given, offense
taken, ritual boasts commence; the fight begins, mettle is tested, blood redeems
honor, and equilibrium is restored. Eye gouging was the poor and middling
whites' own version of a historical southern tendency to consider personal
violence socially useful - indeed, ethically essential. [EN79]

***

Rough-and-tumble fighting emerged from the confluence of economic conditions,
social relationships, and culture in the southern backcountry. Primitive markets
and the semisubsistence basis of life threw men back on close ties to kin and
community. Violence and poverty were part of daily existence, so endurance, even
callousness, became functional values. Loyal to their localities, their
occupations, and each other, men came together and found release from life's
hardships in strong drink, tall talk, rude practical jokes, and cruel sports.
They craved one another's recognition but rejected genteel, pious, or bourgeois
values, awarding esteem on the basis of their own traditional standards. The
glue that held men together was an intensely competitive status system in which
the most prodigious drinker or strongest arm wrestler, the best tale teller,
fiddle player, or log roller, the most daring gambler, original liar, skilled
hunter, outrageous swearer, or accurate marksman was accorded respect by the
others. Reputation was everything, and scars were badges of honor.
Rough-and-tumble fighting demonstrated unflinching willingness to inflict pain
while risking mutilation - all to defend one's standing among peers - and became
a central expression of the all-male subculture.

Eye gouging continued long after the antebellum period. As the market economy
absorbed new parts of the backcountry, however, the way of life that supported
rough-and-tumbling waned. Certainly by mid-century the number of incidents
declined, precisely when expanding international demand brought ever more
upcountry acres into staple production. [EN80] Towns, schools, churches,
revivals, and families gradually overtook the backwoods. In a slow and uneven
process, keelboats gave way to steamers, then railroads; squatters, to cash crop
farmers; hunters and trappers, to preachers. The plain folk code of honor was
far from dead, but emergent social institutions engendered a moral ethos that
warred against the old ways. For many individuals, the justifications for
personal violence grew stricter, and mayhem became unacceptable. [EN81]

Ironically, progress also had a darker side. New technologies and modes of
production could enhance men's fighting abilities. "Birmingham and Pittsburgh
are obliged to complete. the equipment of the 'chivalric Kentuckian,'" Charles
Agustus Murray observed in the 1840s, as bowie knives ended more and more
rough-and-tumbles. Equally important, in 1835 the first modern revolver
appeared, and manufacturers marketed cheap, accurate editions in the coming
decade. Dueling weapons had been costly, and Kentucky rifles or horse pistols
took a full minute to load and prime. The revolver, however, which fitted neatly
into a man's pocket, settled more and more personal disputes. Raw and brutal as
rough-and-tumbling was, it could not survive the use of arms. Yet precisely
because eye gouging was so violent - because combatants cherished maimings,
blindings, even castrations - it unleashed death wishes that invited new
technologies of destruction. [EN82]

With improved weaponry, dueling entered its golden age during the antebellum
era. Armed combat remained both an expression of gentry sensibility and a mark
of social rank. But in a society where status was always shifting and unclear,
dueling did not stay confined to the upper class. The habitual carrying of
weapons, once considered a sign of unmanly fear, now lost some of its stigma. As
the backcountry changed, tests of honor continued, but gunplay rather than
fighting tooth-and-nail appealed to new men with social aspirations. [EN83]
Thus, progress and technology slowly circumscribed rough-and-tumble fighting,
only to substitute a deadlier option. Violence grew neater and more lethal as
men checked their savagery to murder each other.



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ENDNOTES

The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation provided generous support for my research
on violence. Many people read and commented on the manuscript, among them David
Brion Davis, Jean Agnew, Kai Erikson, Fred Hobson, Gerald Burns, John Endean,
and Allen Tullos. I thank them all for their aid. I also wish to thank the
anonymous readers and the editors of the American Historical Review whose
comments proved invaluable. My wife, Anna, critiqued and edited the text, while
our baby, Jade, gouged and chewed the pages - and those were the least of their
contributions.

EN1. Woodmason, "Burlesque Sermon," in Richard J. Hooker, ed., The Carolina
Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1953), xi-xxxvi, 158. The
"Burlesque Sermon" was written in the late 1760s or early 1770s. For the
quotation that appears in the title of the essay, see "A Kentucky Fight," New
York Spirit of the Times, December 12, 1835, p. 2.

