Confederate Nationalism Research Articles

Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty by Gary W. Gallagher (review)

Reviewed by: Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty by Gary W. Gallagher Jim Owens Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty. Gary W. Gallagher. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8203-4540-6, 152pp., paper, $19.95. Gary W. Gallagher in his Becoming Confederates: Paths to a National Loyalty, the result of the Lamar Memorial Lectures at Mercer University in 2011, summarizes many topics he has explored in other works on the Civil War. Using brief biographical essays on Robert E. Lee, Stephen Dodson Ramseur, and Jubal A. Early, Gallagher explains these themes: that the Confederacy was a nation; that the “majority of [the] Confederacy’s white residence developed a strong national identity”; that the “mainline military forces represented the [End Page 313] most important institutional expression of the Confederate nation”; and “that military officers formed an important component in the equation of Confederate loyalty” (2–3). He writes in his introduction, “I take my analytical cue from David M. Potter . . . that every human being possesses numerous overlapping and often mutually reinforcing loyalties, with different ones emerging as most important at various times” (3). In examining these theses and applying them to three individual soldiers, he takes exception with those historians who claim the primacy of states’ rights in triggering the Civil War. In these biographical sketches, he notes that there were generational differences: Lee and Early came to their acceptance of secession later than Ramseur, who grew up during the strident days of the sectional crises. He explains how each man grew to dislike Yankees more as the war progressed. Finally, he embraces U. B. Phillips’s thesis of the “centrality of slavery and race to the loyalties of all three men” (6). In his final chapter, Gallagher carries his ideas beyond the war, writing: “The paths toward Confederate loyalty for Lee and Ramseur and Early help delineate important contours of American history from the late antebellum period through the end of the century. They highlight how Americans juggled multiple, often conflicting loyalties. They reveal white southern identity preoccupied with racial control that transcended political and class line. They render it exceedingly difficult to argue the Confederacy should not be deemed a nation. Perhaps most important they help us understand why and how Confederates waged a prodigiously bloody war and the manner in which they dealt with defeat” (91). With Ramseur and Early, Gallagher seems most at home explaining the ultimate embracing of Confederate nationalism. With Lee, he has to deal with a whole literature emphasizing the general’s loyalty to Virginia and his seeming reconciliation in his farewell address to the Army of Northern Virginia, in which he urged his men to go forward without rancor. But Gallagher argues, using Lee’s private correspondence and the actions of Ramseur’s daughter and of Early, that “reunion” and “reconciliation” were not the same. These men, he asserts, were white southerners who did not repudiate slavery. Gallagher uses his research well, citing support as well as counterarguments for his arguments. These three brief biographical sketches introduce his provocative ideas but do not offer definitive proof; that awaits another book with broader cast of characters, both military and civilian, from a broader geographical perspective. The concluding chapter, which discusses the development of Confederate iconography following Appomattox, in particular, offers a succinct [End Page 314] beginning for anyone who wishes to pursue the topic. Gallagher has written a stimulating book, well worth reading, which forces the reader to rethink concepts concerning secession, states’ rights, race, and the legacy of the Civil War. Jim Owens Lynchburg College Copyright © 2015 The Kent State University Press

Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil War by Ian Binnington (review)

Reviewed by: Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil War by Ian Binnington Michael T. Bernath (bio) Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil War. By Ian Binnington. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Pp. 216. Cloth, $39.50.) Scholarship surrounding Confederate nationalism has grown by leaps and bounds. In just the last decade, over half a dozen major new books dedicated expressly to the subject have been published. These works share a determination to move away from the long-standing weak-versus-strong debate of the previous thirty years and to evaluate the roots, substance, dissemination, and legacy of Confederate nationalism within the broader context of nineteenth-century nation-building, and no longer simply as an explanation for southern defeat or persistence. They have challenged us to take Confederate nationalist ideology seriously and to situate it within American and international practices, traditions, and thought. Ian Binnington’s short book is part of this burgeoning trend. He focuses on the symbols of Confederate nationalism (three in particular) and the meaning that white southerners invested in them. He argues that the creation of Confederate nationalism was “a quest for a symbolic text” and seeks to provide a careful reading of that text by highlighting recurrent symbols across different media and genres (6). With an insufficient collective past and an uncertain and incompletely conceived future, Confederate nationalists dwelled in a compressed “mythic present” (2). In constructing that present, white southerners relied upon certain symbolic figures and tropes to define and differentiate themselves from their northern enemies, as well as to assert their “Confederate Americanism”—a shared sense of history that declared theirs to be the true American nation and Confederates the rightful heirs of the legacy of the Revolution. Binnington identifies these symbolic figures as the “Worthy Southron,” the “Demon Yankee,” and the “Silent Slave.” The Worthy Southron was the embodiment of southern [End Page 318] nobility, civility, gentility, bravery, tradition, liberty, and democracy (rightly understood). The Demon Yankee was his polar opposite—venal, fanatical, barbarous, cowardly, meddlesome, greedy, and tyrannical. The Silent Slave was the often-unacknowledged foundation of this constructed South, a loyal “companion to the vocal Confederate self,” who, while visible, never spoke for himself (4). Having defined these tropes, Binnington proceeds with chapter-length case studies to demonstrate their presence and utility both before and during the war. Binnington begins by focusing on the commentary, largely found in southern newspapers, surrounding the drafting and ratification of the Confederate constitution in order to show that Confederate opinion makers believed it vital that their new constitution and the process by which it was created be situated squarely within the American constitutional tradition: firm evidence, Binnington maintains, of their Confederate Americanism. Next, he examines three prophetic antebellum southern novels foretelling secession and civil war, all of which prefigured Confederate nationalist symbolism by employing the figures of the Worthy Southron, Demon Yankee, and Silent Slave, and by depicting their heroic southern protagonists as champions of American liberty, defending themselves against their un-American northern adversaries. In one of his most original chapters, Binnington treats the collective iconography of Confederate currency as text in order to draw the reader’s attention to money as a means of ideological dissemination as well as to reveal how the depiction of the Confederate nation changed, moving from the agrarian to the more overtly martial. His discussion raises questions about the process by which these images were created and who exactly was writing this symbolic text: questions that examining the images on the bills alone cannot answer. It also raises questions about the material constraints under which Confederate nationalists operated and the degree to which the change Binnington describes resulted from the southern inability to produce or commission original images early in the war. Next, Binnington explores Confederate imaginative literature, four novels specifically, in order to show how southern novelists developed the Worthy Southron, Demon Yankee, and Silent Slave tropes in order to bolster Confederate morale and advance wartime nationalism. The final chapter looks at literary depictions of Confederate military figures as living embodiments of the Worthy Southron ideal. Reaffirming the work of Gary Gallagher and others who have...

