Confederate Soldiers Research Articles

Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons by Evan A. Kutzler

Reviewed by: Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons by Evan A. Kutzler Kelly D. Mezurek (bio) Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons. By Evan A. Kutzler. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 208. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $29.95.) In Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons, Evan A. Kutzler provides the model example of just how much we have yet to explore in the history of the American Civil War. By interrogating how prisoners used their senses as part of the struggle to adapt to and survive prison, this book contributes to the scholarship that explores how wartime experiences challenged and often reinforced how Civil War soldiers understood the cultural worlds in which they lived. While death was ever present, Kutzler seeks to understand “how so many lived” (5). He argues that the imprisoned men feared that the debilitating effects of captivity had the potential to diminish their civility and threatened their manhood. As a result, both Union and Confederate soldiers used their senses, which were assaulted more severely than while in regimental camps or battle, to justify their causes for war, to reinforce sectional differences, and to claim superiority over their enemies in order to withstand the psychological and physical hardships and deprivations of the prison experience. While the structure of the book may seem as if each chapter explores one of the five senses, Kutzler skillfully integrates combinations of the various senses, as is the human experience. But that does not fully recognize [End Page 295] the artful methodology Kutzler demonstrates throughout. For example, chapter 3 is probably the most engaging discussion of lice one will have the pleasure to read. The vermin serve as the host to Kutzler’s deep analysis of touch as perceived by nineteenth-century Americans. And instead of “inventorying the soundscape” in chapter 4, Kutzler skillfully interrogates listening and what sounds and silences meant to the captives (85). He further demonstrates how deeply entrenched is the practice of using senses to explain and understand one’s lived experiences when he includes poetry and song lyrics by and about prisons and prisoners. And the choice to include the voices of prisoners from different prisons, not just one location or type of confinement, helps to illustrate the mobility of captivity during the Civil War, something most prison studies fail to explore. Unlike the widespread references to manhood and masculinity, the question of how race impacted the use of senses as a means to explain and understand the prisoner experience is less explored. Kutzler’s own interpretation of the breakdown of the Dix-Hill Cartel, which led to the increased need for prisons, argues that race was the most important factor. He justly explains that few sources left by African American prisoners of war are readily available, so those men are not part of his research. But the accounts left by Confederates who were captured, transported, and guarded by Black soldiers do not lack sensory commentary. And Confederate prisoners did not all “avoid exhibiting even a whisper that might be interpreted as rebellious exultation” when the news of Abraham Lincoln’s death reached the prisons (103). White southerners used their taunts to applaud the president’s assassination as a form of retaliation against their African American guards. Overall, though, Kutzler succeeds at what he promises to do in this volume. He uses the prisoners’ own words, relying heavily on diaries, to show how they used their sensory perceptions to explain their thoughts, beliefs, and ideas about their experiences and worldviews. The breadth of his archival research is to be commended. And, for the most part, he refrains from engaging the postwar debates over blame and which government inflicted more harm. His desire to show a diversity of prisoner accounts that include a multitude of voices contributes to the ongoing scholarship that challenges the concept of a “common soldier.” When he shares his personal experiences in the conclusion, Kutzler offers strong support for his caution to readers that the acuity of our senses “depends on time and...

Contending with the Elements: The Role of Weather in the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House

