Confederate Nationalism Research Articles

Sutton E. Griggs and Thomas R. Dixon: A Reconstruction Call and Response

Sutton E. Griggs and Thomas R. Dixon: A Reconstruction Call and Response

Garibaldi in the Land of Cotton

It can be difficult to take Confederate nationhood seriously. Born out of fear of Northern interference with their peculiar institution, the Confederacy was riven by divisions, had a deliberately weak central government, lasted less than five years, and failed to gain diplomatic recognition from a single country. Most importantly, because the North prevailed, so too did Abraham Lincoln’s claim that the states in rebellion never actually left the United States. Because states had neither the right nor the ability under the Constitution to secede, a southern nation was an impossibility. Had the South won the war, of course, this argument would have been irrelevant. But the South did not win, thus it was not, and could never have been, its own nation. Ann Tucker’s monograph, Newest Born of Nations, attempts to return contingency to the question of Confederate nationalism by reminding readers that revolution seemed far more likely in...

Home Nursing, Gender, and Confederate Nationalism in the American Civil War (1861-1865).

Home Nursing, Gender, and Confederate Nationalism in the American Civil War (1861-1865).

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...

Defending the indefensible?: The pro-confederate lobby in Britain in the aftermath of the emancipation proclamation

The purpose of this article is to provide the first dedicated examination of the pro-Confederate movement in Britain in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation. By analysing the ideas and activities of pro-Confederates after emancipation, the article problematizes our understanding of Civil War diplomacy and British responses to the conflict. Through an analysis of propaganda, and the correspondence between Confederate representatives and British sympathizers, it offers insights into reactions to emancipation among a group who were deeply invested in the conflict. It also explores how southern sympathizers attempted to publicly respond in a way that they hoped would appeal to Britons after 1863. In doing so, it emphasizes the intellectual and organizational vibrancy that characterized pro-Confederates in this period as well as the extent to which emancipation itself did not automatically determine the diplomatic outcome of the conflict. In addition, it demonstrates that Confederate activism in Britain had always rested on shaky ideological foundations. The lack of clear moral distinction between the belligerents prior to emancipation had allowed sympathetic Britons to project their own values on to the Confederacy. The effects of emancipation on southern diplomatic prospects were as much about revealing these internal dynamics as causing a sudden shift in attitudes towards Confederate nationalism.

Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy by Ann L. Tucker

Reviewed by: Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy by Ann L. Tucker Brian Schoen (bio) Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy. By Ann L. Tucker. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. 272. Cloth, $45.00.) Antebellum white southerners were not the naval gazers previous generations thought them to be. They looked across the Atlantic and perceived themselves in relational and comparative ways. They proved particularly effective at spinning strands of international news and global ideas into webs of self-justification. Ann Tucker’s Newest Born of Nations offers probably the most probative treatment of how “elite white southerners used an international perspective [or at least a Eurocentric one] to understand, imagine, and defend their visions of nationhood” (4). For Tucker, this operated at a couple of levels. Events from unrealized nationalist efforts in Ireland and Hungary to eventually realized ones on the Italian peninsula offered reference points for considering and intensifying the sectional conflict. Southern sectionalists, for example, invoked and debated images of themselves as a Poland to the Tsarist-like North. Global events also “deepened” southerners’ sense of nationalism, as they looked for metaphors, foils, and models for their own efforts to construct [End Page 422] an independent nation (24). Tucker argues that a wider perspective served as a “mechanism for translating their concerns . . . into the more internationally resonant language of rights, values, and nationhood” (4). In short, white southerners learned to be, or at least talk, like a nation by watching and reflecting on the world around them and their place within it. Those mental efforts did not, however, bring agreement. Tucker identifies three oft-competing strains of southern nationalist thought. A “liberal nationalist”–turned–”liberal secessionist” vein tapped into the rights-based language of the American Revolution, which had been reanimated and romanticized amid the European revolutions of 1848. Southerners celebrated, for example, Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi and the European republicanism he symbolically led. This strand, especially prominent in Democratic circles, emphasized that the South had a right to greater self-determination. Aided by voices like exiled Irish nationalist editor John Mitchel, it cloaked “concerns about slavery within broader liberal principles” (114). A second variant that emerged from the embers of the 1848 revolutions was a “conservative nationalism” that, though also generally republican, emphasized the need for authority and law and order. In its balder versions, this strand of thought affixed the South as a bulwark against European-style radical “red republicanism” that many southern whites feared was being imported into the United States. Slavery was trumpeted as a tonic to the perceived excesses of free labor and excessive democracy. This conservative nationalism translated into a call for secession as the best means to defend southern society. In total, Tucker shows that thinking about European political changes taught southern whites to perceive themselves as different from the North. Overlapping southern liberalist and conservative impulses converged in a secessionist impulse that erupted in 1860. Revealing the necessarily slippery use of these labels, Tucker suggests that “it is more appropriate to refer to secessionists who used a liberal versus a conservative perspective, rather than referring to southern liberals versus southern conservatives” (118). It was not uncommon, it seems, for the same person or newspaper to invoke both liberal and conservative justifications. Yet there does emerge a clear trajectory of the emphasis within wartime Confederate global thinking. Early on, Jefferson Davis’s government appealed to liberal nationalist impulses that had helped free parts of Italy from Hapsburg rule and ultimately led to its unification under a constitutional monarchy. Yet for reasons not fully explored here, but presumably tied to slavery, those liberal nationalist arguments had little impact. Their failure forced Confederate propagandists to turn toward conservative [End Page 423] arguments they hoped would land with Hapsburg rulers and conservative Catholics, a point that reinforces the argument of Don Doyle’s synthetic work The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (2014). In seizing on the global roots of Confederate nationalism, Tucker builds on ground previously trod by Andre Fleche, Paul Quigley, Timothy Roberts, and Niels Eichhorn. But Tucker adds to...

