An education in Southern masculinity: The Ball family of South Carolina in the New Republic.

IN THE 1780s JOHN BALL SR., RECENTLY MARRIED TO HIS FIRST COUSIN and inheritor of several hundred acres on two plantations from his late father, assumed leadership of one of the South's wealthiest, most powerful families. Along with similarly prominent kin groups, including the Bulls and Pinckneys of John's native South Carolina and the Carrolls and Lees of the Chesapeake Bay region, the Balls had, by the Revolutionary era, enjoyed nearly a century of power and prestige in the South. (1) As rich, slaveholding planters with commercial ties throughout the Atlantic world, families such as these tended to monopolize political offices in their provincial governments as well as the paths to wealth and social prominence. Colonial assumptions about the importance of deference and the power of lineage, coupled with the synergetic economic and political domination of these men and their relatives, meant that few of the "lesser sorts" challenged gentry command of colonial society. (2) But as John Sr. took charge of the Ball patrimony in the midst of the American Revolution, the structures of colonial society and government--and the cultural assumptions that underlay them--had begun to erode.

By the time John Sr.'s eldest son and namesake came of age at the turn of the nineteenth century, southern elites, who had enjoyed a long history of unchallenged mastery, faced a changing world. John Ball Jr. and his cohort numbered among the first sons of the United States. (3) In the wake of the American Revolution and during the transition to a market economy, personal accomplishments mattered more and family lineage mattered less. Increasingly, elite men needed to prove their merit to their peers rather than relying on inherited status from their families. Certainly the wealthy enjoyed easier access to education, refinement, reputation, and other determinants of social worth. However, this rising generation had to cultivate these attributes publicly in order to acquire the power their fathers had simply assumed. Simultaneously, slaveholding southerners heard the first rumblings of antislavery sentiment from the North. The questions thus arose: How could a nation founded on the principle of personal liberty deny freedom to African Americans and endorse slavery? Could one be a virtuous citizen of the republic and also be a slave owner? The answers remained unclear in the early republic; the questions alone, however, implicitly challenged the southern economy and southern gentry society. As boys of John Jr.'s age grew to manhood, the class and racial foundations of American society shifted beneath their feet. John Sr. and his wife, Jane Ball, thus faced a daunting task in rearing their offspring in the early republic. John Jr. had to prepare himself for a leadership position in southern society. His future prospects and the vitality of the Ball family hung in the balance.

Sixteen-year-old John Ball Jr.'s departure for Harvard College in the summer of 1798 produced an intensive letter-writing effort on the part of his parents, aimed at steering the boy toward a proper education, code of masculine conduct, and respect for family duty--in short, toward the cultivation of leadership skills. (The parents preserved copies of their own letters but not those of their son.) (4) The surviving letters only hint at John Jr.'s reaction to the advice proffered. But they clearly define the masculine identity John Jr.'s parents expected him to adopt, a set of qualities that struck a balance between embracing national values and conserving southern customs. The Ball family correspondence thus provides a compelling look at white southern masculine ideals in the new nation, even as the South as a self-defined region first began to take shape. Indeed, John Sr.'s letters read like a prescriptive manual for achieving southern genteel manhood. Jane Ball also contributed to the grooming of John Jr., but as was typical among elite southern families, the father played the greater role in delineating the parameters of appropriate male behavior. In the process of instructing their son, the Balls revealed the efforts of southern aristocrats to come to terms with their changing position in American society. (5)

The Balls and similar families do not easily fit into existing historiographical assumptions about masculinity. Scholars interested in masculinity in early America have primarily focused their attention on men in the North and, more particularly, on how republican political ideology and the transition to a market economy encouraged a changing code of male behavior among middle-class white men in that region. Individualistic, wage-earning, "self-made" men were increasingly idealized in the nineteenth-century urbanizing North. (6) The Ball case study indicates that this paradigm breaks down in the South, revealing a distinctly southern dimension to masculine ideals and presaging the sectional self-consciousness and divisiveness that characterized antebellum America. The Balls also demonstrate the power of gender in the privileged lives of powerful patriarchs and wealthy slaveholders. (7) Despite all their wealth and power--and, ironically, because of it--elite southern men such as the Balls faced a complex and exacting set of assumptions about masculinity. The Ball family evidence therefore offers intriguing parallels to studies of femininity and women's identity in this era. (8)

Taking the Ball family as illustrative of the southern aristocracy, this essay seeks to uncover the values that elite parents purposefully inculcated in their adolescent sons, the role of both southern conservatism and national changes in forming those values, and the rigidity of the code of genteel southern masculinity. The frequency and thoroughness of the Ball correspondence make it a telling example of gentry culture. Many southern boys received advisory letters or reprimands from parents or patrons; John Jr. got persistent prompting on every dimension of southern manhood. The Balls' thoroughgoing advice did not, however, differ appreciably from that sent to other boys of similar circumstances. Selective inclusion in this essay of materials from other families' papers demonstrates that many elite southern parents, who wrote less frequently or comprehensively than the Balls, nevertheless coached their sons toward a similar code of masculine conduct that married national norms to southern traditions. As this generation of southern parents prepared their sons for the future, they integrated their colonial past of elite entitlement, localism, and family-based power with the emerging vision of the American future, which prized individual merit and self-determination.

The decision to send John Jr. to college--and to an American institution in the North--reflected a series of important shifts in national, southern, and masculine values. A generation earlier, a young elite man like John Jr. would have most likely traveled abroad for his education, if he received any such institutional schooling. In the Revolutionary era, however, many southern fathers came to believe that Europe had grown too decadent and encouraged those quintessential eighteenth-century sins of idleness and dissipation. Increasingly, they determined that a more appropriate education would be acquired at home, where American youths could become informed, virtuous citizens of the new republic and successful representatives of their families. (9)

The education southern parents sought for their sons did not center exclusively, or even primarily, on academics. Instead, they broadly construed education to include refinement, the development of reputation, and preparation for leadership. This education required proficiency in oratory and penmanship and knowledge of science, Latin, and literature. Such erudition, however, was a consequence of and subordinate to acquiring a reputation that would thereby merit power. Sarah Reeve Gibbes, a wealthy South Carolina contemporary of the Balls, sent her son John to Princeton in 1783 with the lofty standard "of your attaining that knowledge which will ... make you not only a credit to Your Family; but also an honor to Your Country." Henry W. DeSaussure also expressed this priority in an 1810 letter to his young relative, John E. Colhoun, a student at Yale. DeSaussure advised Colhoun to pursue a course of study that would allow him to serve both his family and the young nation, reminding the boy that "idleness & ignorance can never enable a young man to be useful to either." Gibbes and DeSaussure typified the expectations and the explicit advice of parents in the early republic, and the Balls were no different. As John Jr. headed off to Harvard, they urged him to conduct himself so that the family would be honored and "your country will be ornamented by you." (10)

Education and personal accomplishments became more valued in the wake of the Revolution as Americans questioned the viability and necessity of a natural aristocracy. When he came of age in the 1770s, John Ball Sr. received no formal university education. Like generations of Balls before him, his birthright ensured his place in society. His son, however, grew up in a new nation that identified individual achievement and educational credentials as prerequisites to power and reputation. As an older man, John Sr. lamented that his own formal education had been "too much neglected by my fond Father." (11) He determined that no such mistake would be made with John Jr., whose attainments could reinforce and perpetuate familial status. A university education allowed John Jr. to lay a proper foundation for his inclusion in the emerging American meritocracy. Honoring the new cultural demands on young men while simultaneously exhibiting the hereditary wealth of the family, John Ball Sr. bought the best education he could for his son, at Harvard. Other southerners made different decisions when selecting a college, opting for Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, or Yale (which drew a particularly large contingent of South Carolinians during the early republic). Young John C. Calhoun, a contemporary of John Ball Jr., struggled to determine "which college is in the highest repute northerly." After consultation with his relative Andrew Pickens Jr., Calhoun chose Yale in 1802. (12) At the turn of the nineteenth century, the paucity of prestigious universities in the South left few alternatives to traveling north to study. Moreover, attending a distinguished northern school added to a man's pedigree and validated his claim to power in southern society.

