Gone With the Wind and the many novels about the grace and charm of life in the Old South have taught a popular view of Southerners' attachment to the concept of chivalry, but even the more historically sophisticated remain vague about the actual place of chivalry in southern culture, missing its medieval source. The chivalry of the Middle Ages, as Richard Kaeuper demonstrates, rested upon – and uneasily bridged – contradictory allegiances to Christianity and to violence, producing tensions that persisted in Southerners' attempts to defend their ideal of chivalry in their unique modern slave society.

The medieval ideal of meekness in the ferocious warrior and of ferocity in the meekest of men lay at the heart of the southern ideal of the gentleman, which chivalry inspired and informed across differences of region and social class. The Presbyterian Reverend Frederick Ross and his doctrinal and political arch-foe, the Methodist Reverend William G. Brownlow, for once saw eye to eye. Ross, scion of a planter family in Virginia, taunted the abolitionists: “Oh sir, if slavery tends in any way to give the honor of chivalry to Southern young gentlemen towards ladies, and the exquisite delicacy of heavenly integrity and love to Southern maid and matron, it has then a glorious blessing with its curse.”