The word “cavalier” gets thrown around a lot. However, 400 years ago it was an actual, specific type of person in England, and later on in the Old Dominion. A cavalier was a royalist, a country gentleman, and a soldier. These people were loyal to the King of England during the English Civil War, and the often owned large chunks of land. They continued this landed gentry tradition in what would later become the colonies, and later states, of Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware. Many of the folkways in South West England were maintained in the Tidewater region, and even the geography of the Tidewater reminded the people in this part of the New World of their ancestral homelands back in England.
…a Child of Honour, a Gentleman well borne and bred, that loves his king for conscience sake, of a clearer countenance, and bolder look than other men, because of a more loyal Heart.
Edward Simmons
The Cavalier Culture had virtues and vices like any other distinct folkway. Gambling, betting on just about anything, sensitivity to perceived or imagined personal slights, and adulterous behavior were all fairly regular behaviors. However, there were very good aspects of Cavalier Culture. The virtue of honour was a major part of their worldview. Honour wasn’t simply a military virtue, but required cultivation in daily life and manners. Men were expected to cultivate virtue, and gentility encompassed that. In this dynamic, landed gentry could have honour, so could yeoman, and even servants in their own way, but the landed gentry were the pinnacle of this possibility.
A country gentleman, or cavalier, had his own estate and manor. In many ways, he was “king of the hill.” He didn’t really have to answer to anyone, not in any meaningful sense. The manor was mostly self-sufficient, and because of all the waterways throughout the Tidewater, he could trade and fairly easily get his crops to market or even overseas. This allowed the Cavalier Culture to be very independent-minded, and nurtured a very patriarchal society. And, I use “patriarchy” in a non-pejorative but descriptive sense. The gentleman had dominion over his family, servants, and the broader community. He also shouldered all the responsibilities that entailed. A gentleman was obligated to protect his family and his people, even his indentured servants and slaves.
Modern Southern men, in some circumstances, are an amalgamation of three separate, but complementary, folkways of Dixie: Appalachia, Tidewater, and the Deep South. It’s possible to pick the best attributes from each of these Southern nations and incorporate them into your individual lives. For instance, a man’s father might be from Smithfield, Virginia (Tidewater) and his mother from Bristol, Virginia (Appalachia). The self-reliance, borderland culture of Appalachia can be combined with the Tidewater’s Cavalier Culture quite nicely. I hope the Texans and Western Confederates excuse my omission of their respectable cultures in the comment section.
You likely don’t have a manor or large estate, but you can own property and a few acres. We can all learn through practice and patience how to live more virtuous lives. Even if you haven’t served in the military, you probably know someone who has. Learning how to effectively use the tools you need to defend yourself in this era is going to involve marksmanship and training. We are going to have to be more involved in our communities, more than simply being “king of the hill.” Cavaliers don’t like taking orders from other people, but it is necessary for us to build lasting relationships with like-minded folks.
If we want to preserve a neighborhood, village, or town, then the isolated individualist must take a backseat to the larger community. If for no other reason than simple survival, we must help each other in genuine communal practices. For starters, we must begin pooling our resources together, helping the financially needy, and encouraging small business ownership. Homeschooling and fraternal organizations are going to become a more prevalent reality moving forward, or we are going to have a difficult time surviving the coming cultural and political onslaught.
Yeomanry, owning your own humble piece of land and being autonomous, wasn’t a widespread practice in the Deep South, although it has been part of the broader Southern tradition. Yeomanry existed in the old country, and it grew and expanded in the New World. Historically, roughly 20-30 percent of the Old Dominion could have been labeled as yeomen. My direct ancestor came from Wales circa the 1630s as free yeoman. His family stayed in the same general area for the past 400 years. There is something to be said for love of country, of the dirt under your feet, and the soil in your hands. For a tree to grow properly, its roots have to be firmly planted in the soil. We need to be like the great trees of the forest; deep roots have no trouble weathering storms.