As early as the 1790s, southern parents who had decided to send their sons to a university nevertheless expressed concerns about the kind of education their offspring might receive in the North. John and Jane routinely warned their son about negative influences at Harvard: they feared that he might form objectionable friendships, fall in love with a northern woman, drink, or gamble; and they especially worried that he might adopt the views of Massachusetts antislavery advocates. As his father explained, John Jr. stood in peril of "imbibing principles ... against the interest of the southern states." The Balls were not alone in anticipating that southern "traditions" might find little sustenance in northern institutions. John C. Calhoun complained shortly after his arrival in New Haven, "There is ... a considerable prejudice here against both the southern states and students." By 1815, Virginian James McDowell insisted that Yale was "the capital of Yankee Land." Both self-defined and marked by northerners as different, southern boys regularly reported socializing with other students from their region and sometimes clashing with northern classmates. Even educators wrote of the differences between northern and southern students. In 1807, for instance, Edward Hooker, a New England tutor in the South, informed his relatives that "Southern students require a different management" from their New England counterparts. Southern boys apparently exhibited far more willfulness and far less piety than northerners. John Calhoun concluded that northern boys "are certainly more penurious, more contracted in their sentiments, and less social, than the Carolinians. But as to morality we must yield." These comments pale beside the vitriol directed against northerners in general and northern schools in particular in the late antebellum era. While far subtler, such early national student criticism nonetheless evinces a shift toward, if not a full immersion in, sectional awareness and animosity. (13)

A second set of issues, endemic in early national university life, also produced parental anxieties. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, fathers, uncles, and elder brothers oversaw the formal education and apprenticeships of their younger relatives. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, young men increasingly traveled alone to colleges and socialized away from the watchful eyes of family members. Peer groups at these institutions now provided the locus for the critical transformation from the awkwardness and impulsiveness of youth to the rationality and virtue of manhood. As a result, college fostered a distinct male youth culture based on friendship, affection, and sometimes intimacy. Not surprisingly, an environment centered in large part on youthful independence, socializing, and gentry entitlement did not necessarily create dutiful sons. Congregated together and away from parental authority, college boys regularly engaged in mischievous, even violent behavior. (14) John Sr. worried about the school's ability to "govern so many young men collected together from different parts of the Union" and feared that his son would fraternize with disreputable classmates and engage in hedonistic behavior. (15)

John Sr.'s concerns were well placed, for students enjoyed unprecedented freedoms to drink, carouse, squander money, and run wild while at school and separated from their parents. Southerners in particular gave in to those temptations; and southern institutions were particularly raucous. As Henry DeSaussure learned in 1805, it was rumored that "Gambling & debauchery prevail" at the College of South Carolina. Warner Wormeley of Virginia behaved so badly while away at school in England that his father threatened in 1801 to "leave my estate to my daughters, and only so much to you, as may keep you from indigence and want." The College of South Carolina suspended young Henry Grimke in 1818, and only his father's intervention saved him from being "ruined ... in the eyes of all considerate persons." Henry Clay similarly interceded on his son Henry Jr.'s behalf after the young man's dismissal from West Point. When Princeton erupted in student riots in 1807, southern students received the blame. South Carolinian Martha Laurens Ramsay attributed the uprising to her region's sons and "their idleness, their impatience of control, their extravagance, [and] their self consequence." (16)

For some southern fathers, the fears of violence and truculence at southern colleges outweighed their concerns about exposing their sons to antislavery sentiment at northern schools. Henry Middleton, a South Carolina contemporary of John Ball Sr., shipped his son off to Harvard in 1811 "with a view to the double benefit to be derived from the Climate & the discipline of that College which from all the information I can obtain is more perfect than in our Southern Institutions." Throughout his stay at Yale, John C. Calhoun wanted to circulate among more southerners. But he allowed that being separated from boys of his own region "diminishes something from our social pleasure, yet contributes considerably to our studious habits." When South Carolinian William Martin traveled to Connecticut in 1809, he put things even more bluntly. "Education is more regarded," he wrote of the northern states, "its importance & necessity are held in highest estimation.... I feel for my country & blush at the comparison." (17)

Few fathers, however, imagined they could fully shield their sons from the temptations that college life offered. Individual and collective improprieties occurred so commonly that most parents took student misbehavior as a given. Some parents, moreover, viewed those enticing distractions as important trials of manhood. John Ball Sr. never directly articulated a desire to test his son's character by exposing him to such perilous experiences, but he certainly acted as if that were his agenda. Other southern fathers did voice such expectations. When Gabriel Manigault, a wealthy neighbor of the Balls, sent his son Harry abroad in 1807, he dreaded the company the young man might keep. However, meeting and transcending negative influences represented an important lesson. As Gabriel explained, "We cannot expect that my Son is to escape bad examples. He must be exposed to them, as he must to various kinds of temptation. If he has good sense he will escape them. They may even be a service." When Harry fell in with a ne'er-do-well, Gabriel determined that "I will caution him about this young man, & that being all that can be done, we must hope for the best." (18) Exposure to circumstances that might compromise a son's honor and duty was a rite of passage that parents anticipated. While the Balls wrote religiously, they did not deem it appropriate to sequester John Jr. from the world; indeed, their responsibility was to introduce him gradually to life's difficult choices and encourage the right behavior. Harvard, then, appeared to be a moderate proving ground for a boy of John Jr.'s class and temperament.

Harvard offered much to a young man seeking to fashion a reputation and prepare himself for his future. The university was famous for superior learning and excellent socializing, and prominent families throughout the young nation routinely chose Harvard for their sons. Like these other families, the Balls wanted their son to acquire a network of prestigious friendships that would advance the boy's reputation. Such ties could be procured only at a handful of schools, and Harvard, they believed, ranked first. Harvard also attracted some of the finest teacher-scholars in America. This, however, mattered less to most parents than the institution's ability to promote social connections. Indeed, the Balls, typical of southern parents in the early republic, wrote far more about John's social life than his academic pursuits. (One of the puzzling hallmarks of family correspondence with sons away at school is the paucity of references to curriculum.) Although intellectual preparation was not as important as socializing, an excellent academic record still enhanced the status of Harvard's graduates and made a desirable addition to the superior social network.

Harvard, moreover, was renowned for respecting social hierarchy within its student population and in the political leanings of its trustees and president. The college stopped officially ranking students according to the social status of their fathers in 1773, but family lineage continued to carry significant weight in informal matters. (19) Harvard drew the scions of Boston's elite as well as wealthy young men from across the nation. The Balls, who numbered among the richest of Charleston's gentry, could rest assured that their son would circulate with young men of similar backgrounds whose families shared many of the ambitions of John Sr. and Jane. (20) The Balls also identified with Harvard's Federalist-leaning politics. Like many among the nation's elite, Harvard president Joseph Willard "questioned the democratizing thrust of the Revolution." Along with a number of important Harvard professors and trustees, Willard became an outspoken social conservative and Federalist by the 1790s. Conversely, Yale had been headed until 1795 by Ezra Stiles, who had publicly expressed sympathy for the French Revolution and quietly supported Jeffersonian Republicanism. Although Timothy Dwight, a staunch Federalist, replaced Stiles three years before John and Jane selected a school for their son, the reputation of Stiles may have lingered. The College of William and Mary, a closer option for the Balls, leaned toward the Republicans as well. (The University of Virginia, the College of South Carolina, and the University of Georgia all welcomed their first classes several years later.) Harvard thus offered the right social and intellectual environment for John Jr. and the proper class and political ideology. (21)

Once parents determined the location of a boy's formal education, the real work of sons began. To become genteel men, southern boys necessarily devoted themselves to practicing an elaborate and rigid code of conduct. The genteel identity that John Sr. embodied and encouraged in his son was not simply internal; it required self-conscious cultivation, public display, and societal affirmation. In order to attain the requisite recognition of their genteel masculine identity, men exhibited appropriate attributes and suppressed behaviors that ran counter to this ideal. Only then could a man merit respect, claim social power, and bring honor to his family. (22)

The advice literature that swept America in the late eighteenth century profoundly affected John Ball Sr.'s ideas about self-fashioning and gentility. This new current of prescriptive writings, of which Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son was the most influential, encouraged the open and calculated shaping of one's identity for public consumption. Prior generations of Americans certainly worried about how others perceived them, and they exhibited to their friends and neighbors the best possible representation of themselves. They, too, read advice literature, but in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries prescriptive writings concentrated on morality and religiosity. The new wave of manuals, conversely, told young people to focus their energies on outward attributes and to construct the self especially for its presentation in society. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Letters to His Son was a runaway best-seller in America. Along with Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth and the 110 precepts of George Washington's "Rules of Civility," Chesterfield's letters helped codify the new ideals of genteel society and encouraged a conscious attention to the publicly represented self. At the same time, these texts served to confine men's behavior by delineating acceptable and unacceptable masculine characteristics. American men increasingly followed their advice, rigorously attending to outward signs of refinement and manliness. (23) For many, this attention to the public presentation of self bordered on obsession. Lord Chesterfield, by way of example, bragged that forty years had passed since he had said or had written anything without first considering its societal implications. (24)

John Ball Sr. read Chesterfield carefully and echoed many of Chesterfield's ideas in his advisory letters to John Jr. (25) Paraphrasing conduct guides occurred fairly often in parental instruction in the nineteenth-century South. Historian Steven M. Stowe, for example, has demonstrated that the antebellum southern gentry frequently borrowed from popular advice writers such as Jasper Adams in their letters to children. (26) Chesterfield probably appealed to Ball because the two men wanted comparable things for their sons and worried about similar inadequacies in them. Each struggled with his son's predisposition toward shyness and awkwardness, and both informed the boys that their status as gentlemen required them to transcend these shortcomings. Ball repeatedly urged John Jr. to "strive then to get the better of your bashfulness," while Chesterfield told his son to "present yourself with the easy and genteel air of a man of fashion, who has kept good company." (27) Ball also endorsed Chesterfield's emphasis on forming proper friendships and circulating among polite society. Chesterfield warned his reticent son, "You must be sensible that you cannot rise in the world without forming connexions.... "Similarly, Ball coaxed his son to "cultivate with zeal the acquaintance you may get in genteel & respectable families." Ball borrowed Chesterfield's advice on a host of smaller issues as well, including physical comportment and gossip. (28) John's mother reiterated his father's concerns about reputation and self-mastery in her less frequent letters. Jane Ball cast herself in the role of indulgent, devoted mother, rearing a virtuous son whose vigilant attention to social, educational, and moral development would serve him well in the future. Having inculcated her gender's and generation's emphasis on republican motherhood, Jane repeatedly wrote her son about pursuing a path of virtue and honor in order to earn the esteem of his countrymen and prepare himself for public service. (29)

