FIGHTING FOR REVIVAL - Clemson University

ABSTRACT
The focus of this work is Edgefield County, South Carolina, a small, rural district
in the central-southwest portion of the state. Edgefield has proven indicative of Southern
society in general and as a case study has allowed historians to make broader
generalizations on the development of Southern culture. This work will show how the
seemingly oppositional Southern cultural ethics of honor and Protestant Evangelicalism
developed simultaneously and coexisted in Edgefield, emphasizing the aspects of each
ethic that reinforced and intensified one another, as well as the resulting public perception
of the ethics in tandem. The result will reconcile two overarching historical analyses of
the South—one based on the ethos of honor and the other on the evangelical ethos—as
well as illuminate the maturation of a broad cultural ethic in Edgefield County that at
once personified as well as defied religious and cultural development in Southern history
at large.
The first chapter will establish the culture of honor as it existed in Edgefield
County, and will illustrate the extent to which Edgefield reflected and later epitomized
the cultural ethic of Southern honor into which it was born. To achieve this end,
Edgefield’s founding and cultural maturation will be placed into the prevailing historical
analysis of Southern honor. The result will suggest that Edgefield culture was the
embodiment of the Southern ethic of honor as well as highlight specific aspects of the
ethic of honor which lent themselves to manipulation and incorporation by the other
prevailing cultural ethic in the South, evangelicalism.
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