EN2. Harden E. Taliaferro, Fisher's River Scenes and Characters (New York,
1839), 198. Let me state explicitly that this is a study in male culture, but it
is informed by central insights of recent women's history - that gender
definitions are malleable, that they have a formative impact on the past, and
that to ignore them is to misrepresent social and cultural development.

EN3. William Gooch to the Bishop of London, July 8, 1735, in G. McLaren Bryden,
ed., "The Virginia Clergy: Governor Gooch's Letters to the Bishop of London,
1727-1749, from the Fulham Manuscripts," Virginia Magazine of History and
Biography, 32 (1924); 219, 332; and Philip Vickers Fithian to John Peck, August
12, 1774, in Fithian, Journal and Letters, ed. Hunter Dickinson Farish
(Williamsburg, Va., 1943), 212.

EN4. Tom Parramore, "Gouging in Early North Carolina," North Carolina Folklore
Journal, 22 (1974): 58; Jane Carson, Colonial Virginians at Play (Williamsburg,
Va., 1965), 166-67; and Jack Kenny Williams, Vogues in Villainy: Crime and
Retribution in Ante-Bellum South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1959), 33. The South
Carolina law included fingers and eyes but excluded noses and ears.

EN5. Fithian, Journal and Letters, 240-41.

EN6. Ibid.; and Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel
Hill, 1982), 44.

EN7. Weld, Travels Through the States of North America, 1 (3d edn., London,
1800): 191. Weld claimed he saw four or five men castrated and confined to their
sick beds during his travels in Virginia and Maryland.

EN8. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (New York, 1971),
1:1180, 2:2582.

EN9. Thomas Ashe, Travels in America (London, 1809), 86. Thomas Anburey, who
served in Virginia during the Revolution, observed that fighters agreed ahead of
time on which tactics to allow, then abided by their own rules; Anburey, Travels
Through the Interior Parts of America, 2 (1789; reprint edn., Boston, 1823),
215-18. Gouging another man's eye was not native to the colonies but had
antecedents in the mother country. A few reports placed the practice in
Lancashire and Yorkshire; the lowland Scots and their descendants in Ulster also
used these tactics. Gouging was common enough in English ring fights that the
1838 "Rules of the London Prize Ring" banned it. But what had been an occasional
practice in Britain was elevated to a unique fighting style in the American
South. See Dr. Beardsley, "On the Use and Abuse of Popular Sports and Exercises,
Resembling Those of the Greeks and Romans," Nicholson's Philosophical Magazine,
15, excerpted in Portfolio! , 1, ser. 4 (1816): 407-09; Jennie Holliman,
American Sports, 1785-1835 (Durham, N.C., 1931), chap. 10; New York Spirit of
the Times, July 4, 1840, p. 207; Henry Adams, The Formative Years, ed. Herbert
Agar (London, 1948), 28; "'Kick and Bite' in Lancashire," New York Sporting
Magazine, November 1834, p. 188; John Ford, Prize Fighting: The Age of Regency
Boximania (New York, 1971), 116-18; J.C. Furnas, The Americans: A Social History
of the United States, 1587-1914 (New York, 1969), 216; James G. Leyburn, The
Scotch Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1962), 263-66; Arthur K. Moore, The
Frontier Mind (New York, 1957), 111; and Parramore, "Gouging in North Carolina,"
56.

EN10. Anburey, Travels Through the Interior Parts of America, 203; Parramore,
"Gouging in North Carolina," 57-58; and Adland Ashby, A Visit to North America
(London, 1821), 73. In colonial days, an eye could be saved by calling out
"King's curse"; Guion Griffs Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina: A Social
History (Chapel Hill, 1937), 16-17.

EN11. The tradition lingered in pockets along the coast. A Florida grand jury
member watched outside the courthouse as his son fought another boy. Not yet a
decade old, the youngster received some manly advice when the battle ended: "Now
you little devil, if you catch him down again bite him, chaw his lip or you
never'll be a man." Henry Benjamin Whipple, as quoted in John Hope Franklin, The
Militant South (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 11-12.