Most importantly, the Balls coached their son on--and personally practiced--the art of grooming the self for public presentation. To that end, certain traits had to be overcome and others nurtured. Anger, shyness, and excessive mirth intimated a lack of restraint and required suppression. Even facial expressions were controlled in order to shape others' assessments of one's internal character. In Chesterfield's words: "Make yourself absolute master, therefore, of your temper and your countenance--so far, at least, as that no visible change do appear in either, whatever you may feel inwardly." John Sr. and Jane charged their son with being "too serious" and "too bashful" and beseeched him to attend to his comportment in society. Other southerners expressed similar concerns about even the most trivial and spontaneous of actions. For example, Roger Pinckney's benefactor wrote that he hoped fourteen-year-old Roger and his friends "have not made your Mouths from Ear to Ear by immoderate laughing," and he warned the boy "to avoid saying, or doing any thing to give Offence." Richard Hopkins, a Maryland medical student, was also advised to embrace Chesterfield's code of conduct: "[T]he study of Books dont do alone. A man must have politeness and good breeding, otherwise his learning will never please--therefore a little Chesterfieldian politeness is essentially necessary." (30)

The Ball family letters themselves played a key role in affirming the father's and constructing the son's identities as gentlemen. As historian Richard L. Bushman has persuasively argued, participating in literate culture bespoke an individual's refinement in early America. Letter writing afforded genteel Americans the opportunity to display their status and provided others a gauge by which to evaluate the writer. Keenly aware of this intimate connection between correspondence and gentility, parents took writing seriously and spent a good deal of energy fostering the right style and content in their children's letters. (31)

Because letters provided the primary means of perpetuating the bond between father and son, John Sr. wrote regularly. He integrated his advice to John Jr. with family and local news. Writing about the world that his son had left behind allowed John Sr. to relay stories of neighbors as cautionary tales and to keep John Jr. informed about and connected to Charleston. John Sr. also insisted that John Jr. write frequent, lengthy letters offering a full accounting of his new life in Cambridge. Shortly after his departure from South Carolina, John Jr. received the following directive: "I wish you to write once a week by Post untill I countermand the order." In a subsequent letter John Sr. induced his son to "get into the way of writing more fully about yourself & favor me with more of your own observations on the country." When ignored, John Sr. could grow quite demanding. After six weeks went by in the spring of 1799 without a letter from Cambridge, he declared that "it is high time for us to get another." (32)

Besides being the exclusive means of communication between Cambridge and Charleston, letters served to measure John Jr.'s improvement in school and his success at adopting suitable masculine traits. Steven M. Stowe, who conducted extensive research into the letter-writing practices of antebellum southerners, has argued that when children traveled away from home to attend academies or colleges, their letters became "the best, and often the only, evidence that sons and daughters were growing up to be worthy persons." (33) Although the Ball family predates Stowe's research cohort by a generation, they demonstrated similar attitudes in their correspondence. Letter writing, insisted John Sr., "is a very useful branch of Education." In hopes of enhancing his son' s style, John Sr. recommended that the boy read printed collections of letters in the Harvard library and reread the letters he received from his South Carolina relatives. (34) As John Jr.'s correspondence began to improve near the end of his first year at Harvard, his father encouraged him to write to his uncle, Elias Ball, and to his younger brothers. Ever vigilant about his son's writing technique, John Sr. even vetted some of the letters intended for other family members, reading them without John Jr.'s knowledge and then sending his son critical appraisals. As the content and style of John Jr.'s letters began to satisfy his father, John Sr. pushed the young man to expand his circle of correspondents beyond the family (and beyond John Sr.'s oversight). According to his father's instructions, John Jr. should correspond with "as many genteel people, and as many of your old school fellows as your scholastic employments will admit." Such letter-writing networks would both indicate John Jr.'s refinement and nurture important social connections. (35) Jane's letters urging John Jr. to build social and familial bonds through written correspondence dovetailed with her husband's advice on the subject. As a southern woman, Jane assumed responsibility for sustaining family relationships through letter writing and visits. Wanting John Jr. to feel connected to his former home, Jane wrote detailed accounts of the vacations, visits, illnesses, and social events of their extensive kin network. She also sent messages to John Jr. from various cousins and aunts and reminded him that they would feel neglected if he failed to write them as well. (36)

Again, the Balls captured the sentiments of myriad southern elites trying to educate young men from a distance. When Virginian Charles Guerrant went to West Point in 1816, his brothers implored him to write more often and more fully of his experiences there. When poorly constructed, hastily written letters arrived, his brother Peter Guerrant instructed the young man to give proper consideration to all his correspondence: "Let it be concise, intelligent and strictly grammatical." Another brother, John, complained of his "mortification at not receiving a letter from you for the last two months." When young Nathaniel Middleton traveled from his native South Carolina to visit a relative in Rhode Island, his mother disapproved of his letters home. Nathaniel had misspelled a number of words, and his mother insisted that "these mistakes ... could only be from carelessness for I am certain you know how to spell every one of these words." Although the letter was comprehensible, she informed him, "I am ashamed to shew it to any body." When weeks passed without a follow-up letter from the boy, she leveled a stinging indictment: "I am really sorry that you should have become tired of doing right, or perhaps you have forgotten us, and never recollect that you have a Papa and Mamma ... who love you very much and long to hear." Of course, many boys honored their family's writing expectations. While studying in Paris in 1800, Charles Manigault wrote at every opportunity. When the British occupation of Charleston kept him from hearing from his family for seven months, he nevertheless continued to write because "I think it my duty not to miss it." Regardless of the level of filial compliance, southern aristocrats consistently warned sons about the familial and social needs for skillful, attentive letter writing. (37)

Genteel masculinity also required the mastery of oratorical skills. Confidence in public speaking (a prime indicator of refinement) and preparation for political office (the traditional path to power for southern gentry) demanded excellent oration of young men. Although John Sr. had far more evidence of and therefore influence over John Jr.'s written communication skills, he also urged the boy to develop his speaking abilities. In the father's mind, public speaking was "of the highest importance" because it symbolized genteel status and laid the foundation for a career in politics. Other southerners seconded this sentiment in advisory letters to young men. Henry DeSaussure informed his charge, John E. Colhoun, "Language is an instrument in our intercourse with mankind.... The right knowledge of your own tongue is essential; & no man can be expected to succeed without [it]." Unfortunately, John Sr. had to concede that oratory was not one of his son's strong suits. But he insisted that "by practice & placing a just confidence in your own merit, great things may be acquired." Diligence was essential, and it would pay off. Among the suggestions he offered was to practice speaking aloud before a mirror. (38) Although one is hard pressed to imagine John Jr. actually following this advice, let alone to conceive how his peers might have perceived his acquiescence, the story does reveal how fully John Sr. immersed himself in his son's life.

In addition to certain educational standards, genteel masculinity demanded specific physical traits. Sex and race--maleness and whiteness, to be precise--represented the primary determinants of a person's capacity for masculine gentility. (39) Throughout America, men of color were largely excluded from white notions of genteel masculinity, but race played a particularly critical role in southern manhood. Sex was more uniformly understood as an essential component of masculine identity. Manhood required not only male genitalia but also its appropriate functioning. While men ought to exhibit their sexual power, genteel men simultaneously needed to exert self-control. Men were thus expected to act as sexual creatures within the confines of marriage. For the slaveholding class of southerners, however, the slave community represented another possible venue for sexual expression. (40) Beyond this, experts condemned excessive sexual arousal, particularly masturbation, and instructed men to master their sexual urges. This, of course, fit with the general demand for male restraint and self-control. Those who failed to manage their sexuality or diverged from socially acceptable sexual standards could lose their claim on masculinity. (41) Homosexuality represented the greatest compromise of masculine identity. In a rare reference to homosexuality in the early national South, John C. Calhoun confided to a correspondent the case of his friend, Wentworth Boisseau: "He is blasted forever in this country. A whole life of virtue could not restore his character.... I freely gave him my opinion to leave the country, and fly to some remote part; to give up all ideas of happiness in this life.... "Most southerners avoided such discussions of sexual issues in correspondence. John Sr. did, however, warn his son against "Drinking, Gaming, & Whoring," while allowing that "the two former are even worse than the latter." (42)

Because the male body represented an important part of genteel masculine identity, men carefully groomed their physical selves. The Ball men seemed predisposed toward obesity (as family portraits reveal), and John Sr. worried about his son's weight. In November 1799, after hearing from a friend that John Jr. had "grown very fat," John Sr. began writing about exercise routines. Subsequent letters elaborated on this subject. "Too much sitting," John Sr. warned, "will injure your person and health." Consequently, be told his son to "consider bodily exercise daily, as part of your indispensable duty." He also suggested that walking around his room while reading might solve John Jr.'s weight problem. John Sr. held himself to the same standards and lamented in one letter to his son that inactivity during a vacation had caused him to gain too much weight. (43) Roger Pinckney's mother showed a similar interest in her son's body. Near the second anniversary of his departure from South Carolina for schooling in England, she instructed him to send "an exact measurement of your height" as well as his "thickness." She seemed particularly concerned that a recent visitor to England had seen the teenager and reported that Roger "would be very short indeed--nothing near as high as your Father." (44)

