Reform in Rebeldom

Abstract

Reform in Rebeldom Stephen V. Ash (bio) William Blair. Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. x + 206 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.50. What is it about the Confederacy? Why does it so rivet our attention and engage our minds and emotions? It is not simply that Americans are suckers for a lost cause. If that were the case, we might expect to see library shelves crammed with books about the Tories of the Revolutionary War. But we see no such thing, nor do we see armies of reenactors dressed as Tory soldiers; Union Jack bumper stickers, decals, and T-shirts are not plentiful. No, the Confederacy was not just a lost cause but the Lost Cause, and its grip on the American psyche shows no sign of loosening with the passage of the generations. 1 To a certain extent, this Confederate mania is simply a part of Civil War mania, a perennial of American popular culture that blossomed anew in 1990 when public television aired Ken Burns’s series. Yet Rebel fandom seems in some ways to have a separate existence, for it embraces lots of people who find the war as a whole pretty much a bore. Most scholars of the Confederate experience would probably deny that their interest in the subject has much connection with the popular interest. Professional historians complain that the Confederacy buffs do not truly seek to understand the Rebel nation; instead they celebrate it adoringly, and if they read about it at all they do so only to indulge their taste for romance and melodrama—and maybe even their racism. The very mention of Gone with the Wind evokes groans from the academy. And yet there is a curious point of similarity between the popular and the scholarly interest. Talk to Civil War reenactors and you will learn that there is often an oversupply of Confederates at their mock battles and encampments. The Rebels generally outnumber the Yankees, sometimes embarrassingly so—a luxury that the gray-clad armies of 1861–65 rarely enjoyed in their engagements with the enemy. So, too, there seem to be a lot more historians of the Confederacy than of the Union around these days. This cannot be a factor of the relative abundance of documentary sources for the two nations, for in that regard the Union’s predominance is probably even greater than that of its [End Page 580] military forces and industry during the war. Is there, then, some intellectual reason for the disparity in numbers? Is the history of the Confederacy somehow more instructive than that of its opponent? Or are some historians, deep down inside, as much in thrall to the romance of the Confederacy as the buffs they scorn? If William Blair is a Rebel romantic he betrays no trace of it in his book. Indeed, he worries in his introduction that his findings will be misconstrued as evidence for one of the popular myths about the Confederacy—that its people were unified and unwavering in support of the Cause. Blair knows that the Confederacy was plagued by dissension and flagging morale; his purpose is to show how successfully that nation—or at least the part of it he scrutinizes—overcame those problems. Blair thus takes a stand on one of the most contentious and long-lived issues of American historiography: why the South lost the Civil War. In their wartime and postwar writings, many Confederates pointed fingers of blame at one another. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white Southerners swept all that feuding under the rug and reached a consensus: the Confederate people had fought with unanimity and great devotion, but in the end, as Robert E. Lee himself put it, they had been “compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” In other words, Yankee muscle triumphed over Rebel patriotism. As this popular consensus was taking shape, however, so was the American historical profession, and many of the scholars who looked at the question of Confederate defeat were not so sure that the Rebel nation’s autopsy report should read “died of a...