EN12. Tom Parramore, the most thorough student of rough-and-tumble fighting,
offered only southern sources and argued that gouging spread as far as the
Louisiana Territory early in the century; "Gouging in North Carolina," 56, 58.
Gouging was occasionally practiced above the Ohio, but it was not elevated to a
characteristic fighting style. Lumbermen in the northern forests practiced some
of the rough-and-tumbler's arts, but they were noted for marking a fallen
opponent by stomping his face with caulked boots, leaving scars similar to those
produced by smallpox. "The lumberjack code," as folklorist Richard Dorson called
it, grew out of a pattern of living similar to that of the rough-and-tumblers.
Drinking, treating friends, impulsive pleasure seeking, heroic labor, and
vicious fighting were part of all-male peer groups in the northern woods;
personal honor and valor were the touchstones of lumberjack life. See Dorson,
Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of the Upper Peninsula
(Cambridge, Mass, 1952), chap. 9; Furnas, The Americans, 215-16; and Alan Lomax,
Folksongs of North Ameirca (New York, 1975), 106-07, 119-20. Fred Harvey
Harrington has pointed out in private correspondence that leaders of New York
City gangs in the mid-nineteenth century were sometimes referred to as gougers
or rough-and-tumblers. Moreover, in 1821, Ohio passed a law against gouging out
eyes, biting off facial parts, and so forth. Nevertheless, men in the East and
Middle West did not glorify mayhem and mutilation in practice and folklore to
the same extent as did the southern backwoodsmen. See Gabriel Furman, "The
Customs, Amusements, Style of Living and Manners of the People of the United
States from the First Settlement to the Present Time," New York Historical
Society, New York, N.Y., MS. 2673, typescript copy, pp. 303-05; and Elliott J.
Gorn, "The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting and the Rise of American
Sports" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1983), chap. 5.

EN13. Isaac brilliantly evoked life in mid-eighteenth-century Virginia. See
Transformation of Virginia, chaps. 5, 6. On play, competitiveness, and prowess
in southern culture, see T.H. Breen, "Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural
Significance of Gambling among the Gentry of Virginia," William and Mary
Quarterly, 3d ser., 34 (1977): 256-57; Carson, Colonial Virginians at Play,
chap. 3; Holliman, American Sports, chap. 12; C. Vann Woodward, "The Southern
Ethic in a Puritan World," in his American Counterpoint (Boston, 1971), 13-46;
and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South
(New York, 1982).

EN14. On these themes, see Breen, "Horses and Gentlemen," 256-57; Isaac,
Transformation of Virginia, 94-104; and Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, chaps 2, 3,
6, 11, 13.

EN15. Isaac traced this change; Transformation of Virginia, pts. 2, 3. Also see
Louise Jordan Walmsley, Sport Attitudes and Practices of Representative
Americans Before 1870 (Farmville, Va., 1938), 26; and Gorn, "The Manly Art,"
141-54.

EN16. Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 319, 322. Also see Dickson Bruce,
Violence and Culture in the Antebellum south (Austin, 1979), introduction and
chap. 1; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, chap. 13; and Johnson, Antebellum North
Carolina, 42-46.

EN17. William Oliver Stevens, Pistols at Ten Paces (Boston, 1940), 33-37; George
G. Smith, The Story of Georgia and the Georgia People, 1732-1860 (Atlanta,
1900), 184; and "Jones' Fight," New York Spirit of the Times, January 25, 1840,
pp. 559-60, reprinted in ibid., June 15, 1844, p. 181. The author of "Jones'
Fight" was anonymous, but clearly the story was derived from oral tradition.
Although dueling became a mark of gentlemanly status, social elites sometimes
backslid into street brawling during the antebellum period. For examples, see
Williams, Vogues in Villainy, 23.

EN18. Anburey, Travels Through the Interior Parts of America, 201-02. Gougers
occasionally threatened their social betters. An English traveler in Virginia
recalled that his party fled from a small gang - headed by a "veteran cyclops" -
that tried to provoke a battle. In Kentucky, years later, Adland Ashby dared not
object to the company of one he considered beneath him. To do so, he feared,
might cost him an eye; Visit to North America, 73. Also see the Marquis de
Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780-1782 (New York, 1828),
which was "translated by an English gentlemen who resided in America at that
period" (translator's note is on pages 292-93).