Rebel Richmond: Life and Death in the Confederate Capital by Stephen V. Ash

Reviewed by: Rebel Richmond: Life and Death in the Confederate Capital by Stephen V. Ash Ashley Whitehead Luskey (bio) Rebel Richmond: Life and Death in the Confederate Capital. By Stephen V. Ash. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 296. Cloth, $35.00.) In this meticulously researched social history of Confederate Richmond, Stephen Ash sheds light on a critical sector of the Confederate capital’s social fabric—the refugees, enslaved and free African Americans, impoverished women and children, foreign-born laborers, prisoners of war, and prostitutes that made up Richmond’s “common” population—and their interactions with the city’s merchant and ruling classes over the course of the Civil War. In focusing on how Richmonders sought to feed, clothe, and house themselves, cope with influxes in crime and the omnipresence of [End Page 577] death, and navigate shifting boundaries of morality and of social and geographic delineation, Ash shows how the war transformed Richmond into a “gigantic theater of tragedy, the embodiment of the Rebel nation’s sorrow and pain” (205). Central to Ash’s story is the continuous struggle between the needs and resources of the citizenry and those of the Confederate government and its military, a struggle that inflamed class tensions, placed unfamiliar and onerous burdens on the city’s female population, and threatened to upend the city’s long-cherished racial and social order. Initially a boon to Richmond’s economic interests, Ash argues that the war pushed the city to the near brink of destruction in this coming-of-age chronicle of a city where mere survival became the ultimate focus of the majority of the population, and where suffering was a daily reality. Building on Emory M. Thomas’s foundational The Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital (1971) and Ernest B. Furgurson’s Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War (1996), Ash’s scholarship delves deep into a variety of sources, including court records, period newspapers, census records, business files, letters, diaries and memoirs, church records, and an array of official documents and correspondence from government offices, hospitals, relief associations, and citizens and business firms. This breadth and depth of source material paints a fresh, vivid picture of the social dynamics, cultural mores, economic workings, and political structure of Civil War Richmond. Ash also draws heavily on key secondary works on Confederate politics, refugees, southern women, slavery and African American history, Civil War medicine, industry, agriculture, religion, mourning culture, and prisons to provide important context for his research. In doing so, Ash successfully rescues “obscure and mostly forgotten Richmonders from the wings” and places them “at center stage,” highlighting the kaleidoscope of individuals and experiences that made up life in the Confederate capital and constituted the pulse of the fledgling southern nation (230). Indeed, rather than labeling Richmonders’ experiences of war as wholly monolithic or stagnant, Ash shows how different sectors of the population, such as speculators, prostitutes, free blacks, and slaves, could alternately (or even simultaneously) benefit from many of the economic opportunities created by the conflict and suffer myriad physical and social privations incurred by war. He also nicely spotlights the critical subdivisions that existed within certain pockets of society, such as four separate classes of Richmonders that heretofore have frequently been lumped into merely two (or at most three) generic categories of the elitist “haves” and the impoverished “have nots” (184). Despite intentionally veering away from historiographical debates concerning the success or failure of Confederate nationalism and the reasons [End Page 578] for southern defeat in which many scholars have engaged, Ash’s work affirms the assertions of Stephanie McCurry, George Rable, Drew Gilpin Faust, Thavolia Glymph, Midori Takagi, and others that internal divisions, class and racial tensions, crime, and anxieties over the breakdown of traditional gender roles shook the foundations of Civil War Richmond in cataclysmic ways. Yet, like Gary Gallagher and William Blair, Ash also notes the key ways in which both the Confederate government and the state of Virginia were able to adapt throughout the war to meet their citizens’ evolving, most basic needs for survival. Perhaps some of Ash’s strongest historiographical arguments emerge from his engagement with Karen Halttunen’s masterful Confidence...

The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains: Confederate Nationalism, Sectionalism, and White Supremacy in Bartow County, Georgia by Keith S. Hébert

Reviewed by: The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains: Confederate Nationalism, Sectionalism, and White Supremacy in Bartow County, Georgia by Keith S. Hébert L. Bao Bui The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains: Confederate Nationalism, Sectionalism, and White Supremacy in Bartow County, Georgia. By Keith S. Hébert. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 282. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-317-8.) A considerable body of scholarship has made the case for the distinctiveness of white Appalachian society and culture. In The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains: Confederate Nationalism, Sectionalism, and White Supremacy in Bartow County, Georgia, Keith S. Hebért provides a sharp [End Page 174] counterpoint. His book, derived from his dissertation research, argues that Bartow County represents on a smaller scale not just the South but also all of America. Situated in the northwest corner of Georgia, the county's 460 square miles of fertile land once belonged to the Cherokees. Their forced removal in the 1830s during the era of Andrew Jackson marked another ignominious chapter in the long history of both white populist democracy and white supremacy in the region. By the 1840s, slaves made up more than a fifth of the county's population. The profits derived from their forced labor sustained the political power of the county's dominant planter class. The racial ideology that justified and upheld slavery in Bartow County, and elsewhere throughout the South, provided the social glue that held together the South's white population despite the significant differences in politics, religion, and social class. For sure, the pro-Union sentiments held by many white Appalachians during the Civil War proved a major thorn in the Confederacy' s war effort. Yet, as Hebért points out, the desire of many white southerners in the antebellum period to peacefully resolve the slavery debate within the framework of a federal union could not match their shared conviction that black people should forever stay in a position of permanent legal and social inferiority. That conviction, combined with ties of kinship and culture, explains why the white citizens of Bartow County chose secession and how they maintained the will to wage war despite hardships and deprivations. The belief in both white supremacy and black slavery, more than anything else, propelled nearly a nearly a third of the county's white men to fight for the Confederacy; a third of those who did enlist gave their lives for a cause they felt worthy of their sacrifice. Hebért's use of personal letters from the 1860s gives voice to people—male and female, rich and poor, black and white—who navigated, negotiated, and influenced the events of that tumultuous decade. His book does a fine job of shedding light on the impact of the war on the lives of Bartow County's residents and the challenges they faced in the postwar world. The freedpeople of Bartow County, nominally elevated to the status of free citizens after the war, struggled to assert their full claims to American life. As The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains makes clear, the white majority population held hard and fast to the notion of white supremacy. In Appalachian Georgia, as in the rest of the United States, the Civil War wiped out legalized slavery and the vast wealth invested in human bondage. Still, no amount of destruction and suffering, no experience of military defeat and occupation, no constitutional amendments and Supreme Court rulings, could persuade white southerners to surrender the foundational principle that underpinned their society and their way of life since the 1600s. Hebért adds to our understanding of this small corner of Appalachia and the role of geography in American history. More important, he reminds us of the enduring power of racial ideology to shape American identity and collective memory. [End Page 175] L. Bao Bui Stephen F. Austin State University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Jefferson Davis's Final Campaign: Confederate Nationalism and the Fight to Arm Slaves by Philip D. Dillard