The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America by David T. Gleeson (review)

Reviewed by: The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America by David T. Gleeson Brian K. Fennessy The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America. David T. Gleeson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4696-0756-6, 328 pp., cloth, $35.00. Gleeson’s treatment of the Irish in the Confederacy goes far beyond the mere cataloging of contributions and bald assertions of Irish military valor that have characterized past scholarship on this topic. The Green and the Gray [End Page 89] does indeed draw from an evidence base that stretches from one end of the southern nation to the other, and brave deeds by the Confederate Irish are duly noted, though not so much for the sake of celebration as to ask what they meant to the participants and the contemporary newspaper editors who publicized them. At the same time, Gleeson tackles the issue of desertion by Irish soldiers, whose rates exceeded the average, and then moves beyond the battlefield to an examination of patriotism and disaffection among Irish civilians. Gleeson’s analysis as a whole is justly sensitive to the role Lost Cause memory played in the selective remembering of Irish participation in the Confederacy, a process that also receives separate attention in the book’s final chapter. In Gleeson’s hands, the topic of the Irish in the Confederacy has much to tell us about Irish acculturation in America as well as the history of the Confederacy and its postwar afterlife. Gleeson carefully handles the complexity of Irish southerners’ motivations and national identity. In a chapter on the secession crisis, he shows that most Irishmen voted for the National Democratic Party candidate Stephen Douglas because of the party’s record in opposing Know-Nothingism, but the perceived threat of Lincoln’s victory to their privileged status as white men moved them toward secession. Two chapters tease out the many layers of motivation behind Irish enlistment and military participation by analyzing company names, census data, army statistics, as well as literary sources. This evidence suggests that economic need likely influenced the decisions of the poorest Irishmen to sign up, though the poor were not overrepresented in the army, and greater personal investment in slavery seems to have inspired more lasting commitment. Confederate nationalism, however, often proved shallow, resulting in high levels of desertion and swearing allegiance to the United States. Ultimately, Gleeson finds that Irish soldiers’ ideas of manliness, camaraderie, and ethnic pride are more compelling explanations for their battlefield bravery and endurance. A fourth chapter, on the home front, further demonstrates “the equivocal nature of their new Confederate identity” by placing nationalists like John Mitchel and A. G. Magrath alongside other Irish civilians who were less willing to sacrifice everything for the faltering Confederacy (112). The Catholic faith inspired many and offered needed consolation, as Gleeson shows in a fifth chapter, but clerics’ words had greater impact on constructing a positive image of Irish patriotism that obscured the more complicated reality. The ambiguous and equivocal nature of Irish identity continued into the postwar period as many quite readily reverted [End Page 90] to old loyalties. However, Gleeson’s final chapter shows that Irish opposition to rights for African Americans during Radical Reconstruction, which the Irish found more animating than the defense of a slaveholding republic, brought them back into the fold of conservative natives. This, combined with their active participation in Lost Cause commemoration, allowed the Irish to confirm their places within the white South. The celebration of Irish participation in the Lost Cause made them into “excellent postwar patriots” and was integral to their acculturation, while it effaced the memory of wartime privation and disaffection (222). Gleeson also uses the bellum and postbellum Irish experience to reflect on the history of the Confederacy. By paying attention to how Irish participation was perceived at different times and in different contexts, he finds that native southern newspaper editors publicized stories of Irish bravery to rally confidence but also scapegoated the Irish for the Confederacy’s failures, as when they tied the bread riots to ethnicity. That most of the rioters were actually natives...

Confederate Nationalism and the Authenticity of Southern Ideology

Confederate Nationalism and the Authenticity of Southern Ideology

Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty by Gary W. Gallagher (review)

Reviewed by: Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty by Gary W. Gallagher Richard B. McCaslin Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty. By Gary W. Gallagher. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Pp. x, 117. Illustrations, notes, index.) Gary Gallagher, as either the author of a monograph or editor of an anthology, has addressed almost every important topic being discussed by Civil War scholars. In this collection of essays, which began as Lamar Lectures at Mercer University, he tackles the issue of Confederate nationalism. To begin, he declares that the Confederacy was indeed a nation, and that the conflict that almost sundered the United States was in truth a clash between two nation-states, one of which existed for only a brief time. Having established those premises, he declares that most, but not all, of the whites who resided within the seceded states developed a strong loyalty to their new nation. This nationalism relied greatly on the military leadership of the Confederacy, and it faded with the defeat of their armies. Within the framework defined in his introduction, Gallagher explores the nationalism expressed by Robert E. Lee, Stephen Dodson Ramseur, and Jubal A. Early. All three served as Confederate generals in the Army of Northern Virginia, and all of them ultimately developed a strong loyalty to the Confederacy that transcended any concerns they had for regional, state, or local interests. Lee as portrayed by Gallagher wrote often about his support for the Confederate government’s attempts to sustain its war efforts, a cause that to him was much more important than the arguments of any state, including Virginia, in favor of its own interests. He came to this new nationalism in stages, exhibiting strong attachments to the United States, Virginia, and the South in other phases of his life. Not so Ramseur, who was born thirty years after Lee. He grew up in an era of intensifying sectional loyalties and never served in the U.S. Army, going immediately from West Point to Confederate service in 1861. Gallagher says Ramseur easily made the transition from ardent Southerner to committed Confederate, rising rapidly to command a division before his death at Cedar Creek in October 1864. Early provides the most intriguing study in shifting loyalties. He was an outspoken Unionist delegate in the Virginia Secession Convention that later commissioned Lee as the commander of their revolutionary forces, then became one of the most vituperative Confederates, spewing unreconstructed rhetoric long after the war had ended. Early apparently never did anything half-way, and he remained a staunch conservative throughout his life, which Gallagher makes abundantly clear. Gallagher returns to several other interesting points in his discussion of Lee, Ramseur, and Early. All three consciously fought to preserve a social, economic, and political order that kept blacks under the control of whites. All three came to detest their enemies, especially those from New England, which reinforced their loyalty to the Confederacy, which they believed was populated by superior people. While Early was the most insistent about this, Ramseur was not much more moderate, and even Lee spoke harshly about his blue-clad opponents. Lee and Early each referenced George Washington and the American Revolution, but in sharply different ways. Finally, both Lee and Early retained a strong loyalty to the Confederacy [End Page 228] after the war, indicating their persistent Confederate nationalism. While this might also reflect resentment towards the United States government that had defeated them, their words indicate otherwise, especially those of the bellicose Early. In sum, this is a useful book for those seeking to put aside simplistic analyses of Confederate loyalty and dig deeper into a complex and enduring riddle. Richard B. McCaslin University of North Texas Copyright © 2014 The Texas State Historical Association

Confederate visions: nationalism, symbolism, and the imagined South in the Civil War

Nationalism in nineteenth-century America operated through a collection of symbols, signifiers citizens could invest with meaning and understanding. In Confederate Visions, Ian Binnington examines the roots of Confederate nationalism by analysing some of its most important symbols: Confederate constitutions, treasury notes, wartime literature, and the role of the military in symbolising the Confederate nation. Nationalisms tend to construct a glorified past, an idyllic picture of national strength, honor, and unity, with a past often based on a vision of what should be true rather than what actually was. Binnington considers here the ways in which the Confederacy was imagined by antebellum Southerners through a group of intertwined mythic concepts--the the Yankee, the and a sense of shared history deemed Confederate Americanism. These symbols were repeatedly invoked and entwined by the producers of Confederate nationalism. The Worthy Southron, the constructed Confederate self, was imagined as a champion of liberty, counterposed to the Demon Yankee other, a fanatical abolitionist and enemy of Liberty. The Silent Slave, meanwhile, was a companion to the vocal Confederate self, loyal and trusting, reliable and honest. The road to the creation of an American identity was fraught with struggle, political conflict, and ultimately bloody Civil War. Confederate Visions examines literature, newspapers and periodicals, visual imagery, and formal state documents to explore the origins and development of these symbols of wartime Confederate nationalism.