Cultivating virtue, through practicing honour and self-improvement, will ensure our communities have leaders in them that actually represent the folks we want to have in our nation. The Tidewater cavaliers, Deep South, and Appalachian folkways have a martial spirit to them and an embedded honour culture. We can cultivate these very real historical attributes, blend them together, and this will, in part, help our people survive the future.
Embrace Cavalier Culture, or some fusion of it. God bless Dixie.
-By JJ, Old Dominion Cavalier
O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
Well written and great points, thank you sir.
Anglo Barbadian Slave Lord > Southwest English Cavalier Gentry
How dare you good sir! Duel at sundown! (takes of glove and throws it down)
Ulster Scots Yeoman >
Anglo Barbadian Slave Lord > Southwest English Cavalier Gentry
Why the Yeoman is greatest among the Southerner?
I’ll tell you why: the Yeoman society was truly Southern, the other two societies were built on a fiction of corporation… the bane of all of America now…
The most salient features of the pre-war “quintessential South” were states’ rights, agrarianism, racial slavery, “aristocracy”, and specific habits of mind.
In their postwar memoirs, both Jefferson Davis and Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens maintained that states’ rights were the essential issue underlying the conflict.
States’ rights is the political doctrine that strictly limits the prerogatives of the federal government to powers explicitly assigned to it by the US Constitution, while reserving to the several states all remaining powers not explicitly forbidden them.
The legal concept originated with Thomas Jefferson in 1798, and was elaborated in succeeding decades by John Taylor of Caroline, John Randolph of Roanoke, and Southern statesman John C. Calhoun.
Agrarianism signified an agricultural society, economy, and way of life neither communal nor wholly capitalistic (ie. usury and corporatism).
Slavery was a third vital feature of the South.
Additionally, the concepts of the agrarians are nice, but one can make a solid argument that the United States, even going back to colonial days, has never really been a traditional agrarian society such as England before the Enclosure Acts or Scotland before the Clearances. The South’s economy became that of commercial agriculture during the life of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. The market for Virginia’s products was not local by the 1630s as well as and South Carolina’s, and everyone had to watch their bottom line. Indeed, it can be argued that slavery itself was the result of corporations bringing in cheap, Third World labor, and they lobbied state governments for policies that privatized their profits and made their costs public (ie. privatize the profits and benefits but socialize the risks and losses onto the Yeoman.
In the United States, yeomen were identified in the 18th and 19th centuries as non-slaveholding, small landowning, family farmers. In areas of the Southern United States where land was poor, like East Tennessee, the landowning yeomen were typically subsistence farmers, but some managed to grow crops for market. Whether they engaged in subsistence or commercial agriculture, they controlled far more modest landholdings than those of the planters, typically in the range of 50–200 acres. In the Northern United States, practically all the farms were operated by yeoman farmers as family farms.
Thomas Jefferson was a leading advocate of the yeomen, arguing that the independent farmers formed the basis of republican values. Indeed, Jeffersonianism as a political force was largely built around the yeomen. After the American Civil War (1861-1865), organizations of farmers, especially the Grange, formed to organize and enhance the status of the yeoman farmers.
We have lost our way in idolatry of mammon and worship of a god proxy and the other which has destroyed any sense of our own kinship, community, ethnos and nation…
yes, Southern yeomen should have been given more importance. however, the Northern republic of yeomen pretty much allowed their urban aristocracy to rule, eventually building an American System more coldly and anti-nature than any Cavalier or enslaver dreamed of. so, land distribution is not the only vector we have to deal with… for without kings of the hill, the yeomen can be duped by the urbanites quite easier. the kings of the hill just needed to share a little more, and import less/no scabs (and even then, malaria and swamps made that hard – the whitest area of the South is after all the drier, hillier, more temperate Appalachia…)
Agreed. Ulster Scots/Border English/Scots Irish/Hillbilly culture is one of the most successful cultures to be brought over from Great Britain during colonization. From the hills of Virginia to West Texas you can see this anarchic group of people spreading their civilization far and wide. I would say that they are one of the most anti-fragile groups to have settled the early American continent has their presence is felt in places so far flung as New Mexico and California. These were the eager hungry men that plowed across a continent shaping it for later settlers. Even early California/Western settlers came from this stock and came to create the “cowboy” culture that is so much a part of American mythos today.