Contending with the ElementsThe Role of Weather in the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House Cameron M. Boutin (bio) More than two decades after the conclusion of the American Civil War, Union assistant adjutant general Francis Walker recollected that the climax of the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House was the "closest and fiercest" fighting of the entire conflict, when "for the distance of nearly a mile, amid a cold, drenching rain, the combatants were literally struggling across the breastworks."1 Between May 8 and 19, 1864, the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia battled at the small Virginia crossroads of Spotsylvania Court House in a clash that proved to be one of the bloodiest of the war. As the costliest engagement of the Overland Campaign, the fighting at Spotsylvania has received widespread attention from scholars since the war ended.2 Despite the extensive studies of Spotsylvania, one aspect of the battle has often been overlooked: the role of weather. Similar to most conflicts, especially before the era of mechanized warfare, a main facet of the Civil War was that armies lived, marched, and fought in natural [End Page 200] landscapes while exposed to the vagaries of the weather.3 The interaction between soldiers and weather was unavoidable, intimate, and continuous. The Civil War, like history in general, encompassed the dynamic interplay between humans and nature, and the weather was an active force in the conflict, with a direct impact on human affairs.4 While not hard and fast determinants of events, the weather and other aspects of the natural world affect the course of history through their interaction with human beings. As historians Lisa Brady and Timothy Silver declare, "the natural world moves to its own peculiar rhythms and frequently shapes historical events in ways that humans cannot anticipate."5 Humans react to nature, nature reacts to human actions, and weather is no exception. Weather is experienced all the time by humans, especially soldiers in the midst of war, but in no way can it be controlled, and in the nineteenth century during the Civil War, it could not even be accurately predicted. The cursory discussion of the meteorological conditions at Spotsylvania Court House in most scholarship on the battle may make it seem that weather was simply a passive backdrop to the clash, but it was actually an interactive agent that influenced the course of events.6 During the nearly two-week span of the Battle of Spotsylvania, the weather was frequently extreme, particularly in the first nine days. Scorching, dry heat at the beginning of the battle changed to days of heavy fog and torrential rains that transformed the landscape around Spotsylvania into [End Page 201] "a sea of mud," in the words of one contemporary.7 Only in the final days of the fighting did milder weather occur and become a more minor factor influencing the course of the battle. At the same time that the Federal and Confederate soldiers were engaged in combat operations at Spotsylvania, they were forced to continually struggle against the often severe meteorological conditions. As the weather was omnipresent, the troops needed to contend with its vagaries more regularly than the actual enemy forces. The intense weather significantly affected the physical and mental health, and therefore capabilities, of the Union and Confederate troops. The soldiers themselves recognized its influence over their well-being.8 While the weather was not the overall determinant of the battle's outcome, its direct and at times dramatic impact on the soldiers meant that it was central to the combatants' experience within the engagement. As the progress of the Battle of Spotsylvania as a whole, like all the military events of the Civil War, was determined by the Union and Confederate troops' experiences, the course of the clash was frequently shaped by the extreme weather conditions. For the soldiers battling at Spotsylvania Court House, the weather was a changeable variable, but one that could prove decisive. While the weather sometimes was an ally, helping the armies implement their plans and fulfill their objectives, at other times it was an enemy, causing difficulties for the soldiers and hindering their operations. The role...

No Place for Glory: Major General Robert E. Rodes and the Confederate Defeat at Gettysburg

In “an engaging, readable narrative,” Wynstra shows that “leadership breakdowns” in Rodes’s command “ultimately undid the fighting determination and sacrifice of” Confederate soldiers, which led “to the South’s Gettysburg defeat as surely as did the actions of more popularly famous officers and units.” No Place for Glory “will find a well-deserved place in the Gettysburg shelf of every interested reader’s” collection, reviewer David A. Welker writes.

Mobile's Great Magazine Explosion of 1865

Mobile's Great Magazine Explosion of 1865 Russell W. Blount Jr. (bio) With the fall of the confederate strongholds at blakeley and Spanish Fort in 1865, Union General Edward Canby's Federal army crossed Mobile Bay to finally occupy the city of Mobile. On the afternoon of April 12, a Wednesday, the first of Canby's troops began tramping through the city's streets. For most of the curious onlookers, this was their first glimpse at Yankee soldiers. Although the city had been under threat of a full siege since David Farragut's naval victory at the Battle of Mobile Bay in August of 1864, the city had remained under Confederate control. Mobile had been fortunate in that it had been spared the devastation experienced by other southern cities such as Richmond, Vicksburg, Atlanta, and Columbia, where bombardments and fires had reduced the buildings to rubble and ashes. Yet Mobile's people had still endured four years of war and the deprivations it brought. Many families had lost one or more of their men, and the economy was ruined. Like the rest of the South, the once-thriving port city had become a land of widowed women, orphans, vacant houses, rotting wharves, deserted businesses, weed-filled gardens and lifeless faces. Whitelaw Reid, a reporter traveling [End Page 240] with the troops and covering the war for the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, put into words a vivid portrayal of the scene: The city is a sad picture to contemplate. The stores look a thousand years old. They wear something of the appearance of the old castles to be seen in some of the countries of Europe. They are empty and forsaken, except here and there an old man seated like some faithful sentinel at his post. Shelves are forsaken of their silks, and occupied only with the flies and dust. The people look sad and sorry. The best people of the city are poor, and poorly clad. There is no money save the scrip of the confederacy. The people are distressed. No money except coin and greenbacks will pass. They have little of the former – none of the latter. We have witnessed such sorrow over this order of things as we do not desire again to behold.1 Within a few weeks after Mobile's occupation, Generals Joseph Johnston, Richard Taylor, and Kirby Smith surrendered the last of the Confederate forces, and the city began to experience a sort of metamorphosis. Mobile was named an administrative center from which the Federal army managed the conquered region. Under this authority, thousands of soldiers began filing into the city. Great numbers of Union men were waiting to be processed out of the army, while Confederate soldiers were seeking paroles. All of them, Blue and Gray, were looking for transportation to return to their homes. A Union soldier from Ohio, watching the swarms of troops, reported, "the place was overrun by officers and soldiers of both Confederate and Union armies." Joining the soldiers were multitudes of freed slaves who had left their farms and plantations in the country and travelled to Mobile where they hoped to find assistance from the newly [End Page 241] established Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (more commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau) to help them find work, and aid them in the transition to freedom. In addition to the influx of so many people, the city was rapidly becoming a site for stockpiling cotton that had been confiscated throughout the South. Alongside the storage of cotton, many of the warehouses and sheds in the northern section of Mobile were used as facilities for collecting munitions seized from the surrendered Confederate forces. Union authorities believed that the dangerous stockpile of weapons and artillery could be safely stored in this district with little risk until such time that they could be discarded or destroyed.2 With the presence of what some southerners considered to be an invading army, many white Mobilians remained defiant, contemptuous, and distrustful of federal soldiers. This was especially true of the ladies who had lost loved ones during the war. "The ladies do not associate with them," observed James Williams, a Rebel officer, in...