This Corner of Canaan: Essays on Texas in Honor of Randolph B. Campbell ed. by Richard B. McCaslin, Donald E. Chipman, Andrew J. Torget (review)

Reviewed by: This Corner of Canaan: Essays on Texas in Honor of Randolph B. Campbell ed. by Richard B. McCaslin, Donald E. Chipman, Andrew J. Torget Diana Davids Hinton This Corner of Canaan: Essays on Texas in Honor of Randolph B. Campbell. Edited by Richard B. McCaslin, Donald E. Chipman, and Andrew J. Torget. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013. Pp. 452. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Without doubt, Randolph B. “Mike” Campbell is one of the foremost Texas history scholars, so this collection of essays in his honor by his friends and former students is indeed welcome. As the editors note, these essays reflect Campbell’s profound influence on Texas historical scholarship, especially regarding two dominant aspects of his scholarly approach: his emphasis on Texas’s southern identity and his focus on grassroots research in local records to test prevailing generalizations and excise distortions created by popular memory. The editors organize sixteen essays into sections on Texas identity, the pre-Civil War era, Civil War and Reconstruction, Texas and the New South, and twentieth-century Texas. Is Texas southern, western, or exceptional—simply unique? Walter Buenger agrees with Campbell that between 1845 and 1890 Texas fit the southern model, but after 1890 he sees that identity shifting to “first western and then American” (9), concluding, “More often than not, Texas was American and universal” (3). Light Cummins emphatically agrees with Campbell regarding Texas’s essentially southern identity, but argues that popular memory created a western identity, a transformation he sees happening in the 1930s. Essays relating to pre-Civil War Texas focus on three significant individuals in early Texas history. Donald Chipman introduces us to all but forgotten Fray José Antonio Pichardo, who literally worked himself to death writing a three-thousand [End Page 78] page report defending Spain’s claims regarding the Texas-Louisiana boundary. Carol Lipscomb describes how Sam Houston’s service as an Indian agent influenced his later career, while Andrew Torget argues for Stephen F. Austin’s wholehearted commitment to the institution of slavery. The essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction offer perspectives on key questions. Carl Moneyhon, for example, studies the extent to which the war meant changes in the landholding elite of Brazos County. Andrew Lang contrasts the behavior of bored and unruly Confederate soldiers on the Gulf Coast to ideals of Confederate nationalism, while Bradley Clampitt looks at how some North Texas Confederates obtained amnesty once the shooting stopped. By examining an ugly instance of racial violence in Reconstruction Hill County, Richard McCaslin demonstrates the fallibility of popular memory, in which the perpetrators were turned into heroes. In each instance, research at the grassroots level sets aside facile generalizations. Essays on Texas and the New South include Gregg Cantrell’s analysis of political currents in Milam County to show how Conservative Democrats, Populists, and Progressives vied for political power in the 1890s. Mark Stanley shows how the poll tax disfranchised blacks and poor whites in Cooke County, and Gregory W. Ball identifies how draft boards made exemptions in Denton County during World War I. Turning to urban development, Alwyn Barr uses Little Rock, Shreveport, Houston, and San Antonio to illuminate the black urban experience with respect to neighborhood segregation and public health. Urban emphasis also dominates the final group of essays, with Jessica Brannon-Wranosky’s study of the Woman’s Monday Club in Corpus Christi; Harriet Joseph, Alix Riviere, and Jordan Renner’s biographical perspective on Corpus Christi educators Edmundo and Jovita González Mireles; and Wesley Phelps’s description of grassroots activism in the Houston War on Poverty of the 1960s. What these essays have in common is their focus on how local experience sheds light on broader changes. Reflecting Campbell’s interests and methods, this collection, stimulating as it is, does not attempt to represent all aspects of Texas history. Texas west of Fort Worth, for example, receives no attention, and important parts of the twentieth-century experience like demographic change, industrial growth, petroleum development, and federal military spending are conspicuously absent. That said, the essays do address an important range of topics in Texas history. Even better, the collection showcases not only the work of established scholars...

War's Desolating Scourge: The Union's Occupation of North Alabama by Joseph W. Danielson (review)