EN19. Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years (Boston, 1826), 97-98. The
right and left banks of the Ohio became a common symbol of the contrast between
slave and free states in the writings of foreign travelers. America's most
perceptive visitor, Alexis de Tocqueville, included this motif. See Democracy n
Action, ed. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (New York, 1945), I:376-79.

EN20. Chastellux, Travels in North America, 292-93.

EN21. Anburey, Travels Through the Interior Parts of America, 215-18. Also see
George W. Featherstonhaugh, Excursion Through the Slave States from Washingtonon
the Potomac to the Frontier of Mexico, 2 (London, 1844), 329-30, as cited in
Jack K. Williams, Duelling in the Old South (College Station, Tex., 1980), 73.

EN22. Janson, The Stranger in America, 1793-1806 (1807; reprint edn., New York,
1935), 304-06, 310-311.

EN23. Ibid. Edmund S. Morgan argued convincingly that the ideology of white
equality was built on the material base of black slavery; Morgan, American
Slavery, American Freedom (New York, 1975), 376-87, 380-81. Also see George
Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind (New York, 1971), chaps. 2, 3.

EN24. Janson, Stranger in America, 308-09.

EN25. Ashe, Travels in America, 82-85.

EN26. Ibid., 85-86.

EN27. Ibid., 86-88. No doubt Ashe exaggerated the frequency of gouging matches.

EN28. Walter Blair and Franklin J. Meine, Mike Fink, King of Mississippi
Keelboatmen (New York, 1933), 105-25.

EN29. New York Spirit of the Times, July 4, 1840, p. 207; Parramore, "Gouging in
North Carolina," 62; Moore, Frontier Mind, 112; Horace Kephart, Our Southern
Highlands (New York, 1929), 375; and Weld, Travels Through the States of North
America, 193.

EN30. See Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New
York, 1974), esp. bk. 1, pt. 1; Frank Lawrence Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old
South (Baton Rouge, 1949); Bruce, Violence and Culture, introduction and chaps.
1-3, 8; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 121-31; and Steven Hahn, The Roots of
Southern Populism (New York, 1983), chaps. 1, 2. Wyatt-Brown observed that honor
and shame in southern culture reinforced the importance of the spoken word
because they required personal confrontations; Southern Honor, 46-48, 56-58, and
pt. 3.

EN31. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York,
1978), 157. Levine's work is indispensable for historians studying southern folk
cultures, black or whtie.

EN32. Kenneth Schuyler Lynn, Mark Twain and Southern Humor (Boston, 1960),
23-32.

EN33. Harden Taliaferro created a character who incited others to fight by
inadvertently uttering Latin phrases, making them feel intellectually inferior;
Fisher's River Scenes, 193-94. Mike Fink once challenged a man who failed to
laugh at his stories, claiming that the stranger's sullenness dampened
everyone's spirits; Blair and Meine, Mike Fink, 112-13. For the theme of
defending reputation, see Peter Berger et al., The Homeless Mind (New York,
1973), 83-96; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 14-15; and Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance
and Justice, Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (new
York, 1984), chap. 1.

EN34. For example, see C.F. Hoffman, A Winter in the West, By a New Yorker, 2
(New York, 1835), 221-24, as cited in James I. Robertson, Jr., "Frolics, Fights,
and Firewater in Frontier Tennessee," Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 17 (1958):
97. Whites' sensitivity to affront can be contrasted with blacks who made
ritualized insult into a dueling game commonly called "the dozens." Playing the
dozens toughened blacks for the abuse that whites inevitably gave them. See, for
example, Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 344-58; John Dollard,
"The Dozens: Dialect of Insult," American Imago, 1(1939): 3-25; and Roger D.
Abrahams, "Playing the Dozens," Journal of American Folklore, 75(1962): 209-20.
Both articles are reprinted in Alan Dundes, Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973), 277-94, 295-309.

EN35. Thus Christian Schultz, Jr., overheard two drunken riverboatmen arguing
over a Choctaw woman; Moore, Frontier Mind, 115. Also see Richard M. Dorson,
ed., Davy Crockett, American Comic Legend (New York, 1939), xv-xvii.