Reviewed by: Jefferson Davis's Final Campaign: Confederate Nationalism and the Fight to Arm Slaves by Philip D. Dillard Colin Woodward (bio) Jefferson Davis's Final Campaign: Confederate Nationalism and the Fight to Arm Slaves. By Philip D. Dillard. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2017. Pp. 285. $35.00 cloth) Philip Dillard examines the Confederate debate to arm the slaves in three states: Virginia, Georgia, and Texas. His book builds upon the work of Bruce Levine, Chandra Manning, Robert Durden and others who have examined the Confederacy's late-war effort to alter the relationship between master and slave. For most of the book, Dillard undertakes a state-by-state examination of the emancipation debate, which did not begin in earnest until late 1864 and concluded with Congress passing a bill to arm African Americans, though the original bill did not emancipate any slaves. Dillard sees Jefferson Davis's role as critical in promoting debate and facilitating emancipation and black recruitment (what little of it took place). Dillard argues that the Confederacy ultimately chose independence over the racial status quo. Writers on the Confederate black enlistment debate usually fall into two camps. On the one hand, there are those who think the debate was a half-hearted, last-ditch effort by a Confederacy that had [End Page 123] run out of options. On the other hand, there are those who see it as evidence of a revolution within a revolution, whereby Davis and his supporters wanted emancipation on the South's terms. Dillard's book will appeal to the latter camp, though his book mostly focuses on newspaper's role in shaping public opinion—not the inner workings of Davis, his cabinet, or the Confederate armies. Dillard's examination of Davis's role in the enlistment debate will contain little new information for scholars, and his exploration of how nationalism factored into the debate does not go far enough. What I found most interesting and original in the book was its attention to events in Texas. Unlike most Confederate states, Texas did not suffer serious wartime destruction. Dillard's analysis of public opinion there provides an interesting contrast to Virginia and Georgia, where battles where large and bloody and the war's effect on the civilian population dramatic. Texas, he shows, was resistant to emancipation because most of the state had not seen a Yankee. With the cotton trade and slavery thriving in Texas, why mess with success? Dillard's attention to changes in public opinion in Texas, Georgia, and Virginia are good, but the book, surprisingly, cites no manuscript sources. Thus, we get little sense of what those outside the newspaper world or high-ranking political circles thought. Had Dillard mined the vast archival sources available to him, he might have cut down on the book's repetitiveness. I lost track of how many times he reminds us of the Confederacy's late 1864 losses at Savannah and Nashville. He also quotes Howell Cobb as saying "if slaves will make good soldiers our whole idea of slavery is wrong" not once but twice (pp. 106–107, 132). Strictures aside, Dillard has written a good book. I am afraid it does not surpass Bruce Levine's Confederate Emancipation—still the best monograph on the subject. Even so, Dillard's work is focused, relevant, and timely. He has done the profession a valuable service. His book further undermines the absurd notion of there being armies of black Confederates troops at any point in wartime. After all, if there were tens of thousands of black Confederate troops in [End Page 124] existence before March 1865, why would Confederates have engaged in such a widespread debate on the subject? Sadly, many individuals will continue to believe whatever they want to believe. Nevertheless, with the help of Dillard and other historians writing on the topic of black Confederates, wrong-minded people will have even less reason for ignorance. Colin Woodward COLIN WOODWARD received his PhD in history from Louisiana State University–Baton Rouge. He is the author of Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War (2014) and is working on a book titled Country Boy: The Roots of Johnny...

