Civil War South Research Articles

Navigating Liberty: Black Refugees and Antislavery Reformers in the Civil War South

Navigating Liberty: Black Refugees and Antislavery Reformers in the Civil War South

“A Dead Cock in the Pit”: Masculine Rivalry, Manhood, and Honor in the Civil War South

“A Dead Cock in the Pit”Masculine Rivalry, Manhood, and Honor in the Civil War South Patrick J. Doyle (bio) In early February 1863, soldiers from the Seventeenth and Twenty-Third Regiments, South Carolina Volunteers (SCV) engaged in a fierce battle with each other. Both units were camped in North Carolina and were part of the same brigade that was commanded by Gen. Nathan George Evans, yet this did not prevent what one participant described as a scene of “desperate fighting” between the two regiments, in which “the balls flew thick and fast.” Fortunately, the fighting was not real, and the men exchanged balls made of snow rather than lead. Some of the officers of Evans’ Brigade were, however, already engaged in a very real and serious conflict with each other. David Jackson Logan, a member of the Seventeenth and a contributor to the Yorkville Enquirer, had noted the internecine strife a week prior to providing the above description of the snowball fight, explaining: “There is much bad feeling among the officers of our Brigade.”1 Two key figures within this conflict were Evans, the brigade’s commander, and Fitz William McMaster, the colonel of the Seventeenth SCV. Following the Battle of Kinston in mid-December 1862, McMaster headed up a petition signed by himself and thirty-seven other officers in the brigade requesting that they be transferred to some other command. Their desire to be [End Page 76] transferred stemmed from concerns about Evans’s competence and his sobriety. Evans was incensed and believed—with justification—that McMaster was the orchestrator of this attempt to undermine his reputation and authority. Accordingly, by the time Logan provided his rather whimsical account of the members of Evans’ Brigade pelting each other with snowballs, Evans and Mc-Master had already been casting serious aspersions against each other. During the first half of 1863, both officers would come before military courts to address allegations that were made in the wake of Kinston, and the resultant rancor from their clash would prove long-standing. A close analysis of the dispute between Evans and McMaster offers the historian an ideal opportunity to rethink constructions of manhood and honor in the mid-nineteenth-century US South and, importantly, to also better understand how the circumstances of war impinged on these constructions. Indeed, by invoking ideas about alcohol and intoxication, cowardice and bravery, insult and appropriate retribution, the dispute clustered around contemporary understandings of what it meant to be an honorable gentleman. The notion that masculinity was a driving force in all of this was neatly encapsulated by a confidant of McMaster who congratulated his friend that the publication and distribution of McMaster’s court-martial proceedings had left Evans “a dead cock in the pit.”2 A cockfight was an apt metaphor, as the image of fierce combat encapsulated the need to dominate that lay at the heart of antebellum Southern manhood, while the baying audience symbolized the interconnected individual performance and communal sanction of honor. Evans and McMaster each sought to vanquish the other, and to do so, they needed their actions and behavior to be approved by their peers.3 The pages that follow outline the evolution of the Evans-McMaster feud during the US Civil War and, in doing so, probe its significance with regards to regional understandings of manhood (for the avoidance of doubt, it must be [End Page 77] emphasized that this article focuses specifically on ideas about masculinity and honor held by men of the middle and upper strata of white Southern society). A number of fine studies have identified divergent visions of white manhood in the antebellum South, often by portraying an older “masquerade culture” of performative honor and gentlemanliness as being challenged by more modern impulses that were stimulated by the market, evangelicalism, and/or generational transition.4 In one such fine study, John Mayfield has noted how both ethics shared an undeniable desire to dominate but the means to that end diverged: “Manhood in the marketplace required shrewdness over fearlessness, cleverness over generosity, a tough rationalism over pride, self-discipline over conspicuous waste, and the occasional need to be downright deceptive rather than transparent.”5 Amy S...