EN36. Albert B. Lord and Milman Perry found that, despite the passage of
decades, Serbo-Croatian epics changed in detail but not in plot or structure.
Lord described their field studies in his The Singer of Tales (New York, 1971),
chaps., 1-3. Also see William R. Ferris, Jr., Blues from the Delta (New York,
1978), sect. 2.

EN37. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor, 27.

EN38. Blair and Meine, Mike Fink, 105-06.

EN39. Stith Thompson, The Folktale (New York, 1946), and Motif Index of Folk
Literature (Bloomington, Ind., 1955-58).

EN40. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2: 75-83.

EN41. See, for example, Eugene W. Hollon, Frontier Violence, Another Look (New
York, 1974), 21; "A Kentucky Fight," New York Spirit of the Times, December 12,
1835, p. 2; Richard M. Dorson, America in Legend (New York, 1973), 57-122; Neil
Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Boston, 1973), 67-89; and Lawrence W.
Levine, "William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural
Transformation, American Historical Review, 89 (1984): 53-54.

EN42. New York Spirit of the Timesm May 30, 1846, p. 159. Legends of frontier
fighting found their way into comic almanacs and dime novels and onto the urban
stage. Grandiose boasts and legendary fights fed a national tradition
celebrating larger-than-life heroes. See Blair and Meine, Mike Fink 105-25;
Constance Rourke, American Humor (New York, 1931), 53-55; Dorson, Davy Crockett,
xv-xxvi, 34-35, 38-42, 60-61, 127-30; and Robertson, "Frolics, Fights, and
Firewater," 97-99.

EN43. For the most wide-ranging discussion of violence in American fiction, see
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence (Middletown, Conn., 1973), esp.
chaps. 9-13. Also see David Brion Davis, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860
(Ithaca, 1957); and Kenneth Schuyler Lynn, "Violence in American Literature and
Folklore," in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America:
Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York, 1969), 226-45.

EN44. James B. Finley, as quoted in Moore, Frontier Mind, 87; and Dorson, Davy
Crockett, 83. Another Kentuckian fought an alligator and insisted that his
comrades stay back and "give the fellow fair play." The alligator, of course,
lost both eyes. Moore, Frontier Mind, 87.

EN45. "An Arkansas Fight," New York Spirit of the Times, February 18, 1843, p.
611. For an analysis of the graphic realism of such stories, see Norris Yates,
William T. Porter and the Spirit of the Times (Baton Rouge, 1957), 118-22.

EN46. For two examinations of the deep pessimism and melancholy pervading
backwoods life, see Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 29-34; and Bruce, Violence and
Culture, chap. 4. Also see Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884;
reprint, New York, 1959), 104-07.

EN47. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor, 23-32.

EN48. Rourke, American Humor. Chap. 2. Neil Harris argued that stretching the
limits of credulity was precisely the appeal of P.T. Barnum. In a democratic
society, individuals must distinguish sham from truth, the very game Barnum
played with his audience; Humbug, 67-89.

EN49. Dorson, Davy Crockett, 83.

EN50. Moore, Frontier Mind, 112.

EN51. In Regeneration Through Violence, Slotkin argued that this contradiction
was the very font of literature and folklore on the American frontier. Also see
Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor, 23-32.

EN52. Folklorists and literary scholars, primarily interested in textual
analysis, too readily dismiss the reality of these battles. See, for example,
Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America's Humor from Poor Richard to Doonesbury
(New York, 1978), 113-32; and Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor, 23-32.

EN53. Benjamin F. Perry, as quoted in Williams, Vogues in Villainy, 33; Dorson,
Davy Crockett, xv-xvi; and Robertson, "Frolics, Fights, and Firewater," 109.
Perry's diary, 1832-60, is in the Southern Historical Collection of the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Williams also recounted the case of a
judge who sentenced two defendants - one missing his lip, the other an ear - to
the same cell: "[Now] you may bite one another as you please"; Vogues in
Villainy, 33. Wyatt-Brown included the following account: "In Davidson County,
North Carolina, a drunken young mountaineer named William Tippett had bitten off
a large piece of old Arthur Newsome's chin, almost plucked out his left eye, and
grasped Newsome's right eye with his other hand. A witness at the tavern scene
reported that Tipett 'felt the eyeball slip around his fingers,' and said with a
laugh before the crowd watching that 'he reckoned the fire flew mightily' out of
that eye. Indeed, the old man was left with just one, badly injured, eye when
the right one popped out some days later." Southern Honor, 393.

