How did white Southerners in the nineteenth century reconcile a Christian faith that instructed them to turn the other cheek with a pervasive code of honour that instructed them to do just the opposite--to demand satisfaction for perceived insults? In Edgefield, South Carolina, in the 1830s, white Southerners combined these seemingly antithetical ideals to forge a new compound: a wrathful moral ethic of righteous honour. Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies investigates the formation and proliferation of this white supremacist ideology that merged masculine bellicosity with religious devotion.

In 1856, when Edgefield native Preston Smith Brooks viciously beat the abolitionist Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, the ideology of righteous honour reached its apogee and took national centre stage. Welborn analyses the birth of this peculiar moral ethic in Edgefield and traces its increasing dominance across the American South in the build-up to the Civil War, as white Southerners sought to cloak a war fought in defense of slavery in the language of honour and Christian piety.