surviving those dry desert Highlands and/or farming peat for generations, and attending so many Masses in Latin, builds that. as well as all the fairs and holidays of olde which gave them some respite and good humor. some of this spirit may have also come to the South through the old few Catholics of New Orleans and Maryland, these definitely more gentry Cavaliers though.
then again, the hellfire and brimstone Prots perhaps had even stronger imprint among these descendants of Presbyterians, though perhaps softened a bit by Southern weather too. the Yankee is either all work and no play, or pure urbanite hedonism, zero balance, lots of neurotics and Jew friends.
Theres a character just like this; Sir Martyn Lacey in the BBC’s ‘By the Sword Divided’ series. Its all on youtube, its worth a look.
JJ, This has to be one of my favorite articles I’ve read on this site, very well said. I guess I’m a mixture of 2 of the southern nations, as half of my family comes from mostly the deep south an half from mostly Southern Appalachia an still mostly remains there to this day.
I appreciate that you included the English roots gentleman/gentry traditions that are still such pillars in particularly, the south. My grandfather especially would have appreciated how you included their Brittish roots at the beginning as he made sure that I never forgot my Brittish roots while growing up, and was also very passionate about my families heritage in general. I hope to keep these traditions alive in my family an social circles, and never forget how important they are to teach to the future generations as my grandfather taught me.
Its good for us to live from the best principles of each nation, It’s also important that the 3 southern nations remain distinct from one another as they have been for over 400 years.
An example of this is that someone native to Alabama or the Deep South is not in cowboy country nor a cowboy, like many modern country artists seem to think just as someone from cowboy country in states such as Texas they wouldn’t be identified as Appalachian mountain men. Sorry new country artists, not all southern people are cowboys an Im sure our cowboy friends in the western part of the south are just as sick of this generalization of our people as I am. I have great appreciation an admiration for the cowboy an his way of life, but just because Im from the South doesn’t make me a cowboy cause I’m not one an never will be one. You have no idea how much that stuff annoys me an gets under my skin every time I hear those generalizations of southerns from ignorant fools.
In conclusion it’s important that we unite across the south, but remember the distinctions from the southern region we come from. It’s important that we don’t generalize ourselves to much an forget what makes our particular region of south special along with the variations of culture depending on what part of the south you’re in. Unlike the generic yanks, we actually have the distinct “cultural diversity” they always go on an on about right under their noses an it’s important we’re proud of it.
Agree! But I’ll have to say that I’m partial to the Ulster Scot pioneered Western Cowboy culture and region of Dixie. 🤷🏼♂️ “In conclusion it’s important that we unite across the south, but remember the distinctions from the southern region we come from. It’s important that we don’t generalize ourselves to much an forget what makes our particular region of south special along with the variations of culture depending on what part of the south you’re in. Unlike the generic yanks, we actually have the distinct “cultural diversity” they always go on an on about right under their noses an it’s important we’re proud of it.”
Virtually my entire family ended up here in Colorado. The earliest were pioneers, and the latest arrived in the 1960’s from East Saint Louis – for obvious reasons.
On my mom’s side there were farmers, but they made their money from being general store/grocery store owners. But, my dad’s side are full of boxers, soldiers, policemen, and firemen. Between the two sides my family has fought in every branch of the service and every major conflict since the War of Northern Aggression.
The only pedigree I can claim is my physique. The most valuable thing that I own is an exceptionally comprehensive library. Out here in the West are the mountains, when you’re standing on the top of a 14er, it feels like the entire world is yours.
Then there’s Southern Colorado where the high desert begins. It’s desolate, it’s vast, and by God it is dry. Out here amongst the true natives there is a bristling sentiment of – “this is God’s land, it ain’t mine, and it sure as hell ain’t yours.” This is where Mountain Men came to live in the wilderness, I aspire to be like these men, and the Yamabushi of Japan.
I am not a gentleman, merely a man.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/hugh-glass
a noble and true history: The Confederate Revolution https://www.counter-currents.com/2012/10/the-confederate-revolution/