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Kate Masur and Gregory P. Downs As we write this editors' note in summer 2021, we are hopeful that many in-person activities will soon resume, including the conferences, seminars, workshops, and writing groups that are so important to our collective work. Our issue features three research essays about men's lives that touch on politics, ideology, and power. Daniel Crofts takes a new look at a famous diarist in "Sidney George Fisher and the Coming of the Civil War: How Southern Overreach Alarmed a Conservative Philadelphian." An elite Philadelphian, Fisher had generally conservative political instincts. Yet he became increasingly troubled by southern politicians' demands for dominance in the 1850s, eventually siding with the Republicans and, when war came, even supporting emancipation. The story of Fisher's political evolution is a reminder of the diversity and contentiousness of the Republican coalition. In "William Henry Trescot, Pardon Broker," Cynthia Nicoletti follows Trescot, a South Carolina lawyer and politician (and historian), to Washington, DC, where he lobbied President Andrew Johnson to restore land to his state's planter elite. Trescot entered directly into political negotiations about the future of land confiscated from Confederates during the war, using his legal savvy and political connections to discredit demands for land redistribution by South Carolina freedpeople and O. O. Howard, the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau. Tarik Yiğit explores Civil War veterans in Egypt in "Reconstructing the American under the Most Unimaginable Conditions: Civil War Veterans in the 'Arabian Nights.'" Egypt's leader, Ismail Pasha, sought American advisors after the war, and many U.S. and Confederate veterans were happy to oblige. Impelled by the chance to earn an income and an associated sense of manhood, Civil War veterans in Egypt contributed their skills in surveying, military training, and armed conflict itself. Many had known each other before the war, and Egypt became a site where Americans who had fought on both sides grappled with one another and with the Civil War's legacies. In his review essay, "The Common Soldier of the Civil War: His Rise and Fall," Gerald Prokopowicz examines evolving scholarly interest in Civil War soldiers. Historical scholarship on the rank and file has been shaped by subsequent wars and by historians' changing approaches to the past. What was once represented as a generalizable "common soldier" experience—atleast [End Page 447] for Confederate soldiers on the one hand and US ones on the other—has been shattered, but questions of why people fought endure. With this issue, we say goodbye to our editorial assistant, Megan Hildebrand, a PhD candidate at Penn State, whose term is ending and whose excellent work we have appreciated tremendously. Edward Green is the new editorial assistant, and we welcome him to the team. We also express special gratitude to the authors, peer reviewers, and book reviewers who made time to contribute to the journal during the difficult months of the pandemic. We hope they and all our readers are faring well and that we'll see one another soon. [End Page 448] Copyright © 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

Opposing Lincoln: Clement L. Vallandigham, Presidential Power, and the Legal Battle over Dissent in Wartime by Thomas C. Mackey