EN54. On the remarkably high rate of interpersonal violence in the South, see
Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 9-33, 98-101, 111-16, 263-76; Michael S. Hindus,
Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South
Carolina, 1767-1878 (Chapel Hill, 1980), 42-49, 63-67, 96-98; and Williams,
Vogues in Villainy, 6-7, 11-14, 31-38.

EN55. The nature or nurture debate rages on. For examples, see Erich Fromm, The
Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York, 1973), pts. 1, 2; Clifford Geertz,
"The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of the Mind," in his The Interpretation
of Cultures (New York, 1973), chap. 3; Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (New York,
1969); Richard G. Sipes, "War, Sports, and Aggression: An Empirical Test of Two
Rival Theories," American Anthropologist, new ser., 75 (1973): 64-86; Edward O.
Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass., 1975); Charles J.
Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson, Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of Mind
(Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Daniel G. Freedman, Human Sociobiolgy (New York,
1979); Ashley Montagu, ed., Sociobiology Examined (New York, 1980); Michael S.
Gregory, et al., Not in our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (New
York, 1984); Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biol! ogy (Ann Arbor, 1976);
Stephen Jay Gould, "Genes on the Brain, New York Review, June 30, 1983, pp.
5-10; and Peter Marsh and Anne Campbell, eds., Aggression and Violence (Oxford,
1982).

EN56. Moore, Frontier Mind, 114-118; Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South, chap.
3; and Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, esp. chap. 2. Several recent studies have
emphasized the premodern, localistic social and cultural patterns of the upland
South and their transformation during the middle decades of the nineteenth
century. See Hahn, Roots of Populism, pt. 1; J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and
Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978), chaps 1,5;
William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860
(Princeton, 1974), chap. 1; and Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, "The South
from Self-Sufficiency to Peonage: An Interpretation," American Historical
Review, 85 (1980): 1103-11.

EN57. Moore, Frontier Mind, 117-121; Bruce, Violence and Culture, chaps. 4, 9;
Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South, chap. 3; and Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The
Trans-Appalachian Frontier (New York, 1978), 283-84.

EN58. Flint, as quoted in Moore, Frontier Mind, 115; and Twain, Life on the
Mississippi (1883; reprint, New York, 1961), 24.

EN59. Robertson, "Frolics, Fights, and Firewater"; Isaac, Transformation of
Virginia, 94-98; and Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, esp. chaps. 2, 3, 6, 11, 13.
For a speculative discussion of the transformation of male roles from premodern
to modern times, see Peter N. Stearns, Be a Man: Males in Modern Society (New
York, 1979), chaps. 2, 3.

EN60. Robertson, "Frolics, Fights, and Firewater," 109. Robertson noted that
observers were so aroused during an 1816 fight in Elkton, Tennessee, that
several rough-and-tumbles quickly commenced.

EN61. Bruce, Violence and Culture, chap. 9. For a fine discussion of changing
English attitudes toward animals, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World
(London, 1983), esp. chaps. 3, 4. An American counterpart to Thomas's work
remains to be written.

EN62. Moore described the group values of these men; Frontier Mind, 119-22.
Intense loyalties and frightful intragroup competition at first seem
contradictory. For an excellent discussion of how mutually exclusive norms, such
as dependence and independence, coexist in the southern mountains, see Kai T.
Erikson, Everything in Its Path (New York, 1976), 88-93. Also see Stearn's
discussion of male values in hunting societies; Be a Man, chap. 2.

EN63. Ashe, Travels in America, 82-88. Also see Williams, Vogues in Villainy,
26.

EN64. Transformation of Virginia, pt. 2; and Donald G. Matthews, Religion in the
Old South (Chicago, 1977), chap. 3. For an exceptional discussion of the social
and religious origins of the northern work ethic, see Daniel T. Rodgers, The
Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago, 1979), esp. chap. 1. On
crime patterns and social differences in the nineteenth-century North and south,
see Hindus, Prison and Plantation, 34-36, 53-55, 96-98, 242-55; and Ayers,
Vengeance and Justice, 16-33, 119-23.