Dress offered men the opportunity to publicly demonstrate their class identity. Careful attention was thus paid to the style and tailoring of clothing as well as to the kind of horse a man rode and the residence he maintained. John Sr. prided himself on his "extensive wardrobe" and lavish home. By the age of fifteen, he had required a special notebook to keep track of his clothing. Similarly, he wanted his son to dress and live so as "to keep way with the first circles at Cambridge." On several occasions, he requested information on John Jr.'s classmates. Did any Harvard student, he wondered, "live in a higher or better stile than yourself?." If a reputable young man kept a horse or servant, John Sr. wanted John Jr. to acquire the same. On the other hand, John Sr. did not want his son to appear extravagant or disrespectful. He made certain that John Jr.'s dress and housing did not exceed that of all of his classmates or the students ahead of him in school. John Jr. thus learned to position himself alongside the best in his own rank while respecting the status of upperclassmen. (45)

Nothing, however, mattered quite so much to the reputations of genteel men as their style and grace in society. Unfortunately, these represented John Jr.'s greatest shortcomings, necessitating constant vigilance on the part of his father. As John Sr. explained to him, "your natural turn is too much of the reserve & unsociable." John Jr.'s bashfulness constituted the greatest difference between father and son. John Sr. was highly gregarious and led an active social life. His letters recount an endless array of trips, balls, dinner parties, and other social gatherings with prominent Charlestonians. In the spring of 1800, for example, he wrote that he and Jane entertained company almost constantly. John Jr., conversely, so seldom attended social functions at Harvard that his father chastised him for being "too serious to dance." John and Jane often found themselves complaining about their son's reticence. In one typical charge John Sr. wrote, "[Y]ou are too particular & will get the reputation of being a selfish, unsociable being." (46)

Fearful that his son's awkwardness at social gatherings would undermine the boy's future in society and reflect badly on the Ball family, John Sr. tried mightily to get John Jr. to develop a network of Carolina friends while at Harvard. He wrote letters detailing the character and family lineage of local boys moving to Cambridge and asked John Jr. to pay particular attention to them, reminding him that "such attention will be a benefit to you when you return to Carolina." Jane agreed, beseeching him to "cultivate the friendship of some of your young Countrymen." Other boys, including John C. Calhoun, embraced local networks of friends while studying in the North, and this redounded to their credit. Those shunning such attachments threatened the position in the South of both themselves and their families. (47)

John Sr. knew that ensuring his son's future required suppressing the boy's natural personality--such was the cost of genteel masculinity. Men, explained John Sr., often needed to "sacrifice our own feelings" in order to meet the expectations of society. The practical solution to their son's specific problem, the Balls believed, lay in the young man's immersion in social activities that would boost his self-confidence. John and Jane encouraged their son to attend balls and dinner parties whenever possible and to meet as many "genteel & respectable families" as he could. His mission should be "to get the general esteem of all those who know you" and to become "free, affable & courteous." (48) Frequenting genteel society would not only build ties to other prominent families but also sharpen, by example, John's manners. Moreover, John Jr.'s acceptance into such circles would confirm John Sr.'s success as a father. Ultimately, the elder Ball insisted John Jr.'s innate predisposition toward shyness must be overcome. Or, as he explained, "fix a just value on yourself." Jane agreed, maintaining that John should "assume some self confidence & not think too humbly" of himself. (49) Both parents knew that John Jr.'s success in society, and by extension the reputation of John Sr. and the well-being of the Ball family, would depend on the networks of friends he cultivated and the social standing he secured. Isolation and timidity simply would not do. John Jr. needed to abandon his "natural turn" and internalize the genteel masculine code.

John Ball Sr.'s enthusiasm for a socially prescribed masculine gentility linked him to men of wealth and privilege throughout the young nation. His ideas about oratory, letter writing, and social grace, for example, did not differ significantly from those held by elites in other regions. Nor did his endorsement of advice writers' calls for image-driven self-fashioning denote a unique regional culture. Much of what John Sr. wrote about acquiring a reputation of masculine refinement could have come from a father in Boston or Philadelphia. In many ways, then, Ball's prescription for genteel masculinity showcased his endorsement of national norms. (50)

In fact, Ball insisted that being a virtuous citizen of the republic mattered deeply to him, and he expected his namesake to adopt the same passion for American citizenship and service. He sent his son to Harvard in the first place so that John Jr. could acquire an education "in America upon patriot principles." (51) As part of his commitment to American values, John Sr. drew clear distinctions between American and European political culture and public morality, instructing his son to embody virtue and civic-mindedness and shun the "shallow excesses" of Europe. Like many fathers throughout the United States, John Sr. saw a bright future for his son in the American republic, provided that John Jr. seized the opportunities before him. As his father explained, John Jr. possessed "as great advantages as America can at present bestow on her sons--embrace them & God grant that you may become an ornament to your country." (52)

Finally, John Sr.'s commitment to family and community duty was part of a national masculine code. In every region of the young nation, as E. Anthony Rotundo has explained, masculine idealizations upheld duty as "a crucial word for manhood." Ideally, southern and northern men alike focused on the good of the community and placed duty to it before personal ambitions. Virtue became the watchword of white men, while mothers across the young republic devoted themselves to raising virtuous sons. For men throughout America, having and providing for children--being active fathers--also played a critical role in male identity. Many of the lessons John Sr. taught his son and the seriousness with which he undertook his parenting duties, therefore, placed him within the mainstream of white elite ideals of manhood. (53)

Despite these similarities, however, northern and southern masculine idealizations diverged in the early national era, and slavery was the primary reason. White power, career proficiency, and family loyalty, while fundamental to notions of genteel masculinity across regional lines, took on added intensity in the South, since slaveholding raised the stakes for all three among elite planters like the Balls. Cultural values unique to the South also exaggerated John Sr.'s focus on gentility. A persistent belief in gentry entitlement and racial hierarchies in particular evidenced the South's rejection of the social implications of political equality and indicated a regional divergence from national, post-Revolutionary norms. (54) This regional distinctiveness, while important, remained more amorphous in the early national era than in the antebellum period, when sectional identity became self-consciously preeminent in the minds of southern elites.

Many historians locate the origins of self-defined and articulated sectionalism in changes occurring in the 1820s and 1830s. (55) But the private writings of southern elites indicate a growing identification with the South as early as the 1790s. John Ball Sr. typified this emergent sectionalism. While he wanted his son to identify with America as he did, John Sr., like many of the southern gentry, also felt the subtle pull of sectional loyalty. When his son, who represented the future of the Ball family, moved to Massachusetts during the formative period of his maturation, John Ball Sr. articulated that regional loyalty. National political developments in the 1820s and 1830s intensified sectionalism, but they did not create it.

The South as a self-conscious region was just beginning to take shape at the turn of the nineteenth century. Slavery became a distinctly southern institution, and the revivification of the plantation economy that accompanied the development of a reliable cotton gin deepened the commitment of states such as South Carolina to slavery. Since the seventeenth century, Lowcountry gentry families, including the Balls, had depended on slave labor for their wealth and status. At the turn of the nineteenth century they were richer and more reliant on slave labor than ever before, but they were increasingly questioned about and even criticized for their "peculiar institution" by residents of northern states that were gradually abolishing slavery. Southern men of Ball Sr.'s generation, for the first time, could imagine (or, more appropriately, fear) a future without slavery. What then of their wealth, their power, their status? Who would they be, if not genteel slaveholding planters?

John Sr. strongly identified with the South in general and South Carolina in particular, and he needed John Jr. to do the same-especially as his southern son went north, into the center of growing antislavery sentiment. As he explained things to his son, "you are in danger of imbibing principles in the Eastern states that will be against the interest of the southern states, tending to the ruin of your own family & fortune." Clearly, these "principles" and "interests" referred specifically to the emergent debates about the efficacy and morality of slavery. (56) John Sr.'s desire to defend slavery and ensure its future made him and men like him increasingly protective of their regional and racial identity. Indeed, most of his expressed southernness was linked to his family's investment (at once financial and deeply personal) in slavery. Not surprisingly, then, his attempts to encourage a familial and racial identity in his son bore a distinctly southern mark.

Along with many other southerners in the early republic, Ball worried that what he disparagingly called "revolutionary principles" would destroy "Southern property." Not yet fully integrated into political debates, this southern defensiveness is revealed in the letters to malleable sons immersed in northern intellectual, urbane communities. Ball and other planter elites in the turn-of-the-century South did not apprehend any immediate threat to slavery. Rather they feared that in the future, northern antislavery advocates would successfully use the ideas of the Revolutionary generation and the political system the founders had created to destroy slavery. Ball and his generation worried even more about slavery's eventual collapse from within--either from a slave uprising or from the defection of white southerners. In particular, John Sr. feared that his son, exposed to the antislavery advocacy of New Englanders, would turn his back on his family's slaveholding tradition. Therefore he strongly admonished John Jr. to ignore any criticism of slaveholding. "No matter how liberal these ideas may appear," John Sr. warned, they would destroy the southern economy and the Ball family fortune. The struggle over slavery was thus made highly personal. "Carry in your mind," he wrote, "that whenever a general emancipation takes place in So[uth] Carolina & Georgia you are a ruined man and all your family connexions made beggars." (57)

Because of their involvement in racial slavery, elite white southern men like the Balls defined themselves in racial terms. In their minds, genteel men were necessarily white, and most owned slaves. The southern gentry organized their laws and culture according to a rigid racial and gender hierarchy over which white male planter/patriarchs presided. (58) These slaveholders deprived African American men of the economic independence, sexual autonomy, and familial authority that distinguished white men from women in the South and thereby denied slave men their potential for manhood. For southerners of John Ball's class, race presented an insuperable barrier to masculinity, and whiteness and slave ownership informed the male sense of self. To be certain, whiteness influenced the identities of many northern men as well. (59) But in the South, where most African Americans resided and where slaveholding came to be seen by the ruling classes as a symbol of honor and status, the identity of slaveholding men was particularly imbued with racialism. Attacks on the institution of slavery, therefore, not only threatened the economy and lifestyle of southern slaveholders but also challenged a critical part of their manhood.