Confederate Imaginations with the Federals in the Postwar Order

Confederate Imaginations with the Federals in the Postwar Order Adrian Brettle (bio) When two old antebellum Democratic Party colleagues, Francis P. Blair Sr. of Maryland and Confederate president Jefferson Davis met in Richmond, Virginia, in January 1865, they found much to discuss. As historians have noted, the veteran Border State politician and journalist wished to render reunion palatable to Davis. To this end, he hoped to tempt Davis into a joint program of expansion within the United States, and, by so doing, rekindle antebellum American nationalism and the popularity of reunion. Davis had a very different agenda. Historians know well and have documented his commitment to Confederate independence, but less understood is how the president envisaged the consequent postwar relationship between the Confederacy and the United States and how he believed the political map of North America to be in flux. Davis welcomed the possibilities of mutual territorial growth, which to him superseded the proposal for reunion because it provided an enduring basis of independence for each side with improved bilateral relations.1 The meeting between Blair and Davis was not an isolated event within the context of a continuing brutal war. From late 1863 onward, proposals for talks or talks about talks between the sides, circulated among Confederate leaders, notwithstanding the intensity of the conflict, the fiery propaganda directed against the Union, and the public stance of statesmen expressive of their determination to continue the war to the bitter end. It was precisely because the future had become so murky as a result of the progress of the war that leaders adopted what historian Thomas Bender termed, [End Page 43] in another context, the lateral state of mind. They looked at what was going on in the Union in order to determine their own future. At the same time, Confederate observers of the United States considered that the divisions manifest among Federals provided reasonable grounds for hope that the compromise they had sought with their adversaries since 1860 would at last be possible.2 Looking to the future had become increasingly important for Confederates. The duration and destruction of the war meant that the past had become very remote while the future remained unclear. “This eleventh month of the third year of a still continuing devastating war,” the former governor of Virginia and Brig. Gen. Henry A. Wise wrote from his command outside Charleston while being kept awake at midnight amid the deafening din of Union naval guns shelling Fort Sumter, “divides, separates, despoils and destroys.” Wise also believed this destruction would continue “until it seems as if all old things are passing away and as if the Nations, North & South, and all things in them were becoming new.” On Christmas Eve 1863, another former state governor, Albert G. Brown of Mississippi—who had once been Davis’s antagonistic colleague in the US Senate and now sat in its Confederate equivalent—rose in that chamber and defiantly declared, after expounding on the travails of his home state, “I drop the curtain and refuse even a glimpse into the future.”3 Even at its outset, the war had been for the Davis administration an unwelcome interruption between the citizens of the Confederate States and the fulfillment of their destiny of commercial and slavery expansion—a goal always best achieved as an independent nation-state with a harmonious relationship with the Union. Historians of Confederate nationalism tend to overlook the importance of compromise and coexistence with neighbors in their accounts of visions of the future nation-state. By 1864, with the prospect of yet another hard campaign season ahead, the desire to end the war increased and members of the government believed their Federal counterparts shared this disposition. They interpreted such uncompromising public pronouncements of reunion and emancipation from the Federals, for example Lincoln’s December 1863 Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, as both a cover for a similar disposition and a ploy to start negotiations from a position of strength.4 [End Page 44] Click for larger view View full resolution The Union and Confederate Works before Petersburg, from Alfred H. Guernsey and Henry M. Alden, Harpers Pictorial History of the Civil War (1866; repr., New York: Fairfax Press, 1868...

The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains: Confederate Nationalism, Sectionalism, and White Supremacy in Bartow County, Georgia

The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains: Confederate Nationalism, Sectionalism, and White Supremacy in Bartow County, Georgia

Hood's Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy's Most Celebrated Unit by Susannah J. Ural

Reviewed by: Hood's Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy's Most Celebrated Unit by Susannah J. Ural Daniel E. Sutherland (bio) Hood's Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy's Most Celebrated Unit. By Susannah J. Ural. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 384. Cloth, $48.00.) Civil War unit histories have been around for a long time. Veterans created them to preserve their wartime memories, and historians have since found them useful in explaining important campaigns and battles. True, some people regard the genre as old-fashioned and restrictive, but a new type of unit history has recently emerged that may spark a revival. The revival began in 2014, with Lesley J. Gordon's innovative A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut's Civil War. As much social as military history, Gordon's book tells the story of a regiment of "cowards" against the backdrop of both home front and battlefield. Notably, too, Gordon carries the saga of her regiment into the postwar years. Susannah J. Ural has done much the same thing, even as she flips the script. Rather than a Union regiment, Ural writes about a Confederate brigade. Far from being known as the unit that ran away, her rebels are portrayed as among the bravest and most loyal soldiers in the war. That said, Ural mirrors Gordon in having written a splendid bit of history. Ural's Texas Brigade may be defined, she says, by its steadfast devotion to the Confederate cause. Despite the rigors of campaigning, the slaughter of the battlefield, and the plight of loved ones at home, the brigade rarely flinched or faltered. Its men embodied the spirit of their longtime commander, John Bell Hood, who, despite suffering a crippling wound to one arm and losing a leg, remained in the field and stubbornly refused to admit defeat. Anyone who doubts the strength of Confederate nationalism, Ural insists, need only consider the history of this elite unit. [End Page 710] Equally important, the vast majority of these men had quite ordinary backgrounds. Indeed, Ural tells us, much of the brigade's cohesiveness and aggressiveness may be explained by the middle-class status of its recruits, their belief in the Jacksonian notion of the self-made man, and, despite having few slaveholders in their ranks, a conviction that Republican political policies would destroy their way of life. Geography also helped. So certain were these men that neither the destructiveness of war nor the dangers of emancipation would ever reach Texas that they evidenced an almost rabid desire, even against the Confederate government's wishes, to rush to Virginia and join the fight. Not that they were all Texans. In fact, at no time did the brigade consist solely of Lone Star volunteers. Originally it included three Texas infantry regiments (the First, Fourth, and Fifth), the Eighteenth Georgia, and Wade Hampton's legion from South Carolina. When the latter two units were reassigned in late 1862, the void was filled by the Third Arkansas. That would be the final composition of the brigade. Yet individual regiments are almost irrelevant to Ural's narrative, so strongly is it anchored in the experiences of individuals. Such men as Andrew Erskine, James R. Loughridge, and Thomas J. Goree are the focus of their brigade's story, or at least part of it. Also to be heard are Ann Erskine, Felicia Loughridge, and Sarah K. Goree, for the families and friends of these men are an essential part of what motivated the brigade. The men remained steadfast to the Confederate cause, Ural submits, because their devotion was matched by that of their communities. As letters flowed back and forth between home front and battlefield, this shared faith in the Confederate nation became mutually reinforcing. Of course, there is some good, old-fashioned military history embedded in all this discussion of motivation, loyalty, and the will to fight. Ural offers meticulous tactical accounts of the brigade's combat experience, most notably at Gaines's Mill (its first significant action), Second Manassas, Antietam, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and the Wilderness. The names alone suggest how battle-tested the brigade became and why it earned the...

