Today the idea that the cultivation of manners should be an essential part of one’s education has been nearly lost. Indeed, evidence of the demise of manners is all around us, and thus we should be well aware that one of the main pillars of civilization is crumbling.
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee met General Ulysses S. Grant at the McLean House in Appomattox, Virginia, for the purpose of surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee had asked for the meeting and had prepared by putting on his finest uniform: a new, long dress coat with a high collar buttoned to the top, a bejeweled long sword at his side, a pair of high-topped boots with spurs. Grant appeared in his typical attire, the simple uniform of a common soldier: a short coat and plain, spur-less boots, both much spattered with mud. One of his coat buttons was put through the wrong hole.
The contrast in attire matched the contrast in the men themselves: Lee was tall, straight in his bearing and solemn in his manner; the silvery-white hair and beard that ringed his visage befitted a king. The younger Grant was four inches shorter, somewhat stoop-shouldered, with a close-cropped brown beard. He was clearly ill at ease in the presence of Lee, nervously attempting some small talk before Lee turned the meeting to the matter at hand.
This climactic scene of the American Civil War has often been cited as emblematic of a watershed moment in history, the allegorical surrender of the Old World with its regal personalities, chivalric bonds, and inherited wealth to the New World embodied by Grant, a man of humble origins who had failed repeatedly in business and who finally made himself by making war (albeit with overwhelming advantages of men and material on his side). Here was the real rough-and-tumble American of the frontier, the true democrat, whose worth was to be found in his inner fortitude, his stick-to-it-tiveness, and not in the superficiality of his dress, the foppish concerns of an effete and decaying era.
The triumph of this new, democratic world, represented by the surrender of Lee, the embodiment of the Old South, at Appomattox, brought with it a long defeat for the era of good manners.
As a student, the young George Washington once performed a copy exercise, titled “Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation,” based on a 16th-century Jesuit text. At the top of this list of 110 rules was this guiding admonition: “Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.” This maxim had presided over Western culture since the Middle Ages, and it was exemplified in the courtly manners of the upper classes everywhere and at all times, from the knights of the Frankish kingdom to the nobles of the Elizabethan Age to the American Southern aristocratic class represented by Washington and Lee. Where the upper classes led, the lower classes followed. Manners trickled down, so that even the common laborer of nineteenth-century London attempted, when wearing his Sunday best, to emulate the attire of his betters. His top hat and waistcoat may have been worn and of inferior quality, but he wore them proudly nonetheless.
Today the idea that the cultivation of manners should be an essential part of one’s education has been nearly lost. It seems to have followed in death its greatest modern advocate, Emily Post. “Manner is personality,” Post wrote, “the outward manifestation of one’s innate character and attitude toward life.” Proof of the demise of manners is all around us: the open use of foul language on the public street, not simply by unkempt, uneducated youths but by middle-age, well-groomed businessmen; the in-your-ear blaring of something incorrectly deemed to be music by its devotees out car windows; the making of turns or changing of lanes by drivers without the courtesy of a turn signal; the routine violation of one’s personal space by passersby without the least expression of apology; and most obvious and appalling, the horrific decline in standards of dress everywhere. Indeed, T-shirts, jeans and sneakers have become standard attire for adults on “casual Friday” in the business world and, even more distressingly, at Sunday Mass. People venture out of their houses into public wearing their pajamas as they perform Saturday-morning errands. Today it is the lowest class of society that sets the standards of attire for everyone else; young people have adopted an exaggerated version of prison uniforms as their everyday attire, particularly excessively baggy pants, often worn so low that underpants and even one’s derriere is exposed for all to see.
The mannered society began its death throes in America in the 1960s. It was dealt its first lethal blow by the radical cultural and political Left, who preached that business suits, proper manners, and personal grooming were symbols of the oppression of the bourgeois middle class, of “The Man.” Sporting instead tie-dyed shirts, ripped-up jeans, flip-flops and scraggly, unkempt hair upon the head and face, the Left taught, was the way to bring about the egalitarian revolution that would right society’s injustices.
What was started by the Left of the political spectrum five decades ago was exacerbated by the Right years later. Largely in response to the chilling forms of what came to be called “political correctness” that were imposed by radicals on college campuses, right-wing libertarians beginning in the 1990s adopted the mantra that no one has a right not to be offended. In a decisive transformation of the old libertarian adage that one’s right to swing one’s fist stops only at someone else’s nose, these new libertarians claimed that their right to free speech was completely unrestricted by anyone’s religious sensibilities or sense of proper decorum. Thus pornography, outrageous satire of religious belief, and foul language were acceptable in the public square. If one was offended by such things, these libertarians preached, that was the problem of the offended person, not the offender. In effect, libertarians claimed that their right to spew forth whatever they wanted through the written and spoken word was not limited by another’s eye or ear. They said to the offended: “Get over it!”