The important role slaveholding played in the identities of white planters and the difficulty of exerting power over enslaved people combined to make teaching mastery an essential parental obligation. Southern men knew that slavery required vigilance and violence in order to work, and they struggled to maintain control over the institution and the people who provided the cornerstone to their wealth. Southern fathers passed this lesson of practiced domination on to their sons, along with the African Americans they held in bondage. (60) Wanting to prepare John Jr. for the future and knowing that protecting the family's slaveholding interests would eventually fall to him, John Sr., who owned nearly seven hundred slaves at the time of his death in 1817, instructed his son about slaveholding. John Jr. needed to learn every part of the planting/slaving business: maintaining appropriate production levels on rice and cotton plantations, managing overseers, dealing with foreign factors, punishing and selling away truculent slaves. John Sr. encouraged John Jr. to learn to become a benevolent but firm slaveholder. "[A]lways have in mind," he insisted, "that our first charitable attentions are due to our slaves." (61) At the same time, he strongly cautioned John Jr. against the gravest of all slaveholding sins: "too much indulgence of slaves." Slavery, he explained, required severity and cruelty. If house servants misbehaved, they were to be sold "as a common field negro." Field hands who disobeyed should be sold out of state. (62) On one occasion, John Sr. used the experience of his cousin Ann Waring to spin out a cautionary tale on this topic. In the spring of 1800 local courts sentenced one of her slaves to death for murdering another slave. Before the convicted man went to the gallows, he confessed to attempting to poison Waring on three different occasions. John Sr. blamed the mayhem on Waring's "excessive goodness and kindness" toward her slaves. Leniency, explained the elder Ball, was a dangerous, even deadly mistake that imperiled order among the slaves and the safety of slaveholders. (63)

In the early republic, slaveholding men confronted subtle criticisms of slavery for the first time and consequently sought to present a positive image of the institution to outsiders. When John Sr. traveled along the eastern seaboard in 1796, he made sure that the two slaves with him, Adonis and Binah, dressed properly. Sensitive to the public scrutiny of his "property" and worried that his slaves' appearances would damage his character, John Sr. purchased shoes and clothing for them in New York. Years later, when he dispatched a slave to Harvard to accompany John Jr. on his return to Charleston, John Sr. also sent money for the man's clothing so that John Jr. could "keep up the character & appearance of a gentleman." (64)

Inside and outside the South, slaves reflected on the status of their owners. Slaves simultaneously produced the crops that lined the pockets of slaveholders. Hence, slaveholding allowed certain whites to become wealthy and powerful, and slaves served as vital symbols of gentility. Small wonder, then, that slaveholding formed a critical dimension of southern genteel masculinity or that slaveholders such as the Balls attached such terrific importance to protecting and extending their peculiar institution. As the stakes escalated in the antebellum era, white southerners' determination to perpetuate this base of their wealth and reputation intensified; by 1861 the defense of slavery superseded all other concerns, even self-preservation.

In addition to controlling the Ball slaves, John Jr. would eventually assume responsibility for the Ball estate. John Sr. took great care in teaching his son about the financial dimensions of planting as well as the day-to-day demands of running the five plantations he owned. During John Jr.'s years at Harvard, his father kept the young man abreast of fluctuations in the international rice market, local business deals, and changes in the climate, all of which affected crop prices and therefore family finances. Father and son discussed the benefits and problems of shifting from rice to cotton production on the family lands. Whenever John Jr. traveled, his father asked him to pay careful attention to farming methods that might prove useful in South Carolina. (65) Being a planter, in short, formed a critical part of John Sr.'s identity, and he imagined his son would likewise become a successful slaveholding planter. In order for this image to come to fruition, the boy needed to learn to physically and fiscally maintain the Ball plantations. To that end, John Sr. insisted his son manage his own finances in Cambridge and that he keep exact records of all his expenditures. John Jr. sent the accounting records to his father, who used them to compliment thoughtful spending and to correct excesses and errors. The exercise gave John Jr. a sample of the kind of financial management that his future plantations would require. By evaluating his son's financial expenditures, as he did the boy's personal correspondence, John Sr. ensured that John Jr. followed proper guidelines and impressed upon him the seriousness of preparing for his future career as a slaveholding planter. (66)

Over time, the two corresponded more often and more explicitly about the family business, and John Jr. moved from protege to partner. This demand for career proficiency does not, on the surface, seem all that different from the expectations of fathers in Boston training their sons to be merchants or fathers in New York reading law with their sons. Mastery of work and financial success mattered immensely to men throughout the nation. (67) But in the South, where the planting profession included holding another race hostage and demanded the successful defense of racial slavery, career proficiency entailed learning a set of skills that went to the heart of the region's economic, social, and cultural survival.

Family duty and identity, while important throughout the young nation, similarly took on added meaning in the lives of southern men. Southerners, far more than northerners, held on to earlier assumptions about the connection between family lineage and social status in the early nineteenth century. As northern men moved more and more toward idealizing (if not living) what E. Anthony Rotundo has called "self-made manhood," elite southerners clung to a masculine identity linked to family ties. Fewer and fewer young northern men strictly saw themselves as extensions of families who dictated their destinies. Instead, they believed that individual abilities and personal accomplishments should decide a man's status in society. Achievements certainly mattered to southern men, and fathers such as John Ball Sr. wanted their sons to succeed in their own right. Southern parents went the first mile in embracing this national move toward self-determination: they sent their sons to colleges and prepared them to be judged as individuals. They did not, however, believe that personal accomplishments should eclipse lineage. Southern parents therefore sought to conserve in their sons the region's traditional reliance on familial ties to determine a man's merit. (68)

As southern sons made their way into the adult world, relatives admonished them to remember their lineage. While Charles Guerrant studied at West Point, his brother counseled him to emulate the model set by their late father and shun negative northern peer influences: "Regardless of the sneers and frowns of those defaming, thoughtless youths with whom you have been roaming[,] ... pursue the road which leads to virtue and renown and maintain the character of him from whom you are descended." Roger Pinckney was similarly directed toward the path of restraint and honor set by his late father: "embrace it as part of your Inheritance & practice it thro' Reverence to the Character of so good a Man as your Father." Upon receiving a letter in which John E. Colhoun confessed "that you are not very studious, and that you are not disposed to exert yourself," his benefactor reminded the boy that his late father "left a highly honored name behind him; and left too a duty on his sons to emulate his course & to uphold that name." Thus when Jane advised John Jr. to heed his father's instructions and make "good use of the opportunities bestowed on you by a tender & generous Father," she captured the views of many southern elites. (69)

The significance of family in shaping identity paralleled the power of such connections in practical matters among the southern gentry. Even more than most other southerners, elite Carolinians had a long history of elaborate, intensive kinship relations. In the early colonial era, high death rates, frequent out-migration, and the commitment of Charleston's merchant community to international business collectively fostered among the Lowcountry gentry extensive, horizontal ties of kinship and friendship. The personal nature of early modern business and the precariousness of life in early Carolina provided the pull and the push for colonists to create these more fluid and more intragenerational family ties. With business partnerships, political coalitions, marriages, and social relationships bound up in this intricate system of kinship, prominent Charlestonians depended upon their family ties to monopolize power within the colony. Family membership thus dictated class identity: it determined who was and who was not politically powerful, financially successful, and genteel. (70)

This identification with the kin group persisted well into the early nineteenth century. In the case of the Balls, it showed itself in John and Jane's encouragement of their son's attachment to his extended family and the participation of John Jr.'s relatives and family friends in his upbringing. John's parents strongly encouraged him to honor his kin in Charleston with frequent letters and thoughts, since his extended family held the keys to his future. Because of them, his father explained, John enjoyed a "probable chance of rising in the World to eminence-and in point of riches" (71) In return for the advantages his family membership brought him, John Jr. learned to make the needs of his relatives a principal priority.