Reviewed by: War's Desolating Scourge: The Union's Occupation of North Alabama by Joseph W. Danielson Brett J. Derbes War's Desolating Scourge: The Union's Occupation of North Alabama. Joseph W. Danielson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012. ISBN 978-0-7006-1844-6, 232 pp., cloth, $34.95. As the Union army spread across the western theater, its military objectives transitioned from ending the rebellion and preserving the Union to include the liberation of African Americans and reunification of the country. Throughout the war, Union armies invaded the Confederacy and undertook the daunting task of occupying unfriendly territory. Joseph W. Danielson examines the Union occupations of North Alabama that began in April 1862, under Gen. Ormsby Mitchel and seven thousand soldiers from the Third Division of the Army of the Ohio. Gen. Don Carlos Buell implemented President Abraham Lincoln's policy of conciliation in the region, but the army quickly discarded it in favor of more punitive strategies that culminated in hard war against brazenly defiant Confederate soldiers and civilians. Danielson determines that the genesis of the Union's harsh civil-military policies occurred in North Alabama and began much earlier than others have suggested. The sizable cooperationist population of North Alabama, which encompassed the Tennessee Valley and Hill Counties regions, mobilized to strongly support the Confederacy following President Lincoln's call for seventy-five thousand troops. Danielson asserts, "Their initial caution during the secession crisis was not a sign [End Page 95] of their lack of commitment to southern independence or to the institution of slavery" (11). General Mitchel's invasion of North Alabama garnered success as part of a larger Union offensive in the western theater to capture and maintain control of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad. During the subsequent five-month occupation, civilians engaged in daily acts of defiance that ranged from verbal assaults to ambushing and killing. Confederate women's shunning and taunting of Union soldiers proved vital to the resistance, which "revealed a glaring miscalculation by Lincoln, Buell, and other supporters of conciliation" (44). General Mitchel initially eroded Confederate morale through the punitive strategies of arresting dissidents, administering loyalty oaths, censoring information, and confiscating cotton. The Union war department and President Lincoln supported shifting towards a pervasive hard-war strategy that included the wide-spread confiscation of foodstuffs and destruction of property. Danielson describes Union colonel John Basil Turchin's brutal sacking of Athens on May 2 as the North's "most destructive attack on a Confederate town during the 1862 occupation" (76). General Buell's unpopular adherence to an archaic conservative strategy clashed with General Mitchel's harsh tactics, which Danielson suggests influenced the Second Confiscation Act of mid-July. The author notes that Union soldiers across the South adopted Mitchel's hard-war mentality and proposes that "the 1862 occupation of North Alabama ultimately played an integral role in leading the Union toward Emancipation" (112). Danielson's study confirms that a prolonged Union presence significantly disrupted the institution of slavery in the region and revealed deepening cracks in Confederate nationalism. Yet, slaves who escaped to Union camps or enlisted in military service experienced only partial freedom and protection, despite providing sensitive information regarding the whereabouts of former masters and Confederate soldiers. In 1863, repeated Union raids and unrelenting punitive policies combined with Confederate military setbacks to deteriorate civilians' morale, especially women who "expected to be protected from their northern foe" (123). The Battle of Chickamauga brought civilians temporary relief, but the siege of Chattanooga increased their suffering. Additionally, North Alabama unionists, emboldened by President Lincoln's 10 percent plan, cooperated with Union soldiers to destabilize the Confederate home front. By 1864, Gen. William T. Sherman extended hard-war tactics against the defiant civilians of North Alabama, whose "region resembled a wasteland of barren fields, ruined property, and shattered dreams" (151). Danielson concludes that rapid Union demobilization and President Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction policies allowed southern nationalists to openly defy the Thirteenth Amendment by enacting black codes after returning to political power. War's Desolating Scourge certainly provides the most detailed and comprehensive account of the Union occupation of North Alabama. Danielson consults dozens of collections to present personal letters, diaries...

The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America by David T. Gleeson (review)

Reviewed by: The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America by David T. Gleeson Kristopher A. Teters The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America. By David T. Gleeson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. xiii, 307.) In The Green and the Gray, David Gleeson provides a nuanced and comprehensive examination of the Irish in the Confederacy. Using a rich variety of sources, Gleeson chronicles the experience and attitudes of Irish Southerners from the antebellum period through the Civil War to the Lost [End Page 101] Cause commemorations of the postwar period. He persuasively argues that the Irish were “ambiguous Confederates” during the war years (221). At times, they demonstrated a fervent commitment to the Confederacy, but at other times, they showed a willingness to easily desert that nation. It was only after the war that the Irish became unified in their support of the Confederacy. Gleeson demonstrates how in the decades after the conflict, the Irish fully embraced the Lost Cause mythology and actively memorialized Confederate leaders and soldiers. The Irish then became far better Confederate patriots in remembering and memorializing the struggle than they were during the war itself. With their enthusiastic participation in these Lost Cause activities, along with their determined resistance to Radical Reconstruction, the Irish were able to more fully integrate into Southern society. Gleeson’s work thus affords great insight into the complexity of Confederate nationalism and the immigrant experience in the South. Gleeson organizes his book roughly chronologically, beginning with a look at the political views of Irish Southerners during the tumultuous period leading up to the Civil War. The Irish proved to be loyal followers of the Democratic Party and supportive of the institution of slavery. But, as Gleeson convincingly shows, they were also “reluctant secessionists,” who only favored secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln as president (10). Interestingly, during the election of 1860, many Irish Southerners voted for the Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas over the Southern Democrat John Breckinridge. Yet, despite their reluctance to leave the Union, many Irish joined the Confederate armed forces, around 20,000 in all. Gleeson points to several important reasons that the Irish enlisted: defending their homes, proving their manliness, and fighting an oppressive enemy—just as Irish at home struggled against Great Britain. Notwithstanding this early patriotic fervor, Irish Confederates compiled a mixed war record. In numerous instances, they distinguished themselves on the battlefield. Indeed, Gleeson impressively documents the heroism of Irish Confederate soldiers and their leaders in combat. But Irish soldiers also had more of a tendency to desert the Confederate cause and take the oath of allegiance to the United States than native Southerners. Gleeson finds a similar pattern when he examines the patriotism and loyalty of the Irish on the home front. Irish Confederates from all different backgrounds, from politicians to church leaders to laborers, demonstrated a strong commitment to the Confederacy, especially at the war’s beginning. In many instances, though, this commitment proved shallow. As the war progressed and Union forces occupied Southern cities, many Irish civilians more than eager to come back to the Union and forget the Confederacy. For example, when New [End Page 102] Orleans and Memphis came under Union control, the Irish cooperated with and helped the Federals. At the end of the war, the Irish accepted defeat and sought reconciliation with the North. Irish Southerners’ problematic Confederate nationalism was forgotten in the postwar South. Gleeson’s final chapter, one of his most interesting, establishes the important role the Irish played in the formation and celebration of the Lost Cause. In these Lost Cause commemorations, the Irish cast a romantic and positive aura over their Confederate experience. They celebrated the Irish as heroic soldiers and forgot those Irish who deserted or those who took the oath. This Lost Cause mythmaking united Irish Southerners and made them stronger Confederate nationalists than the war did. More importantly, it helped make them truly Southern. Gleeson asserts, “In the long run then, for the Irish Confederates and their descendants, their commemoration of the war was more important than their actual participation in it” (187). Gleeson’s...

