Virtue & honor

Joseph Addison spoke of mistaken forms of honor 

"who think it more honorable to revenge, than to forgive an insult; who make no scruple of telling a lie, but would put any man to death that accuses them of it; who are more careful to guard their reputation by their courage, than by their virtue." (As quoted in Honor: A History, James Bowman, 2006; page 72). 

George Washington admired Addison. He followed the republican virtues as set out in Washington’s Rules of Civility, which was a code of conduct to betters, peers and subordinates, i.e., a code of authority. Honor is a code to be followed by those with authority who naturally fall above the law because they often make the law. 

In the Old World in Europe and in the American South, the upper class were the leisure class who focused more on the social than on the natural basis of honor (they privileged reputation over the expression of strong character and inner virtue). The American North, by contrast, displayed a 

"rapid growth of a new elite class of artisans and merchants whose claims to honor – perversely, in the view of Old World aristocrats – depended on their status as working men. 'By the early nineteenth century, these middling people had destroyed the leisured pretensions of would-be aristocrats in the northern states and had made work a badge of honor to a degree not duplicated in any other Western nation.'" (Honor: A History, James Bowman, 2006; page 73).