Emancipating Masculinity: Black Union Deserters and Their Families in the Civil War South

In June 1863, James Smith fled slavery in Virginia and joined the Union ranks. Not six months later he deserted again—this time emancipating himself from the 36th United States Colored Infantry (Usci). Chaplain Henry McNeal Turner of the 1st Usci learned of the desertion and wrestled with why Smith would run from the army. To proponents of military service such as Turner, fighting would forcefully reclaim Black manhood in the wake of emasculating bondage. Deserters disrupted these aspirations, bewildering the chaplain. “I can neither hear nor imagine the reason why these men desert to the rebels,” Turner wrote to the Christian Recorder. “Perhaps it is mere wife-love,” he speculated, “some of them having wives South to whom they feel much endeared, and not knowing any thing concerning their condition, it seems to prey upon their minds, until all fear, dread and manhood is lost. And thus they desert.” The chaplain dismissed Smith as unmanly for shirking his duty. But the chaplain failed to consider that soldiers could also prove themselves men acting on “wife-love.” Indeed, Smith and many of the nearly 140,000 Black southerners who enlisted had escaped slavery and, while committed to service, yearned to care for their families in bondage or refugee camps. When Union pickets captured Smith and questioned him, Smith spoke of his wife behind enemy lines, showing he valued his responsibilities as a husband at least as much as his duties as a soldier. In his desertion, he enacted a masculine self that was distinct from the prescribed code of manhood Turner referenced.1

Love and Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss by Angela Esco Elder

Reviewed by: Love and Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss by Angela Esco Elder Libra R. Hilde (bio) Love and Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss. By Angela Esco Elder. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 224. $95.00 cloth; $27.95 paper; $21.99 ebook) The Civil War created 200,000 Confederate widows. Angela Esco Elder uses personal narratives, print, and popular-culture sources to explore the social vision and expectations of widows, their heightened political clout, and their diverse responses to loss. "Because society invested widowhood with so much significance, it inadvertently created the stage upon which an unforeseen and unprecedented number of young Confederate women could be seen and heard," Elder writes (p. 2). While Elder includes working-class women, the sources favor elite white women. Love and Duty traces the emotional contours of widow's lives and the political significance of their mourning rituals, which took on increased salience as leaders sought legitimacy for the Confederacy. Widows had a public role to play, and they expected reciprocal rewards. The staggering level of male death in a highly patriarchal society makes this an important study. As wives became widows, they displayed a range of reactions, with some upholding social ideals and others falling short. A selfless widow wore proper mourning attire, found refuge in motherhood and religion, and devoted herself to her husband's memory and to the Confederacy. Widows' behavior mattered, and they "became walking embodiments of sacrifice for their communities" (p. 81). Elder probes the variety of lived experience as these women navigated financial, material, and emotional distress. She interweaves moving individual narratives throughout the book. Chapter two contains an especially strong section on written intimacy as letters became increasingly important and unguarded amidst prolonged separations. This book poses intriguing questions, though Elder's answers sometimes remain unsubstantiated. Elder notes that some wives in abusive marriages likely felt relief when a husband died but [End Page 82] provides no evidence to back up this statement. In addition, the historiography is incomplete. Elder cites Confederate Reckoning (2010) but should explicitly note that she is building on Stephanie McCurry's argument about the unintended ramifications of symbolically including women in the framing of the Confederate experiment. Contrary to Elder's claim, historians have not portrayed southern women as a monolith. She shows tensions within families and across generations, but misses the opportunity to fully address the historiography on class divides and shifting gender roles even as the patriarchy survived. As they reconstructed their lives, widows wielded their social capital to petition the government for aid. Widows who visibly endorsed the Confederacy were more successful, meaning that those in the border states faced added hardships. Because they had "political power," mounting deaths amplified concern over the "sexually promiscuous widow" (pp. 107, 103). Most of the lengthy examples present model widows or those who grieved too deeply rather than in a politically problematic way. The book would benefit from extended first-person stories of those who upended expectations. In the postwar period, widows continued to invoke their special status to seek support. Elite widows could become celebrities devoted to memorializing their deceased husbands. However, Elder suggests that many impoverished widows had little time or energy for memorial work. Those most active in memorial associations were married or widowed after the war, and thus Elder contends that "white women did not seamlessly work together to create a Lost Cause ideology" (p. 132). She raises astute questions about widows' anemic participation, but the evidence is thin. Moreover, not working for something is not the same as working against it. Did these women speak out against the Lost Cause, even privately? Once again, the detailed stories highlight publicly active widows. If "grief, and grieving rituals, could be simultaneously compliant and oppositional," Elder needs examples of oppositional behavior from real women and [End Page 83] not just the fictional Scarlett O'Hara. Was this open opposition or an inability or refusal to actively engage? Libra R. Hilde LIBRA R. HILDE teaches history at San José State University. She is the author of Worth a Dozen Men: Women and Nursing in the Civil War South...