The greatest familial responsibility men held, however, was to their children. Like many men of his era, duty to family in general and sons in particular comprised a key element of John Sr.'s identity as a man. The devotion John Sr. displayed in his extensive correspondence with his son affirmed that fatherhood occupied much of his heart and time. Fathers such as Ball envisioned themselves as critical to the future success of their children, and especially their sons. Their ability to launch fiscally and morally sound children provided a gauge for their success or failure as men. (72)

Northern and southern men shared this devotion to fatherhood, but for many northern men the task of raising children grew more complicated in the early republic. In particular, the financial independence of young men in the new market economy sometimes produced fractious father-son relationships. With little financial leverage to use on wayward children and the explosion in advice literature condemning parental fiat, northern fathers increasingly found themselves in power straggles with their sons. By the late eighteenth century most southern fathers had also abandoned coercion as a parenting tactic and relied instead on persuasion. Influenced by Revolutionary ideology and advice literature, southern fathers embraced a new ideal of relationships with their children, particularly their sons. (73) But financial leverage could still be employed when necessary. John Sr. reminded his son that in southern plantation culture, a boy still needed the support of his father and kin. Without it, he could not hope to attain wealth and power, and he might very well find himself ostracized and impoverished. Conversely, if a son treated his father appropriately, he would find a most sincere, helpful friend. As John Jr. settled in at Harvard, his father urged the boy to "write to me with the freedom of a friend, as well as with the duty and respect due from a son to a father." John Sr. went on to promise his son that "my friendship is as sincere, perhaps more so, than any friend you may ever have." John Sr. made it clear, however, that his continued affection for his son depended on the young man's respectability and improvement. He assured the boy that "as you increase in wisdom & learning so may you expect my affection to increase." On the other hand, failure to fulfill his potential would leave John Jr. without the support of his father. John Sr. warned his son that ignoring parental governance would result in "poverty from disinheritance." (74)

While encouraging familial loyalty and offering advice and support, most southern parents conceded that, in the new republic, a man's future greatly depended on his own actions. One mother provided the following assessment of her duties and their limitations: "As parents let us perform our duty; and should we be so unfortunate as to see our Children not prove good[,] ... let our conscience acquit us[,] let us have the heart-felt satisfaction to say we have fulfilled our part." An advisor to another boy expressed the same theme of self-determination: "I know you have a desire of becoming a Man of Understanding & Education; but believe me my dear, nothing but application can accomplish it." For all their money and efforts, the Balls also recognized that John Jr. himself would play the decisive role in formulating his reputation: "study--perseverance; & industry will do great matters with the advantages that you have had--but on the other hand--if you give yourself up--all is lost." (75) Lineage clearly bestowed privilege on southern boys such as John Ball Jr. For that, elite young men owed a debt of gratitude that only service to their families could repay. Each man's fate, however, hinged upon what he individually made of the opportunities that family membership provided. The southern commitment to familial interdependence and national idealizations of self-determination thus merged.

Honoring the family, pursuing a proper education, learning about planting, defending slavery, grooming the physical self, socializing ably, writing artfully, dressing fashionably, living virtuously, frowning rarely, speaking boldly--it was a formidable set of requirements. Raising a son and training him to become a genteel southern man was therefore a daunting, complex endeavor. The rules, if elaborate, were very clear. Men who failed to meet those demands imperiled their families and risked societal exclusion.

In the end, John Ball Jr. followed those precepts and turned out to be more or less the man his parents had wanted. His later life offered the ultimate testimony to the power of his parents' advice and southern elite gender norms. Shortly after returning to Charleston from Cambridge, he married his first cousin, Elizabeth Bryan, and fathered five offspring. A second marriage after her early demise produced three more children. Rearing the six who survived early childhood required much time and attention because John Jr., like his father before him, took his paternal duties very seriously. As the eldest son, he also oversaw the larger Ball family. After his father's death in 1817, John Jr. found himself in the unenviable position of trying to supervise nine half-siblings produced by John Sr.'s second marriage to the very young and very fecund Martha Swinton. In addition to father and patriarch, John Jr. became a planter and slaveholder. By the 1820s he and his only surviving brother, Isaac, presided over a massive family estate that included twelve plantations throughout the Lowcountry and nearly 1,300 slaves. Not surprisingly, John Jr. became a passionate defender of the institution of slavery and its euphemism, states' rights. In the wake of the Nullification Crisis, John served as vice president of the States' Rights Party, which promoted secession. He remained an outspoken proponent of southern rights until his death in 1834. (76) Throughout his adult life, he identified himself as a Carolinian, a southerner, and a genteel man of privilege and honor. In cultivating this identity, however, he had to subvert his "natural turn" toward introspection and shyness. The code of southern genteel masculinity had demanded as much.

Anyone investigating eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century white women would conclude that gender circumscribed their experiences. The legal, social, and economic marginalization of those women is self-evident. Because men in that era enjoyed economic and political rights denied to women, however, the effects of gender on their lives seem, on the surface, appreciably less confining. In fact, close examination reveals that an elaborate code of conduct informed men's speech, dress, friendships, and demeanor. Masculinity required men to be always in control of their physical and emotional selves and ever conscious of public perceptions of their behavior. These masculine norms, while different from the demands of femininity, were carefully implemented and profoundly influential.

A subtle sectional shift also occurred in masculine ideals during the early national era. In adopting the personae their society deemed appropriate, men of John Jr.'s generation simultaneously crafted a distinct code of southern manhood. While prizing the refinement and citizenship embraced by white men throughout the nation, their commitments to family lineage, an economy based on planting and slaveholding, and white gentry solidarity set these southerners on a divergent path. Regional variance in values matured along with the boys of the early republic. As men, their increasingly aggressive defense of those southern standards dominated antebellum politics and pushed the nation toward sectional crisis.

(1) Kinloch Bull Jr., The Oligarchs in Colonial and Revolutionary Charleston: Lieutenant Governor William Bull II and His Family (Columbia, S.C., 1991); Frances Leigh Williams, A Founding Family: The Pinckneys of South Carolina (New York and London, 1978); George C. Rogers Jr., Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (Norman, Okla., 1969); Ronald Hoffman with Sally D. Mason, Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500-1782 (Chapel Hill and London, 2000); Paul C. Nagel, The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Family (New York and Oxford, 1990).

(2) For an overview of colonial ideology and social organization see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), Part I. For elite culture in eighteenth-century South Carolina see Lorri Glover, All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds among the Early South Carolina Gentry (Baltimore and London, 2000).

(3) Joyce Appleby recently investigated the significance of this generation in Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000).

(4) Manuscript collections of the Ball family are housed in many repositories, including the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston (hereinafter cited as SCHS); the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia (hereinafter cited as SCL); the Southern Historical Collection at the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University. Most of John Sr.'s and Jane's letters to their son are located at the South Carolina Historical Society. The South Caroliniana Library holds a typescript copy of John Ball Sr.'s letterbook. For an account of the Ball family and their slaves across several generations see Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York, 1998).

(5) Other case studies of young people in this era include Anya Jabour, "Masculinity and Adolescence in Antebellum America: Robert Wirt at West Point, 1820-1821," Journal of Family History, 23 (October 1998), 393-416; and Patricia Cleary, "Making Men and Women in the 1770s: Culture, Class, and Commerce in the Anglo-American World," in Laura McCall and Donald Yacovone, eds., A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender (New York and London, 1998), 98-116. See also Daniel Kilbride, "Southern Medical Students in Philadelphia, 1800-1861: Science and Sociability in the `Republic of Medicine,"' Journal of Southern History, 65 (November 1999), 697-732; Jon L. Wakelyn, "Antebellum College Life and the Relations between Fathers and Sons," in Walter J. Fraser Jr., R. Frank Saunders Jr., and Jon L. Wakelyn, eds., The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family, and Education (Athens, Ga., 1985), 107-26; and Jane Turner Censer, North Carolina Planters and Their Children, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge and London, 1984), chap. 3.

(6) E. Anthony Rotundo offered the earliest and fullest analysis of the shift from what he termed "communal manhood" of the colonial era to the market/industrial revolution-influenced "self-made manhood" of the nineteenth century in American Manhood.' Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993), 2-3 (quotations). According to Rotundo, by the mid-nineteenth century, work outside the home came to dominate notions of masculinity, whereas position within the family and community had previously informed men's identity. In Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North (Baltimore and London, 1998), Stephen M. Frank agreed that economic changes altered both idealizations of masculinity and men' s careers in the nineteenth century. But he argued that men's shift toward wage-earning jobs in the nineteenth century did not diminish their interest in domestic concerns or their emotional involvement with their children. Both Frank and Rotundo used white middle-class northern men for their evidentiary base. Lisa Wilson pushed the debates about masculinity back into the colonial era in New England with Ye Heart of a Man: The Domestic Life of Men in Colonial New England (New Haven and London, 1999). A growing number of scholars, however, are beginning to complicate what has largely been a New England-dominated historiography. Ted Ownby's investigation of the post-Civil War South, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill and London, 1990), uncovered the complex interweaving of piety and violence in white men's culture. In "Fatherhood in the Confederacy: Southern Soldiers and Their Children," Journal of Southern History, 63 (May 1997), 269-92, James Marten showed that, during the Civil War, the emotional involvement of southern fathers in the lives of their children differed from the New England paradigm of "fatherly detachment" (quotation on p. 270). Bertram Wyatt-Brown's research into honor as the defining feature of white southern culture offers important insight into masculinity as well. See Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York and Oxford, 1982); and Wyatt-Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1890s (Chapel Hill and London, 2001).

(7) Nineteenth-century southern patriarchs, as historians have shown, typically enjoyed dominion over a society that marginalized others. See, for example, Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore and London, 1985); James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York, 1982); and the various works of Eugene D. Genovese, particularly The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969).

(8) Women's historians studying the early republic have created an impressive body of literature on prescriptive notions of femininity and their impact on women's lives. See Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven and London, 1977); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston and Toronto, 1980); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980); Ruth H. Bloch, "American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785-1815," Feminist Studies, 4 (Summer 1978), 100-126; Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 44 (October 1987), 689-721; Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," American Quarterly, 18 (Summer 1966), 151-74; and Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford, 1984).