Thus the enemies of manners on both Left and Right together constituted modern-day Jacobins, determined not simply to bring down an unjust system of government but to obliterate the very fabric of society by destroying all standards of decorum. This parallel with the French Revolution brings us to the thinking of the great Anglo-Irish statesmen Edmund Burke, who believed that the Jacobins of France were, above all else, launching an assault on “manners.” Now by “manners” Burke meant something broader than what we mean today, something akin to custom. To Burke, custom was nearly synonymous with civilization itself. “Manners are of more importance than laws,” Burke wrote. “Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe.”
Manners and civilization itself, Burke held, depended on two things: religion and “the spirit of a gentleman.” Robert E. Lee believed this also. As president of Washington College in the years after Appomattox he had reduced the rules of the school to one sentence: “Every student must be a gentleman.” To Lee and Burke, a gentleman was one who displayed Christian virtue as embodied in the medieval code of chivalry, an elaborate system of proper behavior towards others—manners in the narrower sense of the word.
The quality of Christian humility lay at the root of chivalry. A chivalrous knight (the term chivalry comes from the old French word, chevalier, meaning “horseman”) humbled himself to all others in society. Thus he was bound by duties not only to his lord, his superior, but to those weaker than himself, particularly women, whose innocent virtue he was tasked to protect, and the poor, whose pathetic condition he was obliged to alleviate. One thinks of St. Martin of Tours, who famously cut off half of his military cloak to provide a naked man with clothing. To adopt a philosophy of individualism in which one rejected concern for others would have been unimaginable to the Christian knight.
One must keep in mind how unique this Christian notion of humility, and its related idea of chivalry, have been in world history. In the ancient pagan world for example, humility was considered a sign of weakness. Too, in many non-Christian modern societies, superiors are expected to be rude to inferiors, a way of keeping everyone in his proper place in society. The mighty in most places and times have boldly asserted their power as a way to maintain the status quo.
But Christian chivalry, Burke believed, “made power gentle” and served to “beautify and soften private society.” It harmonized human relations. Without it, society could only be held together by brute force and cold reason. Gone would be the warmth of considerate human relations, corrupted would be the morals of men, and all would be reduced to slaves.
It is, of course, impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when the decline of chivalry and manners in the West began. Burke certainly saw the process well underway in Europe by the time of the French Revolution. “The age of chivalry is gone,” Burke wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. “That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.” Perhaps in America the precipitous decline of manners began somewhat later, in a humble home in south-central Virginia, when the Last Cavalier of the Old World laid down his sword in defeat, giving way to the New World Order of centralized government, crony capitalism, and the narcissistic New Man, whose main concern was to be profit and personal happiness, not piety and humble concern for others.
Republished, in slightly different form, with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine.
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There are iconic turning points, as this fine essay presents, and less flamboyant but nevertheless real smaller ones, particularly population growth and mobility leading to the loss of community. Some otherwise respectable retirees go shopping dressed as bums because they have moved to Florida where nobody knows who they are. Had they remained at home and risked being seen by people who knew them, they’d have deported themselves better.
Manners, politeness, and courtesy are always proper proprieties, if applied across the board. When I was growing up on a sharecropper’s farm in Arkansas, I read all four volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman’s Biography of R.E. Lee and his three volumes on Lee’s Lieutenants, along with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind (four times from age 9-12). And then I had my grandmother who along with my grandfather (maternal grandparents) was raising me, filling my ears with the adventures of her grandfather during the Civil War. James M. Beasley was a gentleman of the old South, the son of a Planter who owned 200 slaves and many properties. Beasley was supposedly a graduate of the Univ. of Tenn. I once had his calling card. After the War his first wife and child died in child birth, and he drank and gambled his share of the wealth away. In fact, I think he was also suffering from PTSD, the result of some of the terrible battles in which he fought. For instance, a lawyer showed up sometime in the 1800s and asked for the power of attorney to handle some land for him. He signed it, and he lost downtown Memphis, Tenn. At least that is what Grandma said. Anyway one branch of the family owned much of downtown Helena, Ark. even in the 20th century. the family plantation was near Nashville. Anyway, after the death of his first wife, he married again, horror of horrors, a woman from the lower class. The embarrassment to the family was so great that the moved away from the rest of the family.
Grandma would get very upset as she told how he would bow to the rich lady down the lane, would bow and hold the door for his sisters, when they came for a visit, but he would never hold the door for his wife or bow to her. The class distinctions are a part of the chivalry, with the lower classes being treated with studied disrespect on purpose. Egalitarian has its place in our society, especially. It is a part and parcel of the Christian faith as any close study of the documents will reveal. Just spend two years on the Greek of the Agape pericope of I Cors.12:31b-14:1a. Take some 2000 5×8 notecards and write a 50 page term paper with 305 foot notes for an honors course, and it will be evident and apparent that agape love is the greatest leveller of all times.