Jefferson Davis's Final Campaign: Confederate Nationalism and the Fight to Arm Slaves by Philip D. Dillard

Jefferson Davis's Final Campaign: Confederate Nationalism and the Fight to Arm Slaves by Philip D. Dillard

1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace by Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr.

Reviewed by: 1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace by Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr. Mike Bunn 1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace. By Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. 364 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1953-3. 1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace explores in unprecedented depth the devastating final year of the war, as well as the tumultuous beginnings of the Reconstruction Era in the state. In the pages of the book, author Christopher Lyle McIlwain, Sr., argues for a reconsideration of our collective understanding of both, contending our hazy shared memories of the denouement to Alabama's wartime [End Page 267] trials and its postwar reality are heavily colored by a debilitating accretion of myth, legend, and partisan scholarship. McIlwain believes the year 1865 in Alabama history is rather simply defined by a cascading litany of bad decisions on the part of irrational leaders which manifested themselves in an unnecessarily prolonged and particularly devastating period of economic struggle, political turmoil, and isolation from the mainstream of American society that handicapped the state's progress for generations afterward. McIlwain opens his study by chronicling perhaps the paramount blunder among a series of poor choices by Alabama leaders, a decision which, in his opinion, flew in the face of common sense—the attempt to continue to wage a war he contends had long been lost by 1865. Continuing the theme from his recent book Civil War Alabama (Tuscaloosa, 2016), he portrays Confederate nationalism as something akin to either an elaborate hoax foisted on a gullible populace or a tragic disconnect with reality. The state's elite come in for the harshest of his criticisms, as he examines their self-serving efforts to prolong the war, offering either editorial or financial support—but rarely battlefield service—with a thinly veiled contempt. While he tracks in cursory fashion some of the major military campaigns which ravaged the state from the Tennessee Valley to Mobile Bay in the spring of 1865, this is no military history. McIlwain's focus is on the progressive disaffection with the Confederate military effort within Alabama and the wasted opportunities to end the struggle prior to the dismantling of its industrial complex, the complete destruction of its economy, and a wasteful loss of life. The conviction that the state's leaders should have been willing and able to move on and make the best deal they could with their conquerors in the wake of Appomattox undergirds McIlwain's assessment of events during the latter half of 1865. He notes that despite conventional wisdom, a good deal indeed could have been obtained when viewed from their perspective. President Abraham Lincoln, he argues, offered even more generous and lenient terms than commonly understood, pointing to evidence that indicates the president [End Page 268] did not intend to insist on full political rights for black citizens as a condition of the readmission process. Thus with Lincoln's assassination, Alabama's path towards rejoining the Union with any degree of its traditional political autonomy grew considerably more difficult. But the early days of President Andrew Johnson's administration offered opportunities for a relatively smooth readmission process, as well, asserts McIlwain. When Alabama's leadership stubbornly refused to comply, it not only marked the beginning of a hegemonic shift in the state's political power structure, but spelled doom for the state's prospects of economic recovery. It is actually in Alabama's marked recalcitrance during the first months of Johnson's tenure, McIlwain argues—not the later vindictive reprisals of radical Northern Republicans—that the state's postwar fate was sealed. Alabama leaders followed a course of arrogant retrenchment in the latter half of 1865, highlighted by the passage of an exceedingly conservative constitution which raised the eyebrows of observers in Washington. Overall, the first few months of Alabama's postwar era revealed state leaders to be committed to subverting efforts toward the full extension of civil rights to black citizens; the election of outspoken former rebels to the highest of offices; and even the entertaining of an outrageous attempt to repudiate the state's war debt. All this only encouraged...

Paternalism and Imprisonment at Castle Thunder: Reinforcing Gender Norms in the Confederate Capital