Reviewed by: Opposing Lincoln: Clement L. Vallandigham, Presidential Power, and the Legal Battle over Dissent in Wartime by Thomas C. Mackey Jonathan W. White (bio) Opposing Lincoln: Clement L. Vallandigham, Presidential Power, and the Legal Battle over Dissent in Wartime. By Thomas C. Mackey. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020. Pp. 200. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $24.95.) In his masterful study of party politics in the Civil War era, The Union Divided, historian Mark E. Neely Jr. observes that the "loyal opposition in the North during the Civil War remains to this day in crying need of analysis."1 In the last two decades, a number of scholarly works on the Civil War–era Democrats have appeared, including Neely's own Lincoln and the Democrats: The Politics of Opposition in the Civil War (2017) and J. Matthew Gallman's The Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War (2021). Several excellent works on disloyalty, antiwar dissent, and civil liberties during the Civil War have also appeared, most notably William A. Blair's With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era (2014) and Stephen E. Towne's Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America's Heartland (2015). Now, with Thomas C. Mackey's Opposing Lincoln, we have an account of the military commission trial of Clement L. Vallandigham. Vallandigham is notorious today as the most prominent antiwar Democrat in the North during the Civil War. In May 1863, the former congressman was arrested by the Union military and charged with disloyal speech. Following a quick military trial, he was sentenced to imprisonment at hard labor for the duration of the war; however, Lincoln instead chose to banish the "wiley agitator" to the Confederacy. From there, Vallandigham escaped to Canada, where he ran for governor of Ohio in absentia. He lost in a landslide. Vallandigham's story is one that every student of the Civil War should know, and it is ably told by Mackey. In several places, Mackey exhibits great storytelling skill, such as the scene when Vallandigham is turned over to Confederate soldiers in Tennessee. Mackey also deftly explains the constitutional and legal issues facing the Lincoln administration during the war years, helping readers understand Lincoln's thinking on these controversial issues. Indeed, Mackey takes constitutionalism seriously, which is essential for understanding the causes and consequences of the Civil War. The heart of Opposing Lincoln is Vallandigham's military trial, as well as discussion of Lincoln's public letters defending his civil liberties policies. Still, Mackey's slender volume touches on several important historiographical debates, including the adequacy of the Constitution to meet the [End Page 579] crisis of the Civil War, whether the Copperheads posed a real threat to the Union, and the extent to which Lincoln's policies violated the Constitution. In the opening two chapters, Mackey places Vallandigham within his historical context, tracing the politics of the 1850s into the war years. Drawing from the flourishing recent literature on the Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century, Mackey rightly describes Vallandigham as a westerner, rather than simply as a northerner. In explaining Lincoln's view of free speech in wartime, Mackey appropriately describes Lincoln "as a man and lawyer of his times and historical context." After quoting one of Lincoln's arguments, Mackey states, "After reading this statement some moderns will raise the issue of the potential 'chilling effect' on speech and press this policy suggests; but those sensitivities lay in a future that Lincoln could not know" (131). This is sound historical analysis. We ought to strive to understand historical figures within the context of their times. And yet there were strong arguments being made during the war years for more robust protection of free speech, free press, and the right to trial by jury. Mackey analyzes a series of public letters that passed between Lincoln and two groups of Democrats (one in Ohio, and one in New York). He presents Lincoln's arguments in great detail, but the Democrats appear only as foils for Lincoln, rather than as constitutional thinkers in their own right. This is a missed opportunity, for the Democrats' arguments anticipated...

Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers

Reviewed by: Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers Alice L. Baumgartner (bio) Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s. Edited by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Pp. 288. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $35.00.) The 1860s was a decade of constitutional crisis in North America. In 1861, eleven southern states seceded from the Union in defense of slavery. [End Page 429] As Union and Confederate soldiers fought the opening battles of the war, the French army invaded Mexico and installed an Austrian archduke as its emperor. In 1867, the same year that republican forces in Mexico executed the French-imposed emperor, Canadian provinces and territories entered into confederation, resulting in greater independence from Britain. By examining these constitutional crises in relation to one another, Remaking North American Sovereignty not only deepens our understanding of sovereignty and state formation in the 1860s, but also models several different methodological approaches to researching and writing transnational history. Remaking North American Sovereignty is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Making Nations,” examines how sovereignty was reshaped and redefined in the 1860s. Steven Hahn looks at the familiar history of the Civil War from the “inside out” and “the southside north” in order to interrogate our assumptions about the development of capitalism, the abolition of slavery, and the geography of the sectional crisis. Andrew Smith points out the hemispheric factors that helped to convince most Canadians to remain part of the British Empire: British military might promised to guard against threatened invasions from the United States at the same time that the U.S. Civil War and political instability in Latin America demonstrated the dangers of republicanism. Pablo Mijango y González takes up the question of why Mexico and the United States each experienced a “constitutional revolution,” while Canada underwent a more peaceful process of “constitutional gradualism.” Robert Bonner explores the visual vocabulary of sovereignty across North America in order to show how sovereignty was not only conceived but visualized in new ways in the 1860s. Part 2, “Indigenous Polities,” assesses how Native peoples shaped and responded to the constitutional crises in North America. Jane Dinwoodie asks how Native groups who had resisted removal responded to the Civil War, showing that some tribes, such as the Eastern Cherokee, fought for the Confederacy in order to secure their claim to their lands, while others, such as the Bayou Lacombe Choctaws, tried to protect their communities by retreating to remote, inaccessible terrain. Ryan Hall analyzes Blackfoot treaty-making to show both similarities and connections between state expansion in the United States and Canada. Marcela Terrazas y Basante studies how Indian raids shaped the construction of sovereignty at the national, state, and local levels in Mexico. Part 3, “The Complications of the Market,” looks at conceptions of sovereignty at a more granular level. Christopher Clark shows how the [End Page 430] expansion of freeholding, promoted by the distribution of homesteads and the allotment of tribal lands, extended and transformed national power in the United States. Benjamin H. Johnson compares Louis Riel and Juan Cortina to reexamine the consequences of greater national power in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Mary P. Ryan takes up debates over landownership in the San Francisco Bay area to understand how different scales of authority—municipal, state, and federal—contest and, in the process, construct conceptions of sovereignty. These essays speak to one another in ways that enrich our understanding of state formation and transformation in the 1860s. One of the greatest ironies of Greater Reconstruction was, as Frank Towers writes in the introduction, “the simultaneous drive by President Abraham Lincoln to free slaves in the South and conquer indigenous states in the West” (8). The issue of sovereignty helps to resolve the apparent contradiction. As Steven Hahn explains, the constitutional crises of the nineteenth-century United States revolved around “the various challenges and obstacles to a national sovereignty, about competing sovereignties and their eventual defeats, whether they were slaveholding, Native American, Mormon, or some other” (25). Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in order to defeat the Confederate States of America. After...

Women Making War: Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice

Thomas F. Curran shows that not only did southern white women participate in politics while aiding and abetting Confederate soldiers, bushwhackers, and guerrillas, "possibly as many as 200" of such women "were arrested and imprisoned for their efforts" to help the Confederacy.

Juxtapositioned Memory: Lost Cause Statues and Sites of Lynching

The paper explores both ‘official’ historical attempts to counter Lost Cause narratives of the former Confederacy, but also the moves towards re-memorialization in the form of statue removal as well as sites that bring forth what has been lost or excluded in Lost Cause accounts. It thus analyses the post-Reconstruction memorialization of Confederate soldiers via monuments throughout the former Confederacy, on the one hand, and the more recent moves (as seen in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery) to document and commemorate the waves of lynchings which occurred during the same period of time (~1880s–1920s) in many of the same areas of the US South.

OKRUCIEŃSTWA WOJNY CZY PRZEJAW RASIZMU? PRZYPADKI ZNĘCANIA SIĘ NAD JEŃCAMI Z U.S. COLORED TROOPS (USCT) NA ZACHODNIM TEATRZE DZIAŁAŃ WOJENNYCH WOJNY SECESYJNEJ – WYBRANE PRZYKŁADY

It is not without reason that the Civil War is considered to be a turning point in US history. One was the mass participation of African Americans, who, for the first time since the War of Independence, were allowed to serve in the army (total ca.180,000). Even though many U.S. Colored Troops were not frontal units, never-theless some of them did actively participate in military operations. As a consequence an issue of black prisoners of war occurred. Obviously, in this case, they had to be captured by Southern troops first. Unfortu-nately, much oftener, there were instances of mistreatment or even brutal slaughter of POWs from U.S. Colored Troops (i.e. Fort Pillow – April 12, 1864, Poision Springs – April 18, 1864, etc.). Did such behavior of Confederate soldiers fit in in wide definition of war atrocities, understood as a will to take revenge at enemy’s troops, which plunder mother country, to avenge your family and friends, killed by the enemy, etc. Or it is a much deeper problem, having its conditioning in the culture of the South, whose ideological foundation was existence of so called Herrenvolk democracy, deeply rooted belief about superiority of white race over black (known also in the North), which was reflected not only in speeches of Southern, and later Confederate, politicians but also in the Constitution of the Confederate States of America.