Persistence through Peril: Episodes of College Life and Academic Endurance in the Civil War South ed. by R. Eric Platt and Holly A. Foster

Persistence through Peril: Episodes of College Life and Academic Endurance in the Civil War South ed. by R. Eric Platt and Holly A. Foster

Belles and Poets: Intertextuality in the Civil War Diaries of White Southern Women by Julia Nitz, and: Women’s Diaries from the Civil War South: A Literary-Historical Reading by Sharon Talley

Belles and Poets: Intertextuality in the Civil War Diaries of White Southern Women by Julia Nitz, and: Women’s Diaries from the Civil War South: A Literary-Historical Reading by Sharon Talley

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South

Persistence Through Peril: Episodes of College Life and Academic Endurance in the Civil War South

Editors Eric R. Platt and Holly A. Foster compiled a series of essays about southern institutions of higher education's disruptions and persistence in the face of war that resonate in today's COVID disrupted world of higher education.

Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South

Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South

Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski

Reviewed by: Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski Carl C. Creason (bio) Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South. By Gracjan Kraszewski. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2020. Pp. ix, 196. $45.00 cloth; $37.99 ebook) In the spring of 1864, Jesuit priests at St. Charles College in Grand Coteau suspended classes to celebrate the "good news" of Confederate victories in Louisiana (p. 50). Months later, in neighboring Mississippi, federal troops arrested Bishop William Henry Elder of Natchez for refusing to offer a prayer in support of President Abraham Lincoln. And, in July 1864, Bishop Patrick Lynch of [End Page 92] Charleston arrived in Rome to meet with Pope Pius IX. The American prelate, commissioned as an official Confederate diplomat, traveled to Italy in hopes of securing papal recognition of the Confederacy. All of these events serve as examples of what historian Gracjan Kraszewski terms "Catholic Confederatization." In Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South, Kraszweski examines the nature of "Catholic commitment to and involvement in the Confederacy," demonstrating that, for the majority of white southern Catholics, religious and political identities "were not in tension; rather, they mutually reinforced each other" over the course of the Civil War (pp. xvii–xviii). Organized both chronologically and thematically, Catholic Confederates includes six chapters that examine the lives of prominent southern Catholics. Presented together, these case studies provide a representative portrait of the overall white southern Catholic experience. Chapters devoted to the wartime activities of bishops and priests as well as lay soldiers and civilians highlight the spectrum of Catholic Confederatization. Even though "almost all Southern Catholics were somehow involved in the Confederate nation," the degree and manner of Confederatization differed among Catholics for a variety of reasons (p. xix). Chaplains and soldiers remained the most "highly politicized" Catholics, donning rebel uniforms and supporting southern independence on the battlefield (p. xvii). Confederatization among members of the hierarchy, however, ranged from Bishop Lynch's overt display as an international lobbyist to Bishop Elder's position that he prayed only for a quick end to the war. As Catholic Confederates shows, southern prelates often couched their Confederate sympathies in messages advocating peace. Kraszewski's interpretations, then, call into question those religious leaders who claimed to be apolitical or neutral. And, finally, the chapter on sister-nurses focuses on a group of Catholics who participated in the Confederacy "without politicization" (p. 95). Catholic Confederates makes important contributions to the fields of Civil War religion, nineteenth-century southern Catholicism, and [End Page 93] Confederate nationalism. Kraszewski frames his study as an examination of a minority group within the newly established Confederate nation. In doing so, Catholic Confederates builds on the work of Emory Thomas, Drew Gilpin Faust, Anne Sarah Rubin, and other historians who have analyzed loyalty, identity, and citizenship in the Civil War South. Scholars of the Confederacy will benefit from Kraszewski's study of non-Protestant as well as immigrant expressions of nationalism, thereby broadening our understanding of the social makeup of the Confederacy. Historians of U.S. Catholicism, on the other hand, will appreciate Kraszewski's "Confederatization thesis," an alternative to the "Americanization thesis," which has influenced much of the historiography since the mid-twentieth century. While the Americanization thesis highlights the problems Catholics faced with assimilation, often depicting them as "others" or "outsiders," the Confederatization thesis posits that Catholics "were fully integrated members of [Confederate] society" (p. 141). As such, Kraszewski's work supports the arguments of recent publications by Andrew H. Stern, David C. R. Heisser, and Adam L. Tate, all of whom demonstrate that Catholicism thrived as an element of antebellum-southern and Confederate cultures. Throughout Catholic Confederates, Kraszewski illustrates how Catholics seemed "practically indistinguishable from Southern Protestants" (p. xxi). Differences of theology and modes of worship appear in sections about chaplains dispensing the sacraments in campgrounds and on battlefields. However, these activities are presented as examples of accepted religious diversity. In large part, Catholic inclusion in the Confederate nation crystallized because Church leaders either accepted or publicly endorsed slavery and the racial order established by the institution. Kraszewski joins a growing body of scholars who...

Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South

Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South

Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski

Reviewed by: Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski Adam L. Tate (bio) Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South. By Gracjan Kraszewski. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2020. Pp. 216. Cloth, $45.00.) During the past fifteen years, scholars have rediscovered the history of Catholicism in the antebellum South and reexamined Catholic religious practice in the armies during the Civil War. For example, books by James Woods, Andrew Stern, Michael Pasquier, William Kurtz,1 and others have scrutinized Catholic engagement with mid-nineteenth-century culture. Interest in Civil War–era religion also drove the 2016 publication of the massive Civil War diary of Confederate chaplain James Sheeran and the 2019 edition of David Conyngham’s unfinished nineteenth-century manuscript, Soldiers of the Cross, which details the efforts of Catholic chaplains and religious sisters during the war.2 Recently, Benjamin Miller’s In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during the American Civil War (2019) incorporated the experiences of Catholic chaplains into a broader study of religion in Civil War armies. The new scholarship reveals that Catholicism, which by 1860 was the largest Christian denomination in the United States, needs broader incorporation into the general narratives of both southern religion and the Civil War. As part of this emerging literature, Gracjan Kraszewski’s Catholic Confederates demonstrates that southern Catholics strongly supported the Confederacy while considering themselves devoutly religious. Kraszewski, surprised by Catholic allegiance to the South, creates a term, “Confederatization,” to describe Catholics’ acceptance of their new nation. Confederatization, he notes, “propelled Southern Catholics toward prioritizing [End Page 127] a new national identity above older ethnic ones” (xviii–xix). Kraszewski uses letters, diaries, and newspaper sources to explain this process among a handful of Confederates. While the volume contributes to knowledge about religion during the Civil War and American Catholic history, his argument suffers at times from the inconsistent use of his model of Confederatization. Catholic bishops in the South, Kraszewski shows, varied in the enthusiasm they demonstrated toward the Confederacy, but all tried to separate their spiritual duties from their personal political beliefs. Patrick Lynch, the bishop of the Diocese of Charleston, was the “most Confederatized of bishops” (121). He publicly celebrated secession and the fall of Fort Sumter and, in 1864, served on a failed diplomatic mission to the Vatican to obtain formal recognition for the Confederacy from Pope Pius IX. Despite his political zeal, as Kraszewski notes, Lynch “encouraged Catholics to tend to their faith first, regardless of external pressures, for neither war nor circumstances of time could change the Church’s mission” (75). When the archbishop of Baltimore suddenly died in 1863, Lynch even recommended a northern bishop to fill the see, a sign of the episcopacy’s “cross-sectional spiritual unity,” Kraszewski contends (77). Kraszewski also discusses William Henry Elder, bishop of Natchez, Mississippi, who gained notoriety in June 1864 by refusing Union orders to read a prayer for President Abraham Lincoln during mass. At that time, Elder claimed that interfering with divine worship was not the business of the United States government. Refusing to bend, Elder suffered arrest and was imprisoned in Louisiana. Previous scholars have seen Elder’s actions as either genuine spiritual concern or “southern partisanship” (91). Kraszewski, however, depicts Elder’s stand as a perfect example of Confederatization. Elder could appear to be a good Catholic and good Confederate simultaneously with no cognitive dissonance. Elder had told his priests “not to make any pulpit statements about secession” so as not to “scandalize” Catholics who had already taken loyalty oaths to the occupying Union forces (87), but his arrest in 1864 brought him wide acclaim from Protestant southerners and made for newspaper fodder throughout the land. Unlike most of their bishops, however, Catholic Confederate chaplains and soldiers, Kraszewski asserts, “were highly politicized” (xvii). He relies on the diaries of three chaplains—James Sheeran, John Bannon, and Louis-Hippolyte Gache—and three Catholic soldiers—John Dooley, a Virginian, and two Louisiana men, Henri Garidel and Felix Pierre Poche. In particular, Kraszewski finds that the chaplains intensely focused on their spiritual mission to help the troops while frequently referencing their [End Page...