EN65. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, chaps. 2,3; Rodgers, Work Ethic in Industrial
America, chap. 1; Hahn, Southern Populism, pt. 1; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice,
chap. 4; Thornton, Politics and Power, chaps. 1-5; and Barney, Secessionist
Impulse, chap. 1.

EN66. Woodward, "Southern Ethic in a Puritan World," 36-37, 42. For a fine
analysis of southerners' historic compulsion to discuss their region, see Fred
Hobson, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge, 1983).

EN67. For Old World examples, see Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in
English Society, 1700-1850 (Cambridge, 1973), chap. 4; and Peter Burke, Popular
Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978), chaps. 7-9.

EN68. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 366-69; and Julio Caro-Baroja, "Honour and
Shame: An Historical Account of Several Conflicts," trans. R. Johnson, in J.G.
Peristiany, Honour and Shame (Chicago, 1966), 88-91.

EN69. Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978),
200-04. While I find dubious Elias's argument on the recent evolution of man's
brain, his contention that manners, customs, and etiquette become vehicles of
status emulation is convincing. For brilliant recent discussions of routine
cruelty to animals through the eighteenth century and beyond, see Thomas, Man
and the Natural World, chaps 3, 4; and Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre
(New York, 1984), chap. 2. For violence in British sports, see Malcolmson,
Popular Recreations, chap. 3; and Eric Dunning and Kenneth Sheard, Barbarians,
Gentlemen, and Players: A Sociological Study of the Development of Rugby
Football (New York, 1979), 32-43.

EN70. Charles Agustus Murray was especially struck by the quixotic character of
Kentucky hunters. See Murray, Travels in North America (1840; reprint, London,
1854), 175-76. Grady McWhiney has kindly lent me a draft chapter entitled
"Violence" from his forthcoming book on the Celtic origins of southern culture
(co-authored with Forrest McDonald). McWhiney's manuscript vividly captures the
raw texture of antebellum southern life. I am not persuaded, however, by the
Celtic thesis because too much evidence, including works cited above, indicates
that violence was endemic to much of Britain and the Continent. Moreover, even
if descendents of Celts were more violent than others, class, not culture, may
be the reason - a factor McWhiney fails to consider. For other examples of
violence, see Darnton, Great Cat Massacre, chap. 1; and Lawrence Stone, the
Crises of the Aristocracy, 1558-1642 (New York, 1965), 223-34.

EN71. Berger et al., Homeless Mind, 83-94.

EN72. Honor has especially concerned anthropologists of the Mediterranean. In
Peristiany's Honour and Shame, see, especially, "Introduction," 9-18;
Pitt-Rivers, "Honour and Social Status," 19-77; and Caro-Baroja, "Honor and
Shame," 81-137. All of the essays in this collection are informative. Also see
Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Sechem or the Politics of Sex (Cambridge, 1977),
"Honor," in David Sills, ed., The International Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences, 6 (New York, 1968), 503-10; and J. Davis, People of the Mediterranean
(London, 1977), 89-101.

EN73. Wyatt-Brown's book is brilliant but occasionally exasperating. For
example, he too often treated culture as something established millennia ago and
barely modified until the nineteenth century - thus, his rather cavalier
dismissal of his slavery as the major formative fact of southern history. In his
urge to trace broad themes, he sometimes oversimplified complex cultural
diversity. Amid marvelous ethnographic detail and insightful analyses of kinship
patterns, sexual roles, power relationships, and so forth, Wyatt-Brown
frequently fell back on a static and superorganic concept of culture that failed
to do justice to those immediate historical changes. Southerners were not
Teutonic tribesmen; they were not even Celtic herdsmen. Thus the concept of
honor, as applied by Wyatt-Brown, is too all-encompassing. We need to know more
about how and why honor varies across economic systems and cultures.
Nevertheless, Wyatt-Brown asked the right questions, and his book is filled with
probing discussions and brilliant insights. It is a seminal work because it will
frame years of future debate. Orlando Patterson has written a penetrating
critique of Wyatt-Brown's book. See Reviews in American History, 12 (1984):
24-30. For a probing discussion of the northern conscience versus southern
shame, see Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, chap. 1.