Paternalism and Imprisonment at Castle ThunderReinforcing Gender Norms in the Confederate Capital Angela M. Zombek (bio) Castle Thunder’s inmates were a hard lot. In 1863, members of a special congressional investigative committee derided them as “desperate and abandoned characters,” mainly murderers, thieves, deserters, substitutes, forgers, and “all manner of villains.” Commandant George Alexander’s harshness inspired the Confederate Congress to investigate the legality of his favored punishments, which included whipping, bucking and gagging, and solitary confinement. Ultimately, the committee, and Alexander’s subordinates—like warden Baldwin T. Allen, who testified on his behalf—condoned his conduct, and emphasized the necessity of rigid rules, since anything less would hinder officers’ ability to control the motley crew of inmates.1 Scholars’ focus on military prisons has painstakingly chronicled inmates’ suffering and intentional maltreatment.2 But Castle Thunder had a broader function: the Confederate government consolidated power through establishment and control of military prisons. National control over prisons was radical, especially since antebellum southern civilians remained skeptical of state-controlled [End Page 221] penitentiaries and Americans generally believed that the national government should be restrained in criminal matters. But Confederate political and military officials eschewed antebellum disdain for institutions of confinement. They instead believed that military prisons should punish enemies, suppress dissent, and promote Confederate ideology.3 Click for larger view View full resolution Castle Thunder Prison, Petersburg (Richmond), April 1865, photograph by Andrew J. Russell. (Library of Congress.) Confederate military officials used Castle Thunder to create a gendered definition [End Page 222] of nationalism, exalted its commanders as prime examples of southern manhood, and castigated white male and female inmates as deviants whose recalcitrant gendered behavior threatened the cause. Prison officials exercised paternalism by using imprisonment to supervise civilians who betrayed the cause. Meanwhile, journalists crafted messages about prison officers and inmates that showed the southern public how to behave. Confederate officials like Castle Thunder commandant George Alexander and Richmond’s Provost Marshal John Winder used the prison to imbue gendered behavior with meaning, and the Richmond press helped southern civilians envision how proper southern men and women should support the national project.4 Click for larger view View full resolution General John N. Winder, C.S.A, before 1861. (Library of Congress.) Castle Thunder’s history points to how the Civil War disrupted gender norms [End Page 223] and exacerbated social anxieties, which Winder and Alexander corrected and controlled through imprisonment. They used the prison to guard white women in the absence of men, reprimand women who exhibited masculine behavior, and judge how men should balance their duties as heads of household with their obligations to defend the state. Castle Thunder provided a concrete reminder that southern nationalism required proper male and female behavior and that defiance warranted imprisonment.5 The Confederacy’s gendered version of nationalism remained engrained in southerners after war’s end. In postwar Richmond, Union victors maintained the prison for several months to bring order to the city, but southern inmates petitioned for release based on gender expectations that the vanquished Confederates promoted throughout the war. Many Castle Thunder inmates illuminate a paradox in gender dynamics that disturbed the southern social order, as many white and lower-class women assumed traditionally male roles, and imprisonment either emasculated men, or restrained hypermasculine enemies. White southerners had long prided themselves on maintaining a stable gender consensus in their slaveholding society. Under this construct, patriarchal white male heads of household wielded authority over dependents—wives, children, and slaves—and patriarchal power guided social, political, and economic relationships beyond the home. War, however, inspired Confederate officials to scrutinize the behavior of a wide range of “suspicious” characters of both genders, ultimately revealing that the South’s longstanding gender conventions did not command the loyalty necessary to sustain the war effort. Lower-class men and, perhaps more importantly, women who defied gender conventions rejected antebellum norms and took advantage of war’s chaos to create new opportunities. Conservative officials, like Winder and Alexander, made themselves the arbiters of female virtue and male honor to a degree unheard of in the antebellum period and used Castle Thunder to force compliance with Confederate nationalism, which depended on perpetuating the familiar, patriarchal social...

Jefferson Davis's Final Campaign: Confederate Nationalism And The Fight To Arm Slaves

Jefferson Davis's Final Campaign: Confederate Nationalism And The Fight To Arm Slaves

The Irony of Confederate Diplomacy: Visions of Empire, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Quest for Nationhood

The Irony of Confederate Diplomacy:Visions of Empire, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Quest for Nationhood Robert E. May (bio) And with these things, bury the purple dream Of the America we have not been, The tropic empire, seeking the warm sea, The last foray of aristocracy The South’s secession from the Union in the winter of 1860–1861 deserves remembrance, according to most current scholarship, primarily as a defensive reaction to Abraham Lincoln’s election as U.S. president and the growing political strength of his antislavery Republican Party. Fearful that America’s corridors of power were dominated by hostile politicos, appalled at northern fury against and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, aware that the free states had an unshakable grip on the western territories and would never concede to slavery’s extension, outraged by John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry and the specter of northern-inspired slave revolts, and dishonored by abolitionist diatribes against their labor system, white southerners fled such alarming trends by founding their own country. Secessionists, by this rendering, had an inchoate vision at first for their new government, devoting infinitely more thought to what was wrong with the one being forsaken than to the one being initiated. Though disunionists generally believed that the North and the South were, in the words of U.S. senator James H. Hammond of South Carolina, “distinctly separate and hostile,” they sought separation mainly to preserve slavery. Confederate nationalism, thus, was more the product than the cause of the South’s war for independence, gradually and consciously constructed.1 [End Page 69] Still, Confederate founders shared visions beyond regional security and insulating their slave labor system. An early imagining of disunion, Virginian Nathaniel Beverley Tucker’s 1836 futuristic novel, The Partisan Leader, envisioned a free-trade southern nation booming in the wake of separation. Along similar lines, fellow Virginia radical Edmund Ruffin’s 1860 political novel, Anticipations of the Future, imagined the South winning a war for independence and accomplishing prosperity through direct trade and treaties with European countries. Taking such aspirations into account, the historian John Majewski has dubbed the founding of the Confederacy the South’s bid “to create a more modern economy.” Many southern nationalists sought freedom from northern dominance of their commerce, religious institutions, education systems, and literature. Some even envisioned dramatic transformations of political institutions once secession occurred, the initiation, in George C. Rable’s words, of a “commonwealth resting on social harmony, political consensus, and unquestionable legitimacy” and devoid of patronage and political parties. Recently, Michael T. Bernath has portrayed the immediate post-secession Confederacy as a “moment of possibility,” when agendas of enhancing women’s education, reforming and moderating slave management, and rolling back popular democracy might gain traction.2 [End Page 70] Secessionists’ tentative aspirations included spreading Dixie’s peculiar institution into Latin America, where it was banned with the exceptions of Brazil and Spain’s colony in Cuba (and a few other locales), places with which many southern slaveholders sensed a natural affinity. As a Nashville, Tennessee, newspaper put it shortly after the Civil War began, southerners believed that their solution to the problem of relations between capitalists and working classes put them in a special relationship to Brazil and Cuba, both of which had “settled” on the same answer. Matthew Pratt Guterl observes along these lines that the Old South’s “master class . . . was connected—by ship, by overland travel, by print culture, by a sense of singular space, and by the prospect of future conquest—to the habitus and communitas of New World slaveholders.” To no small degree, this confidence in post-secession expansion, which looked toward absorbing Cuba in addition to taking over and spreading slavery into free-labor parts of Latin America, drew sustenance from the confidence that southern slaveholders had in their labor system’s health and future once they divorced themselves from antislavery politicians in Washington, D.C.—including Lincoln—who could be expected to oppose such schemes in the future as they had in the past.3 Though hardly escaping the Panic of 1857 unscathed, the slave states took less of a beating than did...