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

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...

Women’s Diaries from the Civil War South: A Literary-Historical Reading by Sharon Talley

Women’s Diaries from the Civil War South: A Literary-Historical Reading by Sharon Talley

Playing the “Lady Sambo”

Abstract In the post–Civil War South, black women litigants made conscious tactical appeals to white male judges’ racism, particularly the racist-sexist stereotypes at the heart of the white paternalism ethos, in order to win lawsuits against whites who defrauded them. African American women’s arsenal of legal strategies included the “Lady Sambo,” an intentional racialized gender performance of feigned ignorance. By performing the “Lady Sambo”—an ignorant, servile black woman in need of protection—some poor black women mobilized their expertise in white racism to defend their economic rights. In a white-dominated society predicated upon the denial of black rights, freedom, and dignity, poor black women seeking justice in civil court cases had to employ resistance strategies that did not openly challenge white authority. In white paternalism, a cultural mainstay of the postbellum South, poor black women discerned and wrested an opportunity to covertly resist economic racism. Unable to attenuate or eradicate structural racism, black women treated racism as a weakness that, at times, made whites vulnerable to manipulation. As long as judges’ legal decisions left the white male power structure intact, some black women were the potential beneficiaries of jurists’ racial paternalism ethos. While whites imagined themselves as controlling paternalistic exchanges with blacks, black people engaged whites as conscious actors drawing on a keen understanding of white people’s supremacist self-perceptions and projections onto blacks. When possible, black women exploited white racism to their advantage and white judges’ racial paternalism ethos occasioned such exploitation. In so doing, black women earned their legal victories by acting intentionally and with savvy.

Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post–Civil War South

Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post–Civil War South

Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South by R. Scott Huffard Jr.