The Politics of Faith During the Civil War. By Timothy L. Wesley. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xi + 273 pp. $45.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Politics of Faith During the Civil War . By Timothy L. Wesley . Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press , 2013. xi + 273 pp. $45.00 cloth.Book Reviews NotesHistorians have devoted considerable attention to ministers during the American Civil War. More than three decades ago James H. Moorhead (American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants the Civil War, 1860-1869 [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978]) analyzed the millennial overtones in sermons of New England ministers. More recently, Harry S. Stout (Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War [New York: Viking, 2006]) depicted the northern clergy as kneejerk supporters of a war that oftentimes was conducted in an immoral, unchristian manner. In this fine volume, social historian Timothy Wesley maps out much underexplored territory by examining the impact of ministers' words deeds the multifaceted responses to these utterances actions by the laity, denominational leaders, military civil authorities, the secular press. He effectively shows how people inside outside the church manipulated or inhibited the political behavior of clergymen (7), in the process revealing rifts between ministers laypersons regarding the extent appropriateness of the politicization of the church confirming how religion politics were thoroughly blended during the war.One strength of Wesley's work is the geographic breadth of his ministerial coverage. Indeed, his careful attention to regional differences unique local conditions illuminates the diversity complexity of clerical experiences. For instance, he discusses northern clerics who unequivocally supported the Union; northern pastors who were accused of disloyalty for both sins of omission or commission; border state ministers who sometimes served divided congregations oftentimes clashed with either coreligionists or secular figures; clergymen in the occupied South who were arrested or exiled by officers; southern divines who defended the war effort promoted Confederate nationalism; African American preachers who championed moral self-improvement education as stepping stones along the path to freedom rights.Wesley's discussion of treason during the war is also instructive. He explains how most Northerners went beyond the constitutional definition of treason scrutinized a minister's words for signs of disloyalty. In fact, a clergyman need not commit an overt act against the government to be considered a traitor. Laypersons, newspaper editors, military authorities branded numerous preachers as disloyal for failing to pray for Abraham Lincoln, for refusing to give vocal support to the cause, or even for holding personal opinions (the open-ended allegation of sympathizing with the South) that called into question their loyalty to the United States. Although he recognizes that in many cases Republicans targeted Democratic pastors for purely partisan reasons, at times Wesley makes unsubstantiated claims about the extent of disloyalty in the northern pulpit. For example, at the beginning of chapter 3 he asserts, and still other clergymen, at least in sentiment if less often in deed, were openly disloyal to the Union (43). At the chapter's end he concludes, treacherous congregational pastors who sapped their congregants' commitment to the war effort were threats to the Union (58). …

Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of a National Literature

Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of a National Literature

Civil War Literature and Nationalism

Civil War Literature and Nationalism Timothy Sweet (bio) Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America. By Coleman Hutchison. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012. xiii + 277 pp. $69.95 cloth. $24.95 paper. To Fight Aloud is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War. By Faith Barrett. U of Massachusetts P, 2012. xv + 336 pp. $80.00 cloth. $27.95 paper. In his 1962 assessment of Civil War poetry, Edmund Wilson’s impatience with the rhetoric of nationhood led him to dismiss Civil War poetry as so much “patriotic journalism” and to praise instead poets who developed a “more personal kind of self-expression” by ignoring the war altogether (Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman) or approaching it only obliquely (Sidney Lanier). By 2012, it has become impossible to imagine that any study of Civil War poetry would not engage questions of nationalism. Coleman Hutchison and Faith Barrett each illustrate the gulf between 1962 when Wilson valorized the personal over the political and 2012. Each cites Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) to illuminate the way Civil War poetry expresses the relation between literature and nationalism. Each demonstrates with close-readings how texts shaped and were shaped by contexts of production, circulation, and reception. Although Confederate nationalism has received substantial scholarly attention, especially following Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Creation of Confederate Nationalism (1988), its associated literature has suffered neglect. As Hutchison observes, [End Page 136] most scholars have concluded that “there wasn’t much of the stuff, and in any case it wasn’t very good.” Without addressing quality, Hutchison demonstrates that “the Confederacy gave rise to a robust literary culture.” In examining this archive as a test case for Anderson’s account of modern nation-building, Hutchison looks deeply at a few instances, as compared for example with the broad survey approach taken by Michael Bernath’s Confederate Minds (2010). Much more extensively than Bernath, Hutchison emphasizes the international context of Confederate nationalism and its literature. Literary criticism, poetry, and popular song alike provide Hutchison’s evidence for the idea that the Confederacy was a “nation struggling to write itself into existence.” Examinations of the pro-Confederate, London-based periodical The Index and especially the long running Southern Literary Messenger demonstrate the importance of literary criticism. (Chapters on poetry and song will be discussed below in conjunction with Barrett’s study.) Readers may wish that Hutchison had also devoted a chapter to the genre of popular history—for example, Edward A. Pollard’s series, which began in 1862 and culminated in 1866 with The Lost Cause. Other genres bear disproportionate weight in his argument, as in the chapter on the Confederate national novel. By Hutchison’s count, only seven original book-length works of fiction were published in the Confederacy during the war, and of these only one seems to have been popular enough to support claims of cultural influence: Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria; or, the Altars of Sacrifice (1864). This text sold some twenty thousand copies (about as many as The Scarlet Letter sold during Hawthorne’s lifetime). Memoir, which emerged out of Confederate nationalism after the demise of its state apparatus, is represented not by the numerous examples that promoted a Lost Cause ideology but rather by an anomaly, Loreta Janeta Velazquez’s The Woman in Battle (1876). Whereas previous work has focused on gender, Hutchison’s new approach to this text by way of nationalism maps Velazquez’s geographical “restlessness” onto the international context of the Confederacy and the war. Barrett approaches the question of nationalism through poetic form, particularly “voice-effects”: modes of address, pronoun usages (actual or implied), song-like structures, and similar formal features that specify an audience’s relation to a text. Working in the vein of historical poetics opened by scholars such as Paula Bennett and Virginia Jackson, Barrett reminds us of the prominence of poetry and song in mid-century American culture. Arguing that the war reshaped American poetics as poets discovered new permeability in the conventional “boundaries between ‘civic’ and ‘private’ stances,” Barrett asks us to reconsider the definition of lyric subjectivity we have inherited from modernism. Chapters address popular [End...

Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861–1865 by Barton A. Myers (review)

Reviewed by: Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861–1865 by Barton A. Myers Robert Tracy McKenzie (bio) Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861–1865. By Barton A. Myers. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. Pp. 193. Cloth, $32.50; paper, $18.95.) According to Barton Myers, the germ of this book can be traced to the moment when, as an undergraduate engaged in library research at the University of North Carolina, the author stumbled across a brief newspaper account of the execution by Union soldiers of a suspected Confederate guerrilla in northeastern North Carolina. A few years later, by then a master’s degree candidate in graduate school, Myers resolved to revisit the episode with the goal of understanding the community from which the alleged insurgent came. The result is a brief, well-crafted monograph that offers tantalizing insight into the nature and consequences of guerrilla violence in a divided southern community. [End Page 418] As is often the case with academic works, the focus of the book is captured in its subtitle, not its title. Indeed, the reference to the execution of Daniel Bright is essentially a literary device. In truth, Myers could learn little about the alleged insurgent beyond the statistical testimony left by the federal census. Bright was approximately thirty at the time of his execution in December 1863. On the eve of the war, he had owned an estimated $4,500 worth of real and personal property, including one slave. Because Bright left no personal papers behind, not even a military service record, Myers can only conjecture why Bright enrolled in the Confederate service in 1861, why he may have returned home when his original twelve-month term was up, and why he may have later reenlisted and then, possibly, deserted to become, perhaps, a Confederate guerilla in his home community. Nor is much known about Bright’s trial and execution during a counterguerrilla raid led by Union general Augustus Wild. The note that Wild pinned to Bright’s corpse labeled the deceased a guerrilla, and although Confederate authorities disputed the allegation, Myers ultimately concludes that it was “very likely” that Wild was correct (97). The verdict is plausible, yet the evidence for even this basic detail is mostly indirect and circumstantial. Myers has done the best that he can with what he has to work with, but that, unfortunately, is not very much. Myers is much more successful at explaining the context—physical and cultural—in which the trial and execution took place. Executing Daniel Bright is primarily a careful analysis of Pasquotank County, North Carolina, and the economic, social, political, and racial milieu within which local guerrillas operated. The author stresses three themes. The first involves the continuing importance of antebellum political patterns. Although moribund nationally, the two-party system was still alive and well in Pasquotank, and the free population divided during the early stages of the secession crisis along partisan lines, its large Whig majority opposing the prosecession, Democratic minority. After Fort Sumter, all but perhaps 5 percent of the white population became Confederates, but erstwhile Whigs were always primarily loyal to North Carolina—rather than to the Confederacy per se—and the county as a whole never developed a robust Confederate nationalism. In contrast, whites were definitely unified in their fear of racial upheaval, the second theme that Myers identifies. Their anxiety was heightened by the sheer size of the local black population (slaves and free blacks slightly outnumbered whites) and by their proximity to the Great Dismal Swamp, an ideal haven for fugitives. Finally, Myers stresses that much of the county was a “no-man’s land” after the spring of 1862, the area perpetually subject to Union raids but effectively [End Page 419] controlled by neither army. In this vacuum of power, guerrillas often operated with impunity. Perhaps the greatest strength of the work is the author’s careful treatment of the impact and significance of General Wild’s raid on the county. By leading a brigade of United States Colored Troops into Pasquotank, including some former local slaves, the raid embodied...