“Whenever the Yankees Were Gone, I Was a Confederate”: Loyalty and Dissent in Civil War–Era Rapides Parish, Louisiana

“Whenever the Yankees Were Gone, I Was a Confederate”Loyalty and Dissent in Civil War–Era Rapides Parish, Louisiana David T. Ballantyne (bio) On April 8, 1864, in the midst of the Union’s Red River expedition, the New Orleans True Delta estimated that “several hundred” free residents of Rapides Parish, Louisiana, had signed oaths promising future loyalty to the United States. U.S. military records demonstrate that more than 330 free residents of Rapides had taken loyalty oaths by that date. Following military engagements at Mansfield on April 8 and Pleasant Hill the next day, the Union campaign, intended to capture Shreveport and enter Texas, soon ended in debacle. Union forces only held Alexandria, the parish seat of Rapides, from March 15 until May 13, 1864, yet at least 907 parish residents, of whom 664 were men, swore oaths, a number that amounted to 56 percent of the parish’s voters in the January 1861 election of delegates to the state secession convention. The oath-swearing marked a turnaround in the professed allegiances of many Rapides residents, who had voted overwhelmingly for secessionist delegate candidates in January 1861. Among the oath-takers were members of the local secessionist elite, including Lewis E. Texada and John K. Elgee, two of the four men who had represented the parish at Louisiana’s January 1861 Secession Convention.1 [End Page 36] The widespread oath-taking in Rapides, which occurred after several unionists had already been compelled to leave the parish, embarrassed local resident Thomas O. Moore, a sugar planter who had been elected governor in 1859. He wrote to a fellow local planter in June 1864: “Oh God! how I am grieved at the conduct of the citizens of Rapides” in “taking the oath.” Moore denied that the motive in taking the oath was “disloyalty.” Instead, “alarm & the conclusion that the enemy would continue to occupy the country induced them [Rapides residents] to do so.” Yet “if protection of person was what was desired,” it would have been easier for these citizens to reach the lines of Confederate general Richard Taylor than “the Yankee Provost Marshal.” Though Benjamin Butler had demanded oath-signing during his control of New Orleans, the extent of oath-taking in Rapides in so short a time unsettled Moore.2 This article examines the geographical, age, occupational, and gender breakdown of civilian oath-takers during the Union army’s brief occupation of Alexandria in 1864; explores the motivations of civilian oath-takers; and analyzes conditions in Rapides Parish before, during, and immediately after the war. In doing so, it engages debates over the practical value of loyalty oaths as a measure of loyalty, the extent of southern unionism, the vitality of Confederate nationalism, and the inability of the Republican Party to attract meaningful levels of white support in the immediate postwar period. The party’s continued failure to attract white voters contributed to the ultimate collapse of Reconstruction.3 [End Page 37] Postwar Republicans ostensibly associated party loyalty with wartime loyalty to the Union, while historians have observed that postwar white Republicans were most often wartime unionists. One north-central Louisiana unionist later claimed that Republicanism “was a kind of transition from being a Union man. I regarded the republican party all along as being the Union party.” In the South, the most committed wartime unionists would refuse to aid Confederate authorities, and even actively support the Union cause, militarily or otherwise. While some unionists in central Louisiana, notably the future governor James Madison Wells, met this high bar of unionism, most self-consciously unionist southerners cooperated to some extent with Confederate authorities. As historian Robert Tracy McKenzie observed in his study of Civil War–era Knoxville, Tennessee, local unionists “largely acquiesced to Confederate rule and exhibited a ‘Unionism’ characterized primarily by ‘prudent silence,’ ‘strict neutrality,’ and a willingness to make money while awaiting Federal deliverance.” By the time the Union army occupied Rapides Parish, very briefly in May 1863 and for two months in 1864, the Union was fighting an emancipationist war. With Lincoln’s lenient December 1863 terms for reunion, southern unionism needed only entail acquiescence with the end of slavery and support for restoring the...

The Civil War in Southern Appalachian MethodismDurwoodDunn. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013.