Reviewed by: Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South by R. Scott Huffard Jr. Steven E. Nash Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South. By R. Scott Huffard Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 324.) Generations of scholars have debated the degree of continuity or discontinuity in the South’s transition from “Old” to “New.” Railroads are a critical part of this story of industrial transformation, and they are the focus of [End Page 56] R. Scott Huffard Jr.’s Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South. Building on a current historiographical reassessment of the capitalistic nature of the pre–Civil War South, Huffard sees the railroad boom of the 1880s and 1890s as an expansion of earlier practices. In the post-Reconstruction South, railroads served as tangible capitalist development that Huffard analyzes in some unique ways. Moving beyond track mileage and corporate ledger books, Huffard blends top down sources like political correspondence, company records, and newspapers with “mentalities, mores, and stories” to show how the South embraced the capitalist ethos of the railroad while utilizing the region’s deep-rooted racial hierarchies to paper over capitalism’s more destructive elements (4). Huffard roots his argument in the New Orleans Exposition of 1884–85, where the South displayed all its “commodities” to investors. He calls the exposition’s vision of reunion through capitalist development the “phantasmagoria,” a sort of waking dream of capitalistic standardization, creative destruction, and consolidation. For all its bluster and bravado, the southern railroad phantasmagoria was fragile. White southern boosters used it to preach reunion and court outside investment. By portraying everything as for sale in the South, these boosters constructed narratives that excused the failures and excesses of this capitalistic fever dream as well. Newspaper editors deflected criticism of higher accident mortality in the South, due to cheaper, and often inferior, construction methods as the work of often fictive train wreckers. When trains linked new towns and previously marginalized regions of the South to a national capitalistic system, they often brought diseases such as yellow fever with them. The proliferation of express routes laden with wealth sparked the rise of outlaws. White New South boosters went to great lengths to absolve the railroad and capitalism of any fault in these developments, but Huffard argues that these unintended and dangerous consequences were products of the railroad system. The destruction of space and time that made labor, passengers, and goods more mobile also threatened to destroy the railroad phantasmagoria. One of the crucial elements of Huffard’s analysis is the issue of race. Railroads had a profound impact on southern race relations, notably in terms of labor, mobility, consumption, and segregation of public spaces, in the 1880s and 1890s. On the one hand, railroad companies employed African Americans and offered them the type of well-paying jobs that no other southern industry would. White southerners met these challenges by reshaping notions of black criminality (fears of anonymous, mobile Black men) and pushing Black workers into railroad jobs that conformed to their racial imagination (manual laborers and porters). Most importantly, the New Orleans Exposition’s vision of all the South’s resources as commodities included [End Page 57] African American bodies. Black convict laborers laid mile upon mile of railroad track across the South. In his reassessment of the South’s capitalistic development in the late nineteenth century, Huffard connects the convict labor system, which commodified Black men’s bodies, to slavery. Viewing convict labor as capitalism taken to its extreme, Huffard forges new links between the Old and New South. Engines of Redemption is a strong piece of historical scholarship that carefully blends and interprets a variety of sources. Some readers might question why the author devoted little attention to the railroad work of Reconstruction. Other readers might wish that Huffard explored the issue of boosterism further, comparing the rhetoric and effort of railroad companies to other industries such as textiles, coal mining, and other manufacturing endeavors. Railroads may have been the common thread in regional industrialization, but a stronger comparison may have demonstrated the pervasiveness...

Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post–Civil War South by Kathryn B. McKee

