“A Dead Cock in the Pit”: Masculine Rivalry, Manhood, and Honor in the Civil War South

Abstract

In early February 1863, soldiers from the Seventeenth and Twenty-Third Regiments, South Carolina Volunteers (SCV) engaged in a fierce battle with each other. Both units were camped in North Carolina and were part of the same brigade that was commanded by Gen. Nathan George Evans, yet this did not prevent what one participant described as a scene of “desperate fighting” between the two regiments, in which “the balls flew thick and fast.” Fortunately, the fighting was not real, and the men exchanged balls made of snow rather than lead. Some of the officers of Evans’ Brigade were, however, already engaged in a very real and serious conflict with each other. David Jackson Logan, a member of the Seventeenth and a contributor to the Yorkville Enquirer, had noted the internecine strife a week prior to providing the above description of the snowball fight, explaining: “There is much bad feeling among the officers of our Brigade.”1 Two key figures within this conflict were Evans, the brigade’s commander, and Fitz William McMaster, the colonel of the Seventeenth SCV. Following the Battle of Kinston in mid-December 1862, McMaster headed up a petition signed by himself and thirty-seven other officers in the brigade requesting that they be transferred to some other command. Their desire to be