The Civil in Southern Appalachian Methodism Durwood Dunn. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013.As highlighted by key words in title, Durwood Dunn, professor and chair of Department of history at Wesleyan College in Athens, interprets divisions within Methodist Church in America during Civil War. Primary sources in bibliography include manuscripts, books, Methodist minutes, journals, periodicals, sermons, tracts, and other publications, Methodist newspapers, and secular newspapers and periodicals. A list of secondary sources is also equally indicative of deep research in church history and Civil itself. Dunn supplements main text with appendices outlining number of traveling and local preachers; Holston Conference, 1839- 1860; and a listing of local preachers elected to Deacons or Elders Orders in Holston Conference, 1824-1860. He also provides an extensive set of informative notes. The text and notes alike delight readers interested in Appalachian region, Methodism, Civil War, and Union and antislavery issues. As a former Tennessean, having grown up in Van Buren County, this reviewer was hooked with opening illustration of Holston Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1860, by counties, including Van Buren, Grundy, Cumberland, and Bledsoe. She graduated from Bledsoe County High School in 1965.Dunn states in his Preface the actual Civil began in 1861 unveiled an internal civil war within Holston Methodism had been waged surreptitiously for previous five (xi). Dunn's research demonstrates his understanding of Methodism's structure, polity, and its broader role in early republic and takes a long view helps readers understand the critical role later of early anti-slavery within denomination (xi, xii). He offers East Tennessee's exceptionalism as cause and effect of its alienation and discrimination by state of Tennessee as well as by larger South after 1830s. Dunn says this exceptionalism functions as a remarkable index into internal civil war within section... and lingering bitterness and distrust long after Civil War (xii).East Tennessee, for most part, rejected Confederate nationalism and continued its loyalty to Union; Dunn explains indigenous antislavery during first three decades of nineteenth century and an antislavery stance assumed by early in America account for an active participation by African Americans in polity and economics of Methodism up to Civil (xiii). His research further provides evidence another group, local preachers, influenced East Tennessee's opinions against slavery, its favor of Union, and its rejection of Confederate nationalism (xiii). Dunn leaves for someone else any needed further research on what happened to local preachers after Civil but does conclude that rise of lay representation at annual and general conferences of both Methodist Episcopal Church, South and Methodist Episcopal Church occurred at expense of local brethren (xiv).Founded by John Wesley in England in 1730s, Methodism came to East Tennessee and Holston country as a relatively new religious in 1770s and 1780s, coming first to American colonies in 1760s. Methodism emphasized religious feeling or experience, primacy of Scripture, reason, tradition, and rejected predestination and limited atonement. Methodism practiced a belief in individual agency or the power of humans to determine their own spiritual fate (3). Methodism's stress on religious self-determination, individual responsibility, and opportunity may explain its appeal in America and its growth from 1,000 members in 1770 to more than 250, 000 by 1820 (4). Methodism ideally suited the democratic and leveling tastes of new democracy (4), and Methodists were ubiquitous in any frontier movement (6). …

To Live and Die in Dixie: Native Northerners Who Fought for the Confederacy by David Ross Zimring

Reviewed by: To Live and Die in Dixie: Native Northerners Who Fought for the Confederacy by David Ross Zimring Michael Todd Landis (bio) To Live and Die in Dixie: Native Northerners Who Fought for the Confederacy. By David Ross Zimring. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014. Pp. 469. Cloth, $59.95.) Can you name a Confederate general who was a native northerner? Try John Pemberton or Daniel Ruggles. What about former northerners in top civilian posts? John Slidell and Josiah Gorgas. Native northerners, it would seem, played a surprising role in the Confederate experiment, and David Ross Zimring’s To Live and Die in Dixie does a marvelous job of cataloging their exploits, attitudes, and adventures. But there is far more to this monograph than a few familiar names. Zimring also challenges long-held notions about sectional identity in the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras, offering new evidence in support of Confederate nationhood. According to Zimring’s calculations, nearly 350,000 native northerners lived in the South in 1860. To understand what they were doing in Dixie and what their fates were, he examines 303 men and women who were born and raised in a free state and then moved to a slave state in young adulthood. Zimring himself acknowledges that such a small sample is problematic: “These individuals do not speak for all northern emigrants in the South and do not provide a definitive picture of all of their experiences.” Still, Zimring argues, “they provide valuable insight into cross-sectional experiences and . . . identity formation” (13). Indeed, it is “identity formation” that truly interests Zimring, and the study of native northerners in the Civil War South is a means for him to explore that issue. [End Page 280] In ten carefully crafted chapters, Zimring traces the path of “adoptive southerners” from their free-state origins in the antebellum era to their slave-state homes. In the prewar years, he explains, sectional identity was “malleable” and the Mason-Dixon Line was like a “sieve” (5, 47). White southerners welcomed northern emigrants with open arms as long as they embraced local culture and did not challenge slavery. Most emigrants relocated for business opportunities and thus had no interest in upsetting their new neighbors. In the lead-up to war, adoptive southerners defended the South against antislavery attacks, condemned abolitionism, and supported secession. During the war, most adoptive southerners became “Northern Confederates” and fought valiantly in defense of the infant Confederate nation. Never did their faith in the Confederacy waiver, not even when they found themselves near kith and kin in northern prisoner-of-war camps. In the postwar years, Northern Confederates championed the Lost Cause and rejected any reform of southern society. Though the narrative is focused on the experiences of northern emigrants, each chapter is clearly connected to a larger argument about identity formation and Confederate nationalism. Northern Confederates’ loyalty to the South, Zimring asserts, proves that scholars have exaggerated sectionalism in the antebellum era and that Confederate nationhood was authentic and legitimate. “Their dedication to the cause,” he explains, “revealed the strength of the Confederate nation, since individuals who did not have native ties to the region still willingly gave their lives for its survival” (153). Moreover, the Civil War was a profound dividing line (a “Berlin Wall,” in Zimring’s words) between two distinct periods of identity formation (6). In the antebellum era, sectional identity was fluid and flexible. In Reconstruction, however, the North-South divide became an unbridgeable gulf. Northerners who moved south after the war were viewed as “alien trespassers and occupiers,” regardless of their intentions (268). “The Civil War thus represented the cut-off point for the kind of cross-sectional emigration enjoyed by previous generations,” Zimring concludes (269). To support his claims, Zimring draws on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, everything from letter collections to memoirs to biographies. His mining of archival material for his chapter on southern reactions to Northern Confederates is particularly deft, as he uses letters to adoptive southerners to extract native southern opinions and sentiments. Moreover, he provides an appendix with easy-to-read graphs that break down his analysis of the 303 men and women. Zimring’s...