I am of course wondering because of Mark Twain's claim in Life on the Mississippi: "But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner–or Southron, according to Sir Walter’s starchier way of phrasing it– would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them." Of course this is exaggerated for humorous effect, but I wonder to what extent.
More people should read that book. Twain really loved writing it.
Twain also lampooned the Antebellum South's love of Sir Walter Scott in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In the first, it's just boys pretending to be knights out in the woods by a small Missouri town. In the latter, it's more pointed, as at the end Tom tries to re-enact some scene out of a Waverly novel around the basic task of freeing Jim from jail. And there is absolutely no doubt that Scott influenced southern writers. Read William Gilmore Simms' books, especially The Partisan . Though he didn't give his characters King James Bible English to speak, they are very much echoes of Scott's. And while Twain noted the popularity before the Civil War, others have also noticed how well Scott's plots with downtrodden-but-unbowed heroes fit the crafting of the southern Lost Cause narrative afterwards: forget the slavery, look at our noble gallant generals, how they were called forward and loyally did their best to fight for their families and their native land.
However, the honor culture of the South was already there, before Scott's books made the rounds of the plantations. Mortality in the17th c. South was often quite high, and in the 18th c. the often precarious agricultural economy would make life very uncertain. The population was rural and scattered, government institutions were often weak, and a traditional society predominated, centered on family and community . As enumerated by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, the strong elements of conduct were:
So, though perhaps Scott and his imitators might have made it worse, their romances were a correlation of the Olde South's passions and problems, not their primary cause.
Wyatt-Brown, B. (2007). Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (25th anniversary ed.). Oxford University Press.