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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative
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September, 2004
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Book Review



Kentucky Justice, Southern Honor, and Ameri-can Manhood: Understanding the Life and Death of Richard Reid. By James C. Klotter. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. xviii, 197 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8071-2857-0.)

In The Shaping of Southern Culture (2002), Bertram Wyatt-Brown concluded that the "ethic [of honor] that so long has sustained the racial prescriptions of the white South required no respect or humanity toward those outside its moral boundaries" (Shaping of Southern Culture, p. 295). Within the postbellum South, those boundaries were defined not only geographically but in terms of race and manhood. There was little patience with blacks who challenged the racial hierarchy, and there may have been even less tolerance for white men who did not meet societal ideals about what it meant to be a man. 1
      In the 1880s, Richard Reid became a Kentucky Supreme Court justice. He was a kind soul in a most unkind era and region. Postbellum Kentucky was becoming notorious for interpersonal and interfamilial violence. Feuds, duels, and crime came to characterize the state. As a "Christian gentleman" (Klotter, Kentucky Justice ..., p. 42), Reid spent much of his life trying subtly to effect cultural change in his community. But the relationship of individual to community is a complex one, and Reid was at odds with much in his culture. Timidity, religiosity, and hesitance to engage in the manly world around him marked Reid as beyond Kentucky's and the South's moral boundaries. . . .

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