Scripting a Nationalist Narrative: Robert Bingham and the Construction of Confederate Identity

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze and contextualize Robert Bingham's prisoner-of-war diary and show how the work of life writing intersects with the work of Confederate identity formation. Arguing that nationalism need not be fueled by political rhetoric or a local print culture, I show how Bingham uses daily descriptions of his prison experience to shape a sense of national identity. Using northern news and literature as well as local interactions to distinguish himself from his real and imagined Yankee captors, Bingham returns again and again to the broad contrasts between Union and Confederacy and to the more subtle valences of southern gender and class identity to construct himself and his wife according to an ideal that he uses, in turn, to reinforce his affective commitment to the new nation. Though Bingham's ideals are not always shaped by facts, his daily fictionalizations posing as facts allow him to stabilize his sense of self and imagine himself embodying a Confederate ideal.