Granbury's Texas Brigade: Diehard Western Confederates by John R. Lundberg (review)

Reviewed by: Granbury's Texas Brigade: Diehard Western Confederates by John R. Lundberg Kenneth W. Howell Granbury's Texas Brigade: Diehard Western Confederates. By John R. Lundberg. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. Pp. 336. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780807143476, $39.95 cloth; ISBN 9780807143490, $25.95 epub.) Granbury's Texas Brigade formed after the Battle of Chickamauga and fought as part of Patrick Cleburne's division in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. While not as well-known as Hood's Texas Brigade, Brig. Gen. Hiram B. Granbury's unit gained notoriety in the western theater of the Civil War, seeing action at Chattanooga, Atlanta, and in the 1864 Tennessee campaign before suffering heavy causalities at the Battle of Franklin. Lundberg meticulously traces the heroic efforts of the eight regiments that made up Hiram Granbury's brigade as they waged war against their enemy at places such as Tunnel Hill, Ringgold Gap, Pickett's Mill, Franklin, and Nashville. The author also provides detailed information on the actions of the eight regiments prior to their official formation into Granbury's Texas Brigade. Of the eight regiments, the 7th Texas Infantry stood out for their role in the unsuccessful defense of Fort Donelson from U. S. Grant's army. While the 7th Texas Infantry suffered capture and imprisonment after the fall of Fort Donelson, the other Texas regiments that would later be a part of Granbury's Brigade suffered their own setbacks in Arkansas, where they were defeated and taken prisoners at Arkansas Post in 1863. Unlike the 7th, which was paroled in time to see action in the Vicksburg campaign, the Texas Confederates captured in Arkansas remained in prison for several months. They would be paroled in time to see action in the Battle of Chickamauga. The eight Texas regiments were formed into their new brigade after Chickamauga. Using myriad primary and secondary sources, Lundberg offers provocative insights into the minds of the men who served in Granbury's Brigade by focusing on three primary themes. First, the author argues that the high rate of desertion in the brigade did not represent a lack of commitment to the Confederacy but rather a desire to serve near their homes. Lundberg finds that most of the deserters rejoined Confederate units once they returned home and therefore proved their devotion to the southern cause. Second, he argues that the brigade's high degree of effectiveness and determination was the result of the men's shared experiences of being captured and held as federal prisoners. According to the author, the men's strong cohesive bond to each other resulted from their desire to prove their merits in battle and to enact vengeance on their northern captors. Finally, the men's loyalty to the brigade and to the Confederate cause correlated directly with the competency of commanders within their unit, especially Brig. Gen. Granbury. Confidence in their officers led the men to fight with a ferocity that often resulted in brigade-level victories even while the Army of Tennessee suffered defeat. While the latter two themes are plausible and in part seem to explain the tenacity of Granbury's Texas Brigade, the idea that deserters maintained a strong sense of Confederate nationalism seems a stretch. There is no doubt that many Texas soldiers deserted their post and returned to defend their home and families against possible Union invasions and Indian raids, but it is hard to accept that they were still strong Confederate nationalists. In fact, their very act of desertion illustrated that personal concerns outweighed any nationalist feelings that they [End Page 425] may have possessed. However, it does stand to reason that the desertions left the ranks of Granbury's Brigade filled with a hardcore group of soldiers who were devoted Confederate nationalists—they were the true "Diehard Confederates" in the western theater of the war. Despite the controversial argument regarding desertion among the Texas soldiers, Lundberg has provided scholars with a solid unit history of Granbury's Texas Brigade, and those who are interested in the Civil War will find this an informative volume. Kenneth W. Howell Prairie View A&M University Copyright © 2013 The Texas State Historical Association

Worth a dozen men: women and nursing in the Civil War South

In antebellum society, women were regarded as ideal nurses because of their sympathetic natures. However, they were expected to exercise their talents only in the home; nursing strange men in hospitals was considered inappropriate, if not indecent. Nevertheless, in defiance of tradition, Confederate women set up hospitals early in the Civil War and organised volunteers to care for the increasing number of sick and wounded soldiers. As a fledgling government engaged in a long and bloody war, the Confederacy relied on this female labour, which prompted a new understanding of women's place in public life and a shift in gender roles. Challenging the assumption that Southern women's contributions to the war effort were less systematic and organised than those of Union women, Worth a Dozen Men looks at the Civil War as a watershed moment for Southern women. Female nurses in the South played a critical role in raising army and civilian morale and reducing mortality rates, thus allowing the South to continue fighting. They embodied a new model of heroic energy and nationalism, and came to be seen as the female equivalent of soldiers. Moreover, nursing provided them with a foundation for pro-Confederate political activity, both during and after the war, when gender roles and race relations underwent dramatic changes. Worth a Dozen Men chronicles the Southern wartime nursing experience, tracking the course of the conflict from the initial burst of Confederate nationalism to the shock and sorrow of losing the war. Through newspapers and official records, as well as letters, diaries, and memoirs--not only those of the remarkable and dedicated women who participated, but also of the doctors with whom they served, their soldier patients, and the patients' families--a comprehensive picture of what it was like to be a nurse in the South during the Civil War emerges.

