Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil War by Ian Binnington (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil War by Ian Binnington Michael T. Bernath (bio) Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil War. By Ian Binnington. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Pp. 216. Cloth, $39.50.) Scholarship surrounding Confederate nationalism has grown by leaps and bounds. In just the last decade, over half a dozen major new books dedicated expressly to the subject have been published. These works share a determination to move away from the long-standing weak-versus-strong debate of the previous thirty years and to evaluate the roots, substance, dissemination, and legacy of Confederate nationalism within the broader context of nineteenth-century nation-building, and no longer simply as an explanation for southern defeat or persistence. They have challenged us to take Confederate nationalist ideology seriously and to situate it within American and international practices, traditions, and thought. Ian Binnington’s short book is part of this burgeoning trend. He focuses on the symbols of Confederate nationalism (three in particular) and the meaning that white southerners invested in them. He argues that the creation of Confederate nationalism was “a quest for a symbolic text” and seeks to provide a careful reading of that text by highlighting recurrent symbols across different media and genres (6). With an insufficient collective past and an uncertain and incompletely conceived future, Confederate nationalists dwelled in a compressed “mythic present” (2). In constructing that present, white southerners relied upon certain symbolic figures and tropes to define and differentiate themselves from their northern enemies, as well as to assert their “Confederate Americanism”—a shared sense of history that declared theirs to be the true American nation and Confederates the rightful heirs of the legacy of the Revolution. Binnington identifies these symbolic figures as the “Worthy Southron,” the “Demon Yankee,” and the “Silent Slave.” The Worthy Southron was the embodiment of southern [End Page 318] nobility, civility, gentility, bravery, tradition, liberty, and democracy (rightly understood). The Demon Yankee was his polar opposite—venal, fanatical, barbarous, cowardly, meddlesome, greedy, and tyrannical. The Silent Slave was the often-unacknowledged foundation of this constructed South, a loyal “companion to the vocal Confederate self,” who, while visible, never spoke for himself (4). Having defined these tropes, Binnington proceeds with chapter-length case studies to demonstrate their presence and utility both before and during the war. Binnington begins by focusing on the commentary, largely found in southern newspapers, surrounding the drafting and ratification of the Confederate constitution in order to show that Confederate opinion makers believed it vital that their new constitution and the process by which it was created be situated squarely within the American constitutional tradition: firm evidence, Binnington maintains, of their Confederate Americanism. Next, he examines three prophetic antebellum southern novels foretelling secession and civil war, all of which prefigured Confederate nationalist symbolism by employing the figures of the Worthy Southron, Demon Yankee, and Silent Slave, and by depicting their heroic southern protagonists as champions of American liberty, defending themselves against their un-American northern adversaries. In one of his most original chapters, Binnington treats the collective iconography of Confederate currency as text in order to draw the reader’s attention to money as a means of ideological dissemination as well as to reveal how the depiction of the Confederate nation changed, moving from the agrarian to the more overtly martial. His discussion raises questions about the process by which these images were created and who exactly was writing this symbolic text: questions that examining the images on the bills alone cannot answer. It also raises questions about the material constraints under which Confederate nationalists operated and the degree to which the change Binnington describes resulted from the southern inability to produce or commission original images early in the war. Next, Binnington explores Confederate imaginative literature, four novels specifically, in order to show how southern novelists developed the Worthy Southron, Demon Yankee, and Silent Slave tropes in order to bolster Confederate morale and advance wartime nationalism. The final chapter looks at literary depictions of Confederate military figures as living embodiments of the Worthy Southron ideal. Reaffirming the work of Gary Gallagher and others who have...