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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers by James J. Broomall John Mayfield Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers. By James J. Broomall. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 240 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-1-4696-5198-9. It is ironic, perhaps, that in this age in which Civil War monuments have become the hardware of ideological wars, there is a growing body of scholarship that looks beyond the marble and bronze to the emotional core of the men who fought. This is the burgeoning field of the history of emotions. War is politics; war is leadership and strategy; war is a machine. It is also misery, boredom, euphoria, fear, love, confusion, and all the other thoughts and feelings the human psyche can generate, no matter the political objective. From the soldier's point of view, how does a man or woman navigate the terror and machine-like depersonalization of war without losing one's sense of self? There is no fixed answer, yet there are some fine studies already in hand. Among these are Peter Carmichael's exploration of how the common soldier "thought, fought and survived" [The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies (Chapel Hill, NC, 2018)] and Stephen Berry's elegant account of their struggle to define themselves as both "good" men and warrior heroes [All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (New York, NY, 2003)]. These and other works inevitably cross paths with gender studies. What, in Berry's terms, "makes a man"? The answer depends, says James Broomall's new book, on the mix of time, place, and circumstance in which a man finds himself. The key phrase in the title is "emotional worlds," plural. What men are expected to feel and how they express those feelings are not constants; they shift with situations—war being a convulsive one. The southern man experienced enormous emotional change in the transition from peace to war and to war's aftermath, and along the way he developed new "emotional communities" in which he could safely express himself. Broomall has employed here a perspective first voiced by Barbara Rosenwein, a medieval historian who found herself [End Page 262] frustrated at the childlike stereotypes modernists had imposed on her subjects. Times change, and the register of acceptable emotional behaviors change with them. Dealing with such challenges (particularly during war) involves what sociologist Arlie Hochschild has termed "emotional work," which historian William Reddy has translated into the "navigation of feelings." Navigating feelings in the emotional community of the Old South was a tough task. To the public, the ideal southern man was a man of honor—that tense mixture of pride, gentility, fearlessness, violence, and supreme self-assurance that gave men mastery over their emotions and, concurrently, other people. It was a stiff code, and it was played for public recognition, not introspection or self-revelation. "Men commanded themselves and their feelings firmly," writes Broomall, a posture which "erected barriers" between men and discouraged "feminine" notions of vulnerability and openness (5). This man of honor became the stereotypical southern gentleman/hothead who had, in Henry Adams's famous phrase, "temperament," not "mind." In fact, it was never that simple, as Broomall is at pains to point out. Books by Berry, Timothy Williams, myself, and others have revealed a questioning, often painful, sometimes ironic side to southern manhood. It crops up in letters, diaries, memoirs, humor, and even sermons. Privately, southern men were prone to self-doubt, but given honor's heroic appeal they could not show it. So they fashioned themselves into "both restrained and martial masculinities, demonstrating a flexible model of manhood that proved essential" to survival in the coming war (31). Here Broomall echoes Carmichael's perspective: Soldiering demanded a "hard-nosed pragmatism" that could accommodate both individualism and military discipline. There could be honor in picket duty, or even in retreat. Broomall's narrative develops soldiers' emotional communities sequentially, through the phases of war. Recruitment and preparation, battle, demobilization, and defeat—all were disorienting and all...