The Lost Boys: Citizen-Soldiers, Disabled Veterans, and Confederate Nationalism in the Age of People's War

The Lost Boys: Citizen-Soldiers, Disabled Veterans, and Confederate Nationalism in the Age of People's War

Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers (review)

Reviewed by: Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers Matthew C. Hulbert Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers. Steven R. Boyd. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8071-3685-0, 192 pp., cloth, $36.95. With Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War, Steven R. Boyd offers a seemingly untapped lens—or perhaps more appropriately, a series of interconnected lenses—through which we might more intimately examine the values, the ideologies, and the broader cultural environments of middle-class white men and women on both sides of the Civil War. Equal parts cultural history and art history, this study involves the laborious dissection and interpretation of specially embellished envelopes printed immediately before and during the war—with designs ranging from flags, eagles, and canons to Confederate president Jefferson Davis and Union president Abraham Lincoln facing off, shirtless, in an epic bare-knuckle boxing match. In the midst of all this symbolism, propaganda, sentiment, and extrapolation, Boyd attempts to piece together how such relatively small vestiges of material culture informed (and continue to inform) much larger themes of constructed nationalism, [End Page 125] evolving identities and, ultimately, how real people reacted to, interacted with, and perceived themselves in the broader context of a war that fiercely divided friends, families, neighbors, and states alike. Boyd illustrates the varied functions patriotic envelopes performed during the war. Aside from their most obvious roles as artistic promotions of patriotic sentiment, these envelopes also shed considerable light on the causes motivating war efforts on both sides. Acknowledging their greater importance to the Union, Boyd nonetheless argues that the envelopes charted both subtle and substantial changes in the tenor of both war efforts, as well as the degree to which citizens on both sides endorsed and internalized such intellectual and emotional shifts. As visual representations of the causes for war, Boyd essentially contends that patriotic envelopes constitute a slideshow in which symbolic imagery and consumer-approved meanings—from the Constitution itself to slaves playing active roles in their own emancipation—serve as a measuring stick for fluctuating social and political issues. In much the same way that patriotic envelopes visually chart how northerners understood and expressed their own motivations to fight, Boyd maintains that southern envelopes operate as indicators of Confederate nationalism and government efficiency. As printers rapidly designed and disseminated covers featuring the ever-evolving Confederate flag, Jefferson Davis, P. G. T. Beauregard, and even scenes depicting loyal slaves, the envelopes worked as a mechanism through which Confederate citizens, separated by geographic expanses and a painfully slow stream of news and information, became familiar with their new nation—its leaders, its causes, and symbols meant to ignite nationalist fervor. Included in this analysis are women and African Americans. Their images on the envelopes, however, seem to reveal the thoughts of white men more so than those of women on the home front or slaves fleeing the plantation. On one hand, Boyd proposes that imagery designed by northern printers of rebellious or escaping slaves illustrates a wider northern awareness of the role African Americans played in their own liberation. On the other hand, he hints that patriotic covers were a way for men to issue gendered behavioral protocols to women as men marched off to war and left them to manage farms, businesses, and homes. Both assertions, though vague at times concerning scale and impact, do, at the very least, underscore the ways these envelopes could, and likely did, operate as vehicles of popular thought and cultural expression. In many ways, the previous statement works as a microcosmic review of the book. Nearly all of the meanings and functions that Boyd extrapolates [End Page 126] from or assigns to patriotic envelopes are well-founded and thoroughly outlined and represent very plausible conclusions. Despite an admittedly limited chronology of envelopes—as vignettes indicative of the ideals, values, political actions, and even the self-perceptions of middle-class whites, North and South—Boyd’s arguments rest on solid ground. Though questions linger regarding the socioeconomic and/or geographic characteristics of this middle class and its larger representativeness, Boyd’s otherwise pragmatic analysis constitutes...

Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861 (review)

Reviewed by: Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861 William Garrett Piston Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861. By Kenneth Noe. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. xiv, 317 pp. $35.00 ISBN 978-0-8078-3377-3. Kenneth Noe makes an important contribution to our understanding of Civil War soldiers in his well-written and entertaining work Reluctant Rebels: Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861. Although many previous scholars have studied the combatants of 1861-1865, either as a whole, by side, by branch of service, or even by specific army, none has explored how those who enlisted after the heady first year of the war differed from their comrades-in-arms. Noe fills this gap in relation to Confederates. Moreover, by carefully explaining how his findings relate to other scholarship, he provides a thorough introduction to studies of the common soldier. Reluctant Rebels will make an excellent assignment for graduate or upper-division undergraduate Civil War courses. Because Noe skillfully weaves excerpts from his primary sources into his analysis, what might have been a dull topic comes alive, making it a work that should interest general readers as well as scholars. Noe's book shares the same limitation and weakness that characterizes all investigations of Civil War soldiers, namely that the sources available for study do not constitute a representative cross-section of the whole. This is particularly true on the Confederate side, where the surviving material is uneven. Whether one includes postwar memoirs, or limits one's study as Noe does to wartime journals, diaries, and letters, officers and noncommissioned officers are overrepresented, as are soldiers serving in the Eastern Theater. The lower ranks left much less behind, particularly in the Trans-Mississippi. Moreover, source material is more often than not silent or cryptic in relation to many topics of intense historical interest, such as slavery, emancipation, reasons for enlistment, reaction to combat, and morale. This raises important questions. If in a sample of several hundred letters only ten refer to a specific topic, are any conclusions [End Page 77] valid? With such limited data, interpretation can be problematic and it is easy to make extreme assertions. If more soldiers in the Western Theater's Army of Tennessee praise Robert E. Lee in their letters than their own commanders, should we conclude that Lee was a national symbol for the South? Or given the fact that, regardless of theater, the vast majority of soldier letters never mention any commanding generals, should we conclude that neither Lee nor any other top-level commander meant very much to the men they led? Noe's archival research is impressive; that his data set of post-1861 enlistees numbers only 320 soldiers is a testament to how seldom soldiers' letters address specific questions of interest to historians. A few examples must suffice to suggest the complexity and depth of his research and analysis, which both confirms and challenges previous assumptions regarding the "typical" southern soldier. Noe's soldiers are older and more likely to be married than those who joined the ranks in 1861, and their reasons for waiting to enlist remain largely elusive. He concludes that later enlistees were less ideologically motivated than early enlistees, for they rarely espoused Confederate nationalism, mentioned state rights or liberty, or referenced the American Revolution. Noe finds little resentment of planter aristocrats among his later enlistees who owned no slaves; all later enlistees were united in their support of slavery and opposition to emancipation. Noe finds that defense of hearth and home were as important to later enlistees as other Confederates. Hatred of the enemy sustained later enlistees, as it did earlier soldiers, but bounties and furloughs were also powerful incentives for remaining in the ranks over the course of the conflict. Noe sharply questions scholars who assert that large-scale revivals within Confederate armies were important for maintaining morale. He concludes that later enlistees were indeed sustained by faith, but through memories of worship at home rather than a shared Christian brotherhood in gray. Indeed, later enlistees clung much more closely to home, so much so that by resisting the bonds born of...

Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (review)

Reviewed by: Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South Peter S. Carmichael Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Stephanie McCurry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-6740-4589-7, 360 pp., cloth, $35.00. The latest academic fashions hold no appeal to Stephanie McCurry, and thankfully so, as her Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South is a brilliant exploration into the bare-knuckled political battles between the disenfranchised and those deemed citizens by the state. Within the first few pages of her book, she scores a knockout blow against the trendy notion that the Confederacy died of an identity crisis. The relentless style of argumentation that follows buries the theory in the dustbin of interpretations about southern defeat. While most scholars have focused on the ironies of a Confederate nation that pursued centralized federal authority and debated limited emancipation, McCurry gets us into the pit of political contestation where politicians, generals, slaves, poor women, yeomen, Confederate soldiers, and Union armies repeatedly slammed into each other over the control of both natural and human resources. She does not frame these life-and-death political battles around questions of Confederate nationalism or why the South lost. Both issues, as McCurry correctly argues, were not connected to the ways that poor people and slaves perceived their daily struggles. Their points of orientation drew from their political exclusion by a nation that had insatiable wartime demands. Such needs pushed the state to violate the integrity of the household, undermining slaveholder power, upsetting gender and racial relations, and giving women and African Americans unparalleled authority that no Confederate could ignore. Richmond's inability to provide and protect white women has long been identified as a source of civilian malaise and dissatisfaction. McCurry recognizes this, but she wisely breaks with her scholarly predecessors by subordinating issues of morale to pursue a different line of inquiry: How did poor women use their self-understanding as "soldiers' wives" to barge onto the political stage? The jarring gap between what the Confederate nation purported as the ideal of the loyal soldier wife and how poor women perceived reality from the ground exposed an incongruity that they quickly exploited. Shortly after their husbands left for the army, women inundated Confederate officials with petitions and pleas for relief, an act that took them out of the confines of the household and into the public sphere, where they demanded to be treated as a distinct and legitimate political constituency. This development baffled Confederate officials, who could not imagine or want women [End Page 274] as part of the body politic before 1861. As the hardships intensified into the winter of 1863, a series of explosive riots detonated across the South, first in Atlanta, then spreading to Virginia and North Carolina. All of the protests were initiated by women, and all were over bread-and-butter issues. The cry for social justice in Richmond has been studied the most, but almost always in isolation, preventing historians from fully accessing the political impact of these street battles until now. McCurry shows how each riot was not a spontaneous eruption of raw emotions but a well-orchestrated uprising that sufficiently frightened Confederate officials into reforming welfare policy to benefit the poor. She also insists that the protests in Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina were related—since they all occurred within a two-month period—and that a degree of collaboration must have occurred among the self-identified soldier wives. Whether a grapevine of communication spurred this class of women to collective action is difficult to say, but McCurry's bold assertion goes off like a stick of dynamite, blasting a passageway through an old historiographical mountain that has long stood on the bedrock of Confederate morale and nationalism. If scholars follow McCurry through the tunnel, they find a labyrinth of unchartered networks that facilitated a range of political action among poor whites and slaves. The author's claim, however, that historians have not fully assessed the political ramifications of lower-class protest is a curious one, as William Blair, Paul Escott, and Victoria Bynum, among others, have shown how ruling classes...

Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South (review)

Reviewed by: Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South Jason Phillips Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South. Michael T. Bernath. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8078-3391-9, 432 pp., cloth, $39.95. For generations, historians have debated the strength of Confederate nationalism by first defining "nationalism" and then searching Confederate records for evidence of their defined term. In Confederate Minds, Michael Bernath takes an elegantly simple alternative: he accepts how his subjects, Confederate cultural nationalists, defined nationalism, studies their attempts to achieve it, and analyzes their assessment of its failure. The result is a bracing insider's perspective into the Confederate rush to print southern distinctiveness and supremacy into existence through poetry, fiction, periodicals, sermons, textbooks, and plays. This book has many strengths, but its most enduring contribution may be the enormous load of Confederate publications Bernath unearths and describes. No future historian can claim that wartime conditions muffled southerners' public cries for nationalism. The evidence Bernath has collected reveals a dogged determination among Confederate [End Page 277] cultural nationalists to prove southern distinctiveness by publishing partisan literature to the war's bitter end. According to Bernath, Confederate cultural nationalists were a diverse conglomerate of writers, editors, educators, ministers, philosophers, political theorists, and others who sought Confederate intellectual independence by writing and publishing native literature that confirmed southern distinctiveness and supremacy. Bernath chooses not to call his subjects intellectuals, because most of them were not great thinkers or artists but rather " facilitators of culture" who cultivated the ground from which great southern literature and art would sprout (4). He divides his analysis of their efforts into four chronological parts. The first section of the book studies how secession sparked a call to arms among Confederate cultural nationalists who were determined to free the South from its "intellectual vassalage" to the North (13). In a basic sense, secession forced southerners to provide their own literature, textbooks, and periodicals, because the antebellum South had depended so heavily on the North for its reading material. Beneath this practical concern, however, was a widespread belief among Confederate cultural nationalists that political independence could not be realized until the South established an intellectual and cultural autonomy that legitimized the new nation and gave its military triumph a deeper meaning. The second part of the book recounts the birth of Confederate periodicals and textbooks during the nation's first year. Despite wartime challenges and humble beginnings, Confederate editors and educators rallied to the cause with surprising speed and early success. Confederate cultural nationalists had reasons to hope that southern intellectual autonomy was imminent. The third quarter of the book focuses on the middle years of the war, when Confederate cultural nationalism reached its high-water mark. Southern publishers bombarded southern readers with original Confederate periodicals, histories, novels, poetry, textbooks, children's literature, and theatrical works. This dramatic rise in print culture convinced Confederate cultural nationalists that their anticipated southern renaissance had arrived. They were wrong. In the last section of the book, Bernath studies the failure of Confederate cultural nationalism during the war's final year and its aftermath. Despite mighty efforts to stay in print as Union forces occupied the South, Confederate cultural nationalists realized that their bid for intellectual independence had failed internally because the South did not produce great native literature. Even the most partisan southern editors had to admit that the Confederacy [End Page 278] lacked a literary masterpiece. While the quantity of Confederate publishing was impressive, the quality was not. This fascinating conclusion to the Confederate bid for cultural autonomy is one of the most significant discoveries in Bernath's excellent book. As he argues, "Northern armies may have stopped Confederate presses but they were not the reason why the struggle for intellectual independence failed. Despite their repeated and forceful assertions of southern cultural distinctiveness, Confederate nationalists could not demonstrate it, even to their own satisfaction" (290). Unlike other nationalist movements in nineteenth-century Germany, France, and Italy, the Confederate bid for cultural distinctiveness began with no physical means to print its own literature, let alone to distinguish itself by producing...