Books, Arts & Manners: The Last Gentlemen

Honor & Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, Gambling in the Old South, by Kenneth S. Greenberg (Princeton, 224 pp., $24.95)

AS a freshman at Davidson College in North Carolina in 1966, I came in at almost the last gasp of what had been called for nearly a century and a half “the Davidson gentleman.” A mournful college administrator and keeper of the gentlemanly flame informed the matriculating class that “this is the first year since the foundation of the College in which a Davidson gentleman has not had his bed made for him.” That service had been discontinued for pecuniary reasons, but the same administrator had himself dropped another venerable tradition of the college—that of professors’ inviting students around to their houses after chapel on Sunday evenings—when black students had begun to be admitted a couple of years previously.

About the Author

James Bowman

Featured Tags

Honor & Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, Gambling in the Old South, by Kenneth S. Greenberg (Princeton, 224 pp., $24.95)

AS a freshman at Davidson College in North Carolina in 1966, I came in at almost the last gasp of what had been called for nearly a century and a half “the Davidson gentleman.” A mournful college administrator and keeper of the gentlemanly flame informed the matriculating class that “this is the first year since the foundation of the College in which a Davidson gentleman has not had his bed made for him.” That service had been discontinued for pecuniary reasons, but the same administrator had himself dropped another venerable tradition of the college—that of professors’ inviting students around to their houses after chapel on Sunday evenings—when black students had begun to be admitted a couple of years previously.