EN74. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, chaps. 2, 3, 13. Also see Bruce, Violence and
Culture, chaps. 1-4; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, chap. 5; Ayers,
Vengeance and Justice, 9-28, 99-101; and William J. Cooper, The South and the
Politics of Slavery, 1828-1856 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 69-74, 238-44. Growing
numbers of evangelicals, a small bourgeois class, and transplanted foreigners
and Yankees were the most conspicuous opponents of the southern concept of
honor.

EN75. By definition, bondsmen were "men without honor" in all slave societies.
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 10-13, and
chap 3.

EN76. Williams, Duelling in the Old South, 26-28; and Wyatt-Brown, Southern
Honor, 355-57.

EN77. On the ambiguous position of poor whites with respect to slavery and
equality, see William L. Barney, The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the
Old South (New York, 1972), 10-11, 42-43, 2-65, 136-37; Barney, Secessionist
Impulse, 38-48; Frederickson, Black Image, chap. 2; Cooper, The south and the
Politics of Slavery, 370-74; Thornton, Politics and Power, xviii-xx, 55-58,
320-21, 443-50; Morgan, American Slavery, 376-87; and Patterson, Slavery and
Social Death, 94-97. Ayers, unlike Wyatt-Brown, argued that slavery was
essential to the southern honor ethic, a position I find persuasive; Vengeance
and Justice, 26-27.

EN78. On dueling, see Bruce, Violence and Culture, chap. 1; Williams, Duelling
in the Old South, chaps. 1-4; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 350-61; Hindus,
Prison and Plantation, 42-438; and Stephen M. Stowe, "The Touchiness of the
Gentleman Planter: The Sense of Esteem and continuity in the Ante-Bellum South,"
Psychohistory Review, 8 (1979): 6-17. Symbolic inversion has received
considerable attention recently from anthropologists. For a wide-ranging sample
of its applications, see Barbara A. Babcock, ed., The Reversible World: Symbolic
Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca, 1978). By the antebellum period, knife
fights with opponents' arms tied together and quick-draw gun battles marked
backwoods fighting, which again seems to mock, with outrageous brutality, the
decorum of duels. See Williams, Duelling in the Old South, 7; and Davis,
Homicide in American Fiction, 267-72.

EN79. Rohrbaugh documented the unusually high level of violence on the
southwestern frontier in contrast to the northwestern edge of settlement;
Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 117-18, 275-84. Also see Sheldon Hackney, "Southern
Violence," American Historical Review, 74 (1969): 906-25; Bruce, Violence and
Culture; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, chap. 13; Isaac, Transformation of
Virginia, chap. 5; Hindus, Prison and Plantation, chap.3; Ayers, Vengeance and
Justice, 98-101, 113-17; Williams, Vogues in Villainy, 31-38; Franklin, Militant
South, chap. 3; and McWhiney, "Violence." For violence in the contemporary
South, see John Shelton Reed, The Enduring South (Lexington, Mass, 1972), chap.
5.

EN80. "The next thing I knowed I was a comen down on him with my hands and my
teeth like when I was young, fighten back home. I recollect a thinken, 'If I
cain't kill him, I'll mark him up good.' So's I gouged at his eye, chewed on his
yer. I'd know him now in a million." Thus, Clovis Novels described a fight in
the 1940s in Harriet Arnow's novel The Dollmaker (New York, 1954). The
contemporary works of novelist Harry Crews also contain descriptions of mayhem
resembling eye-gouging matches.

EN81. Leyburn, Scotch Irish, 264-67; Hahn, Roots of Populism, chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5;
Barney, Secessionist Impulse, chap. 1; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, conclusion;
and Thornton, Politics and Power, 291-311, 318-21.

EN82. Murray, Travels in North America, 175-78; Hollon, Frontier Violence,
109-10; Franklin, Militant South, chap. 3; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 350-61;
Bruce, Violence and Culture, chap. 1; Davis, Homicide in American Fiction, Chap.
10; McWhiney, "Violence"; and Dorson, Davy Crockett, 84.

EN38. Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina, 46-47; and Bruce, Violence and
Culture, chap. 1. Wyatt-Brown succinctly captured the social function of the
code of honor: "Duelling was a means to demonstrate status and manliness among
those calling themselves gentlemen, whether born of noble blood or not";
Southern Honor, 355. Williams also saw dueling as symbolic social climbing;
Duelling in the Old South, chap. 3.

JManly Apr 2001

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