James J. Broomall. Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers.

Abstract

White men of the Civil War–era South often appear in popular memory as stock figures with limited emotional ranges: hotheaded bullies, stoic warriors, or pious defenders of hearth and home. With Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers, James J. Broomall cuts through these condescending caricatures in a methodologically sophisticated study of Confederate soldiers, which offers nuanced analysis and embraces the ambiguity and diversity of emotional experience. Grounded in close readings of selected letters and diaries, mostly written by slaveholders, Private Confederacies shows that the Civil War marked a personal as well as political crisis for white southern men. Before the war, they were expected to restrain their emotions and project an image of mastery over themselves as well as their households. Yet for all their power and privilege, these public personas masked doubts, anxieties, and fears, which men confided to the diaries they used for self-shaping as well as self-expression. Then came the war. A militaristic regional culture spurred white southern men to enlist, but few were thoroughly prepared to subordinate themselves to rigorous discipline or endure the fatigues of campaigning; still fewer were ready for the grisly horrors of battle. While attending to his subjects’ wide range of responses to the wrenching challenges of soldiering, Broomall illuminates revealing patterns. Most importantly, soldiers who struggled to express themselves to civilians turned to each other for support, building powerful bonds and sharing feelings that they would have suppressed in civilian life. Indeed, notes Broomall, men’s wartime experiences led them to “express levels of emotionality and vulnerability that society once saw as the purview of women,” even as they fostered a “virulent, martial masculinity” and encouraged violence (5).