Good manners, in the end, are nothing but the way in which respect is expressed.
Since respect, in its turn, is a feeling inspired by the presence of an admitted superior, wherever hierarchies are absent—real or fictitious, but revered—good manners die out.
Rudeness is a democratic product.
– Nicolas Gomez Davila
Give me manners, class, chivalry over this ugly, artificially leveled modern society anyday.
Any man who would not bow to his own wife and hold the door for her is a boor of the worst kind.
One man doesn’t not represent an entire civilization. I recommend Richard Weaver’s Southern Tradition at Bay for a more encompassing look at the chivalry and class distinctions of the South.
Daniel Milyavsky An interesting article and very readable, but people like Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner would have a lot to say about the incredibly good Christian manners of the “Southern aristocratic class.”
Also, you’re criticizing General Grant for not having spurs on his boots and not wearing a dress sword? Really? Certainly sounds like “the foppish concerns of an effete and decaying era,” as you say.
I agree with your remarks about manners, but wished as a history scholar specializing in the Civil War to clear up a couple of things about Grant and the Surrender at Appomattox. My defense of Grant should not be misconstrued in any way to be a disparagement of Lee’s chivalrous dress and manner.
1. Grant did not expect the surrender to take place so rapidly, and was therefore more unprepared in his appearance than he would have preferred. When he left that morning, actions were taking place to envelop the Confederates at Appomattox, but it was not certain that the envelopment would be complete and it was thought that a final battle might yet take place (indeed, that very morning of the Confederates had nearly succeeded in a break-out attempt to the west).(1) In his own memoirs, he accounts that he was racing westward to catch up with the Sheridan’s forces out in front and, as such, was passing to the south of the Confederate lines. When word reached him that Lee wanted to surrender, he was passing around the Confederate army; instead of retracing his steps to his headquarters, he proceeded instead to Sheridan’s troops on the westward side of Appomattox, surveyed the situation, dismissed the notion that Lee was lying to them and trying to escape, and then proceeded to Appomattox. In his own words, “When I had left camp that morning I had not expected so soon the result that was then taking place, and consequently was in rough garb. I was without a sword, as I usually was when on horseback on the field…” (2) Grant never even had the option of changing, as his headquarters wagon had “fallen behind in the race to cut off the enemy” that had begun nine days earlier. (3)
2. Grant made up for manners in his actions what he lacked in his dress. His surrender terms were “generous,” allowing officers and men to go home freely on parole, allowed horses to be kept by those who claimed them (to allow farming that year), and guaranteed immunity from prosecution for treason. (4) In addition, he conversed politely with Lee to the point that he “almost forgot the object of our meeting.” When he was writing the terms, he noted that it would “be an unnecessary humiliation to call upon [officers] to deliver their side arms” and therefore wrote that the terms would not “embrace the side-arms of the officers, nor their private horses or baggage.” This included Lee’s “sword of considerable value”–a sword “entirely different… from the one that would ordinarily be worn in the field.” (5) By refusing Lee’s sword, Grant did something very seldom seen before in the annals of war: refusing to gloat in victory. Grant even stopped a 100-gun salute and encouraged officers of the armies to mingle. In addition, 25,000 rations were given to the Confederate troops. (6) Finally, Grant himself apologized for his appearance to Lee and said that “I thought you would rather receive me as I was than be detained.” Lee responded: “I am very glad you did it that way.” (7)
In short, the surrender at Appomattox shows the grace, dignity, and manners exercised by BOTH Lee and Grant. The real lesson to be learned here is that the gentlemen on both the Union and Confederate sides exhibited chivalry in their actions, whatever clothes or uniforms they wore.
(1) Bruce Catton, A Stillness At Appomattox, 376-80.
(2) Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. Brian M. Thomsen, 469-72.
(3) James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 849.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Grant, Memoirs, 473.
(6) Ibid., 476-77.
(7) Shelby Foote, The Civil War: Red River to Appomattox, 949.
Sorry, but I’m not doing publisher info for a simple blog post. 😉
Scott’s comment does clear the air about Grant, but I think the point of the article stands. Dress and manners do matter. How one is dressed when one goes about his business shows the respect he has for his employees, clients and colleagues. When we have a president, and indeed all of our leaders flippantly disregarding the custom of wearing a tie, so that they may dissemble and appear “middle class” it is the paragon of disrespect. A real leader dresses to show respect for those who he serves, he doesn’t shamefully condescend. I’m not sure however which is worse, that our leaders since at least Clinton have taken this condescension as a good thing, or that citizens don’t see it for the slight that it truly is.
What an enjoyable read.