Reviewed by: Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post–Civil War South by Kathryn B. McKee Katherine Brackett Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post–Civil War South. By Kathryn B. McKee. Southern Literary Studies. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 354. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-6995-7.) In recent years, historians and literary critics alike have broadened our understanding of southern literary culture and, in particular, have countered narratives characterizing the South as a region without a literary culture until the [End Page 190] twentieth century. Kathryn B. McKee’s Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post–Civil War South offers an insightful and thorough examination of author Sherwood Bonner. Bonner, an elite white woman, wrote in the midst of Reconstruction, using humor to reveal cracks in the racial and gender expectations of her society and uncovering the “darker undersides” of a region frequently romanticized in popular fiction of the day (p. 2). McKee weaves Bonner’s writing into Reconstruction-era conversations about the meaning of region, women’s roles in a defeated South, and the future of race relations in a region constructed almost entirely on white supremacy. Contrary to other writers of the period, McKee contends, Bonner offered a vision of the “‘South’ not yet fixed in either regional self-fashioning or in the national imaginary” (pp. 11–12). Agency, white womanhood, and regional exceptionalism all function in unexpected ways in Bonner’s writing, McKee argues, which makes the author relevant to more modern discussions of race, place, gender, and class, as well as the effect of all four on identity. Reading Reconstruction’s chapters are organized largely according to the writing analyzed in them, but they also follow a chronological structure that allows McKee to discuss events in Bonner’s life and their impact on her writing. Chapter 1 focuses on Bonner’s experiences in postwar Holly Springs, Mississippi, her hometown and model for the fictional Hollywell. McKee synopsizes recent Reconstruction scholarship and argues that Bonner’s writing provides unique “insight into the postwar world precisely because she . . . never lived beyond it,” since she died of breast cancer in 1883 (p. 24). The remainder of the chapter compares Bonner’s work with that of Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, Bonner’s “friend and feminist ally” (p. 19). Chapters 2 and 3 find Bonner first in Boston, Massachusetts, and then in Europe, and they describe her literary production from both locales as well as how her southern identity remained “laced throughout” her writing (p. 16). Setting aside her familial responsibilities (and thus convention), Bonner inserted herself into the lively Boston literary scene. While in New England during the 1870s, Bonner published domestic travel letters in the Memphis Avalanche, offering an unusual instance of a southerner writing from the North rather than the reverse. While abroad in Europe, Bonner wrote travel letters and, for the first time, “found herself able to confront the Civil War with a distance and clarity that closer proximity had, paradoxically, made impossible” (p. 116). In Europe, Bonner began to think of herself as an American rather than a southerner and recognized “her own incompatibility with the models of womanhood available to a white southerner” (p. 117). McKee reconstructs Bonner’s travels and relationships and connects Bonner’s wartime short story, “From ’60 to ’65” (1876), to her own experiences and frustration with reconciliation narratives and proscribed gender roles in postwar society. Chapter 4 focuses on Bonner’s novel Like unto Like (1878) and compares it with the reconciliation novels in abundance by the late 1870s and early 1880s. McKee argues that the disjointed narrative “reflects Bonner’s struggle to tell a cohesive story about a fractured world in the process of redefining the relations of black to white, of region to nation” (p. 177). Ultimately, McKee argues, the novel functions as “a reconciliation novel that offers no reconciliation” (p. 177). [End Page 191] Finally, chapter 5 considers Bonner’s short fiction published in the early 1880s. In these works, Bonner “undermines the patriarchy at the same time that she telegraphs a faith in white supremacy” (p. 238). McKee uses Dialect Tales...

Seigniorage in the Civil War South

During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederate Congress adopted three currency reforms that were intended to reduce the quantity of Treasury notes in circulation by inducing the money-holding public to exchange their notes for long-term bonds. In this paper, we examine the political factors that influenced the adoption of the reforms and their effect on the flow of seigniorage - revenue that the government derived by using the newly-printed Treasury notes to purchase the goods and services it required. We argue that the bifurcation of the Confederate Congress into two groups – those legislators that represented the Confederacy's interior and those from areas no longer under Confederate control – contributed to the adoption of the reforms. Our findings indicate that representing an area outside of the rebel government's control increased the likelihood that a legislator would support efforts to reform the currency by over 90 percent. In addition, our results indicate that the rate of monetary expansion in the South was below that which would have maximized the revenue from seigniorage. We find that the reforms reduced the flow of seigniorage by approximately 57 percent, depriving the Confederate government of much-needed revenue.

Seigniorage in the Civil War South

During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederate Congress adopted three currency reforms that were intended to reduce the quantity of Treasury notes in circulation by inducing the money-holding public to exchange their notes for long-term bonds. In this paper, we examine the political factors that influenced the adoption of the reforms and their effect on the flow of seigniorage - revenue that the government derived by using the newly-printed Treasury notes to purchase the goods and services it required. We argue that the bifurcation of the Confederate Congress into two groups – those legislators that represented the Confederacy’s interior and those from areas no longer under Confederate control – contributed to the adoption of the reforms. Our findings indicate that representing an area outside of the rebel government’s control increased the likelihood that a legislator would support efforts to reform the currency by over 90 percent. In addition, our results indicate that the rate of monetary expansion in the South was below that which would have maximized the revenue from seigniorage. We find that the reforms reduced the flow of seigniorage by approximately 57 percent, depriving the Confederate government of much-needed revenue.