(9) For the shift from European to American education for southern elites see Gilman M. Ostrander, Republic of Letters: The American Intellectual Community, 1776-1865 (Madison, Wisc., 1999), 8-9, 249; David W. Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1750-1800 (Westport, Conn., and London, 1985), esp. chap. 6; and Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876 (New York and other cities, 1980), 2-3.

(10) Sarah Reeve Gibbes to John Gibbes, August 11, 1783, Gibbes Family Papers (SCHS); Henry DeSaussure to John E. Colhoun, December 12, 1810, Henry William DeSaussure Papers (SCL); John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., August 12, 1798, Ball Family Papers (SCHS).

(11) Ball, Slaves in the Family, 257.

(12) John C. Calhoun to Andrew Pickens Jr., September 6, 1801, in Robert L. Meriwether et al., eds., The Papers of John C. Calhoun (26 vols.; Columbia, S.C., 1959-1999), I, 3.

(13) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., September 29, 1799, Ball Family Papers; John C. Calhoun to Andrew Pickens Jr., May 23, 1803, in Meriwether et al., eds., Papers of John C. Calhoun, I, 10; James McDowell to Susannah Preston, October 29, 1815, McDowell Family Papers (Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.; hereinafter cited as VHS); Edward Hooker to Addin Lewis, June 4, 1807, Edward Hooker Papers (SCL). For the intensification of southern defensiveness regarding education in the antebellum era see Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York and Oxford, 1996), 114; Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the OM South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore and London, 1987), 133; and Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 97-98.

(14) Circles of friendship formed in college or as young adults often proved so important that many men maintained those connections throughout their lives. See, for example, Anya Jabour, "Male Friendship and Masculinity in the Early National South: William Wirt and His Friends," Journal of The Early Republic, 20 (Spring 2000), 83-111; Donald Yacovone, "`Surpassing the Love of Women': Victorian Manhood and the Language of Fraternal Love," in McCall and Yacovone, eds., Shared Experience, 195-221, esp. 199-201; and Karen V. Hansen, "`Our Eyes Behold Each Other': Masculinity and Intimate Friendship in Antebellum New England," in Peter M. Nardi, ed., Men's Friendships (Newbury Park, Calif., 1992), 35-58. For more on the turbulence of early colleges see Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York, 1977), 51-59; and Steven J. Novak, The Rights of Youth: American Colleges and Student Revolt, 1798-1815 (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1977). For the antebellum South see Wakelyn, "Antebellum College Life and the Relations between Fathers and Sons," 107-26; and Robert F. Pace and Christopher A. Bjornsen, "Adolescent Honor and College Student Behavior in the Old South," Southern Cultures, 6 (Fall 2000), 9-28. For more on university life and youth culture in this period see Rotundo, American Manhood, chaps. 2-4; and Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 400-409.

(15) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., June 17, 1799, Ball Family Papers.

(16) Henry DeSaussure to Ezekiel Pickens, October 27, 1805, DeSaussure Papers; Ralph Wormeley to Warner Wormeley, June 29, 1801, Wormeley Family Papers (VHS); John F. Grimke to Henry Grimke, March 8, 1818, Grimke Family Papers (SCHS); Henry Clay Jr. to Henry Clay, May 7, 1827, and June 24, 1827, in Mary W. M. Hargreaves and James F. Hopkins, eds., The Papers of Henry Clay (11 vols.; Lexington, Ky., 1959-1992), VI, 524-25, 718; Martha Ramsay quoted in Joanna Bowen Gillespie, The Life and Times of Martha Laurens Ramsay, 1759-1811 (Columbia, S.C., 2001), 212.

(17) Henry Middleton to Elbridge Gerry, April 5, 1811, Henry Middleton Papers (SCL); John C. Calhoun to Floride Colhoun, September 9, 1805, in Meriwether et al., eds., Papers of John C. Calhoun, I, 18; May 25, 1809, entry in William Dickinson Martin Travel Journal (SCL), published as Anna D. Elmore, ed., A Journey from South Carolina to Connecticut in the Year 1809: The Journal of William D. Martin (Charlotte, N.C., 1959), 45.

(18) Gabriel Manigault to Mr. DuPont, April 13, 1807, Manigault Family Papers (SCL).

(19) Novak, Rights of Youth, 12.

(20) For further discussion of elite power at Harvard see Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800-1870 (Middletown, Conn., 1980).

(21) Robson, Educating Republicans, 144-48, 152-53, 158 (quotation on p. 153). For more intensive analyses of individual universities in this era see Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Princeton, 1989); Story, Forging of an Aristocracy; and Louise L. Stevenson, Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830-1890 (Baltimore and London, 1986). For an overview of education in the early republic and beyond, see Cremin, American Education: The National Experience.

(22) Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, chap. 4; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992), chap. 3.

(23) The often printed letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, to his son and namesake were widely read by Americans and Britons in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The numerous editions of the correspondence include R. K. Root, ed., Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son (London, 1929), which is employed in this essay. Fifteen-year-old George Washington first composed his precepts in 1747. See John Allen Murray, ed., George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation (New York, 1942). For Franklin's Way to Wealth see M. L. Weems, comp., The Immortal Mentor: or, Man's Unerring Guide to a Healthy, Wealthy, and Happy Life. In Three Parts. By Lewis Cornaro, Dr. Franklin, and Dr. Scott (Philadelphia, 1796). For more on advice literature in this period see Sarah E. Newton, Learning to Behave: A Guide to American Conduct Books Before 1900 (Westport, Conn., and London, 1994); C. Dallett Hemphill, "Class, Gender, and the Regulation of Emotional Expression in Revolutionary-Era Conduct Literature," in Peter N. Steams and Jan Lewis, eds., An Emotional History of the United States (New York and London, 1998), 33-51; Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860 (New York and Oxford, 1999); Bushman, Refinement of America, chap. 2; and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books (New York, 1946).

(24) Philip Stanhope to son, December 9, 1749, in Root, ed., Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, 138-39.

(25) John Sr. owned four volumes of Chesterfield's letters at the time of his death in 1817; see the probate of the estate of John Ball Sr., in John Ball Sr. and John Ball Jr. Papers (Duke University). Many Americans lauded and emulated Chesterfield's attention to his son's social and intellectual development, yet they were shocked by Chesterfield's encouragement of duplicity, his thinly veiled contempt for women in general, and his advice about sexual experimentation with Parisian women in particular. John Ball, for example, balked at Chesterfield's instructions for seducing women. In fact, he told John Jr. to "regard with abhorrence the part of duplicity & seduction which his letters contain." Nevertheless, John pressed his son to read the collection for Chesterfield's guidance on sociability and style. John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., April 14, 1799, Ball Family Papers. For a similar reaction from Mercy Otis Warren see Edmund M. Hayes, "Mercy Otis Warren versus Lord Chesterfield, 1779," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 40 (October 1983), 616-21.

(26) Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South, 128-29.

(27) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., April 17, 1802, Ball Family Papers; Philip Stanhope to son, September 22, 1749, in Root, ed., Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, 119.

(28) Philip Stanhope to son, November 14, 1749, in Root, ed., Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, 127; John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., September 11, 1798, Ball Family Papers. For Chesterfield's advice on comportment and gossip, respectively, see Philip Stanhope to son, March 9, 1748, and October 29, 1748, in Root, ed., Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, 48-50, 80. John Ball Sr. repeated these ideas in John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., September 15, 1798, Ball Family Papers.

(29) See, for instance, Jane Ball to John Ball Jr., April 2, 1799, Ball Family Papers. For more on republican motherhood see Kerber, Women of the Republic; and Norton, Liberty's Daughters.

(30) Philip Stanhope to son, May 22, 1749, in Root, ed., Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, 104; John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., October 29, 1799, and October 6, 1801, Ball Family Papers; J. Wilson to Roger Pinckney, May 16, 1784, Roger Pinckney Correspondence (SCHS); unknown to Richard Hopkins, May 27, 1783, in "A Maryland Medical Student and His Friends," Maryland Historical Magazine, 23 (September 1928), 282.

(31) Bushman, Refinement of America, 90-96.

(32) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., September 15, 1798, November 7, 1798, and June 17, 1799, Ball Family Papers.

(33) Stowe provides analysis of parent-child relations and planter family letters in "The Rhetoric of Authority: The Making of Social Values in Planter Family Correspondence," Journal of American History, 73 (March 1987), 916-33; and Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South, chap. 3. Letters were, he writes, "at once a part of formal schooling and a part of intimate life." Intimacy and Power in the Old South, 142-43.

(34) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., April 14, 1799, and December 29, 1799 (quotation), Ball Family Papers.

(35) See, for example, John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., April 14, 1799 (quotation), June 17, 1799, August 11, 1799, and August 14, 1800, Ball Family Papers.

