Civil War History

In early February 1863, soldiers from the Seventeenth and Twenty-Third Regiments, South Carolina Volunteers (SCV) engaged in a fierce battle with each other. Both units were camped in North Carolina and were part of the same brigade that was commanded by Gen. Nathan George Evans, yet this did not prevent what one participant described as a scene of “desperate fighting” between the two regiments, in which “the balls flew thick and fast.” Fortunately, the fighting was not real, and the men exchanged balls made of snow rather than lead. Some of the officers of Evans’ Brigade were, however, already engaged in a very real and serious conflict with each other. David Jackson Logan, a member of the Seventeenth and a contributor to the Yorkville Enquirer, had noted the internecine strife a week prior to providing the above description of the snowball fight, explaining: “There is much bad feeling among the officers of our Brigade.”¹ Two key figures within this conflict were Evans, the brigade’s commander, and Fitz William McMaster, the colonel of the Seventeenth SCV. Following the Battle of Kinston in mid-December 1862, McMaster headed up a petition signed by himself and thirty-seven other officers in the brigade requesting that they be transferred to some other command. Their desire to be [End Page 76] transferred stemmed from concerns about Evans’s competence and his sobriety. Evans was incensed and believed—with justification—that McMaster was the orchestrator of this attempt to undermine his reputation and authority. Accordingly, by the time Logan provided his rather whimsical account of the members of Evans’ Brigade pelting each other with snowballs, Evans and Mc-Master had already been casting serious aspersions against each other. During the first half of 1863, both officers would come before military courts to address allegations that were made in the wake of Kinston, and the resultant rancor from their clash would prove long-standing.

A close analysis of the dispute between Evans and McMaster offers the historian an ideal opportunity to rethink constructions of manhood and honor in the mid-nineteenth-century US South and, importantly, to also better understand how the circumstances of war impinged on these constructions. Indeed, by invoking ideas about alcohol and intoxication, cowardice and bravery, insult and appropriate retribution, the dispute clustered around contemporary understandings of what it meant to be an honorable gentleman. The notion that masculinity was a driving force in all of this was neatly encapsulated by a confidant of McMaster who congratulated his friend that the publication and distribution of McMaster’s court-martial proceedings had left Evans “a dead cock in the pit.”² A cockfight was an apt metaphor, as the image of fierce combat encapsulated the need to dominate that lay at the heart of antebellum Southern manhood, while the baying audience symbolized the interconnected individual performance and communal sanction of honor. Evans and McMaster each sought to vanquish the other, and to do so, they needed their actions and behavior to be approved by their peers.³

The pages that follow outline the evolution of the Evans-McMaster feud during the US Civil War and, in doing so, probe its significance with regards to regional understandings of manhood (for the avoidance of doubt, it must be [End Page 77] emphasized that this article focuses specifically on ideas about masculinity and honor held by men of the middle and upper strata of white Southern society). A number of fine studies have identified divergent visions of white manhood in the antebellum South, often by portraying an older “masquerade culture” of performative honor and gentlemanliness as being challenged by more modern impulses that were stimulated by the market, evangelicalism, and/or generational transition.⁴ In one such fine study, John Mayfield has noted how both ethics shared an undeniable desire to dominate but the means to that end diverged: “Manhood in the marketplace required shrewdness over fearlessness, cleverness over generosity, a tough rationalism over pride, self-discipline over conspicuous waste, and the occasional need to be downright deceptive rather than transparent.”⁵ Amy S...