Abstract:

This dissertation explores the role secret fraternal organizations, such as the Freemasons, the Sons of Temperance, and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, played in white male unity and civic culture in antebellum Virginia. These fraternities, composed primarily of white working and middle-class men, repeatedly stressed the ideals of brotherhood, fidelity, and white male equality. More than just social clubs or charities, these orders softened class distinctions and created a civic brotherhood among white men.

This dissertation can be roughly broken into three sections. Chapter One, "Fraternal Organizations in Antebellum Virginia," serves as an overview of the history of secret fraternal orders.

The second section explores the way in which antebellum fraternal orders contributed to the creation of a new standard of masculine independence in Virginia. As members of fraternal organizations, I argue that white men made themselves the protectors of their community's moral order, and the guardians of society's "true" dependents, women, children, and African Americans. Chapter Two, "Keeping out the Unworthy," investigates the membership requirements for each order. Chapter Three, "Brothers of Vow: Fictive Kinship and the Refuge of the Lodge," examines how members believed their principles would secure social order in their communities. Each order endeavored to protect society from moral decay, the perceived by-product of new market relations in Virginia.

The final section of the dissertation describes how this new social role for non-elite white men redefined the boundaries of public paternal leadership. Chapter Four, "Securing the Republic: Fraternal Republicanism and Masculine Civic Responsibility," explores how and why fraternal orders believed that their organizations played a special role in the long-term preservation and promotion of American republicanism.

Chapter Five, "Civic Brotherhood," describes fraternity members' participation in public celebrations. The orders believed that these ceremonies were crucial to permanently securing the republican principles of the nation's founders.

Based on primary source documents (including minute books, rosters, by-laws, proceedings, census materials, speeches, state and organizational newspapers, and personal papers) this research fills a noticeable gap in existing scholarship on antebellum southern culture and gender in several important ways. First, this study provides new insight into associational life in Virginia during the state's transition to a market economy. The rapid changes in the tumultuous years of the antebellum era caused the men of Virginia to seek ways of stabilizing their society.

Second, this project addresses the role of fraternal orders in the decline of women's reform efforts in Virginia in the 1840s and 1850s. This dissertation suggests that fraternal orders helped to narrow women's opportunities outside the home by assuming their roles in the public sphere.

Finally, it contributes to recent scholarship regarding the transition from class based distinctions among white men to what historians have described as the arrival of "racial modernity" or herrenvolk republicanism in antebellum politics and culture. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)