(36) See, for example, Jane Ball to John Ball Jr., June 7, 1799, August 28, 1799, and April 16, 1800, Ball Family Papers. For southern women and parenting in this era see Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1980), 226-28; Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South, 129-32; and Cynthia A. Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women's Place in the Early South, 1700-1835 (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1998), 175, 180-84. John and Jane differed appreciably in their parental advice in one regard: the role of religion in the life of their son. Positioning herself as the moral center of the household, she wrote far more often about religion than did her husband. She assured her son that she regularly prayed for his virtuous development and pressed him to become a godly, moral man. Jane even infused the specific advice she gave her son concerning education, his relationship with his brothers, and his duty to his extended family with religious meaning. For example, she told him to attend to his studies, not only to secure the financial and social rewards his father stressed, but also because "an improved mind enables us to enjoy the blessings of life ... [and] bear up with Christian fortitude its disappointments & afflictions." Jane Ball to John Ball Jr., August 28, 1799, Ball Family Papers. In both her instructions to him and in the example of her own life, then, Jane taught her son the importance of Christian morality. As historian Christine Leigh Heyrman has shown, however, religious enthusiasm could threaten genteel reputations. Boys often wrote to the women in their families about religion but ignored spirituality in correspondence with men. As evangelical Christianity shifted to embrace the defense of southern slaveholding, southern men wrote more frequently about religion. Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997), esp. chaps. 3 and 5.

(37) Peter Guerrant to Charles Guerrant, September 8, 1818, and John Guerrant to Charles Guerrant, January 10, 1817, Guerrant Family Papers (VHS), Alicia Hopton Middleton to Nathaniel Russell Middleton Jr., July 28, 1817, and September 29, 1817, Middleton Family Papers (SCL); Charles Manigault to Gabriel Manigault, April 27, 1800, Manigault Family Papers.

(38) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., October 21, 1798, Ball Family Papers; Henry DeSaussure to John E. Colhoun, January 20, 1808, DeSaussure Papers.

(39) Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton, 1998); Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, N.C., and London, 1998); Lacy K. Ford Jr., "Making the `White Man's Country' White: Race, Slavery, and State-Building in the Jacksonian South," Journal of the Early Republic, 19 (Winter 1999), 713-37; David R. Roediger, "The Pursuit of Whiteness: Property, Terror, and Expansion, 1790-1860," Journal of the Early Republic, 19 (Winter 1999), 579-600.

(40) Sexual violence against slave women was not legally recognized as rape in much of the early South. If someone other than the owner sexually assaulted a slave woman, it was considered trespassing. For an intriguing case study see Melton A. McLaurin, Celia: A Slave (Athens, Ga., and London, 1991). See also Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York and London, 1985), esp. chap. 1; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985), chap. 1; Thelma Jennings, "'Us Colored Women Had To Go Through A Plenty': Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women," Journal of Women's History, 1 (Winter 1990), 45-66; Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000), esp. 154, 160-61,172-74; and Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 137-38, 236-38.

(41) John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York and other cities, 1988), 67-69. See also Thomas A. Foster, "Deficient Husbands: Manhood, Sexual Incapacity, and Male Marital Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century New England," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 56 (October 1999), 723-44.

(42) John C. Calhoun to Floride Colhoun, August 24, 1810, in Meriwether et al., eds., Papers of John C. Calhoun, I, 53; John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., August 12, 1798, Ball Family Papers.

(43) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., November 10, 1799 (first quotation), March 18, 1800 (second quotation), May 22, 1801, and August 5, 1801 (third quotation), Ball Family Papers.

(44) Frances S. Pinckney to Roger Pinckney, March 18, 1786, Pinckney Correspondence.

(45) Ball, Slaves in the Family, 183 (first quotation); John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., June 17, 1799 (second quotation), and August 11, 1799 (third quotation), Ball Family Papers.

(46) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., May 9, 1802 (first quotation), May 5, 1800, October 29, 1799 (second quotation), and November 10, 1799 (third quotation), Ball Family Papers.

(47) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., May 19, 1801, and Jane Ball to John Ball Jr., September 4, 1798, Ball Family Papers; Meriwether et al., eds., Papers of John C. Calhoun, I, xxv.

(48) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., November 10, 1799 (first quotation), September 11, 1798 (second quotation), August 5, 1799 (third quotation), and September 15, 1798 (fourth quotation), Ball Family Papers.

(49) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., April 17, 1802, and Jane Ball to John Ball Jr., February 24, 1800, Ball Family Papers.

(50) Toby L. Ditz indicated the importance of reputation in determining masculinity and the "precariousness" of that socially recognized manhood among wealthy merchants in eighteenth-century Philadelphia in "Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," Journal of American History, 81 (June 1994), 51-80. See also Bushman, Refinement of America, chap. 3.

(51) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., May 9, 1802, Ball Family Papers. John Sr. also discussed his decision to send his son to Harvard in John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., September 29, 1799, Ball Family Papers.

(52) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., May 9, 1802 (first quotation), and October 21, 1798 (second quotation), Ball Family Papers. In addition to inspiring virtue in young men, the shifts in American political culture in the wake of the Revolution could also encourage willfulness. Gabriel Manigault lamented his son's refusal to follow directions while studying in Paris. But he resigned himself to Harry's attitude: "I must confess that considering the spirit of independence which he imbibed in America in common with all his young Countrymen ... I am not surprised at the circumstances." Gabriel Manigault to Mr. DuPont, April 13, 1807, Manigault Family Papers.

(53) Rotundo, American Manhood, 12 (quotation); Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 248; Kerber, Women of the Republic, 228-29; Ruth H. Bloch, "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America," Signs, 13 (Autumn 1987), 37-58. Studies of nineteenth-century fatherhood include Frank, Life with Father; Rotundo, American Manhood; and Shawn Johansen, Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America (New York and London, 2001).

(54) For a more expansive discussion of the southern gentry's rejection of notions of social equality in the early republic, see Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837 (Chapel Hill and London, 1999).

(55) For economic, political, and racial interpretations, respectively, of emergent sectionalism in the Jacksonian era see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York and Oxford, 1991); Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York, 1990); and Ford, "Making the `White Man's Country' White," 713-37.

(56) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., September 29, 1799, Ball Family Papers.

(57) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., October 6, 1801 (first and second quotations), and September 29, 1799 (third and fourth quotations), Ball Family Papers.

(58) Regarding gender rankings in the early South see Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill and London, 1996); Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill and London, 1992); and Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New York, 1982). See also Oakes, Ruling Race; and Genovese, World the Slaveholders Made. Christine Heyrman explored how evangelicals shifted their position on the question of slavery in order to court the southern gentry in this era. Heyrman, Southern Cross, 24, chap. 5.

(59) For one provocative interpretation of the relationship between race, masculinity, and citizenship, see Nelson, National Manhood.

(60) Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, esp. chaps. 6 and 14.

(61) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., October 6, 1801, Ball Family Papers. This quotation parallels the arguments of Jeffrey Young about the formulation of a new defense of slavery in the early republic, as southerners attempted to "humanize" slaves while promoting slaveholding as a positive good. Young, Domesticating Slavery, 110-12.

(62) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., August 11, 1799, Ball Family Papers.

(63) Ibid., May 22, 1800.

(64) Ball, Slaves in the Family, 254; John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., July 1, 1802, Ball Family Papers.

(65) See, for example, John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., May 14, 1799, June 17, 1799, and August 11, 1799, Ball Family Papers.

(66) Examples of this bookkeeping exercise include John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., September 30, 1798, February 27, 1799, and December 29, 1799, Ball Family Papers. Some fathers demanded such accounting because of the tendency of young, unsupervised boys to grossly exceed their allowed expenditures. This does not apply to the Balls; John and Jane never complained about their son's extravagance.

(67) Rotundo, American Manhood, chap. 8; Frank, Life with Father, chap. 6. For a comparable discussion of work and masculinity in colonial America see Wilson, Ye Heart of a Man, chap. 4.

(68) Rotundo, American Manhood, chap. 1 (quotation on p. 3); Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, chaps. 5 and 7.

(69) Daniel Guerrant to Charles Guerrant, May 4, 1816, Guerrant Family Papers; J. Wilson to Roger Pinckney, May 16, 1784, Pinckney Correspondence; Henry DeSaussure to John E. Colhoun, September 14, 1808, DeSaussure Papers; Jane Ball to John Ball Jr., August 28, 1799, Ball Family Papers.

(70) Glover, All Our Relations. For analyses of family identity and duty in the antebellum South see Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor; Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South; and Censer, North Carolina Planters and Their Children.

(71) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., October 6, 1801, Ball Family Papers.

(72) For more on fatherhood see Frank, Life with Father; Johansen, Family Men; Robert L. Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York, 1993); and Journal of Family History, 24 (July 1999), an issue devoted to fatherhood, guest-edited by Robert L. Griswold.

(73) For further analysis of southern parenting tactics in this period, especially concerning the conditions of parental affection, see Smith, Inside the Great House, chap. 3; and Censer, North Carolina Planters and Their Children, chap. 3. Bertram Wyatt-Brown offers a contradictory interpretation in Southern Honor, chaps. 5-7.

(74) John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., August 12, 1798 (first and second quotations), September 15, 1798 (third quotation), and April 14, 1799 (fourth quotation), Ball Family Papers.

(75) Sarah Reeve Gibbes to John Gibbes, August 11, 1783, Gibbes Family Papers; J. Wilson to Roger Pinckney, March 23, 1784, Pinckney Correspondence; John Ball Sr. to John Ball Jr., March 5, 1800, Ball Family Papers.

(76) Ball, Slaves in the Family, 296-303, 308-13, 446-47. John Ball Jr.'s stewardship of his half-siblings and his father's estate can be traced in the John Ball Sr. and John Ball Jr. Papers.

Ms. GLOVER is an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.