Creating ‘Confederate pioneers’: a spatial narrative analysis of race, settler colonialism, and heritage tourism at the Museu da Imigração, Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, São Paulo

ABSTRACT Local history museums are important to heritage tourism, often presenting interconnected local, regional, national, and transnational histories. This article explores the settler colonial narrative presented at the Museu da Imigração (Museum of the Immigration), in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, São Paulo, Brazil. Though much scholarship explores the relationship between the Confederacy and slavery in public memory and heritage tourism studies, the scale of discussion is typically limited to the US South. Less well known is the fact that several thousand Confederate soldiers and their families, rather than face Reconstruction, preferred to restart their lives in Brazil. Applying innovations in discourse analysis and studies of commemorative atmosphere, I analyze a local museum’s spatial narrative. I show how it weaves together a settler interpretation of the past through texts, photographs, and historical objects and artifacts – bringing together discourses like the Lost Cause and Brazil’s ‘racial democracy.’ Ultimately the museum constructs a settler colonial narrative that frames the Confederate migrants as brave ‘pioneers’ striking out to re-create their lives after the US Civil War. I conclude by placing the significance of the museum’s narrative into broader context, highlighting how some scholars have perpetuated this narrative in academic and public discourse.

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

White men of the Civil War–era South often appear in popular memory as stock figures with limited emotional ranges: hotheaded bullies, stoic warriors, or pious defenders of hearth and home. With Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers, James J. Broomall cuts through these condescending caricatures in a methodologically sophisticated study of Confederate soldiers, which offers nuanced analysis and embraces the ambiguity and diversity of emotional experience. Grounded in close readings of selected letters and diaries, mostly written by slaveholders, Private Confederacies shows that the Civil War marked a personal as well as political crisis for white southern men. Before the war, they were expected to restrain their emotions and project an image of mastery over themselves as well as their households. Yet for all their power and privilege, these public personas masked doubts, anxieties, and fears, which men confided to the diaries they used for self-shaping as well as self-expression. Then came the war. A militaristic regional culture spurred white southern men to enlist, but few were thoroughly prepared to subordinate themselves to rigorous discipline or endure the fatigues of campaigning; still fewer were ready for the grisly horrors of battle. While attending to his subjects’ wide range of responses to the wrenching challenges of soldiering, Broomall illuminates revealing patterns. Most importantly, soldiers who struggled to express themselves to civilians turned to each other for support, building powerful bonds and sharing feelings that they would have suppressed in civilian life. Indeed, notes Broomall, men’s wartime experiences led them to “express levels of emotionality and vulnerability that society once saw as the purview of women,” even as they fostered a “virulent, martial masculinity” and encouraged violence (5).

Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin

Reviewed by: Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin Scott Hancock (bio) Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth. By Kevin M. Levin. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 240. Cloth, $30.00.) We now have a manual for how to respond to anyone insisting that enslaved black men served as soldiers in the Confederate army. In Searching for Black Confederates, Kevin Levin systematically dismantles the myth of slaves fighting in gray. He explicates the myth’s origins, its reliance on faulty evidence, and the motives behind it. The book is not only an incredibly useful manual but also an excellent model for undergraduates in a historical methods course on how to situate careful research within broader contexts such as the politics of race. It is a valuable study of how race and memory have worked in tandem, constantly adapting to changing social circumstances to perpetuate “the myths and self-serving narratives of loyal slaves and brave black Confederate soldiers that have long played a role in maintaining the color line in American life” (11) from the end of the Civil War to the present. Levin draws a bold line from the past to the present, particularly in the introduction and in the conclusion, pointing to the ways this history shapes present realities politically and at times violently. The first chapter verifies that nearly all alleged black Confederates were in reality “camp slaves” whom Confederate soldiers brought into military [End Page 593] campaigns. Levin does not give attention to female camp slaves; an understandable absence since the myth focuses exclusively on black men. Camp slaves lived long days with a heavy workload, though much of their behavior challenged paternalism. Some worked reluctantly, at risk of severe punishment, and some attempted escape. Nonetheless, Levin argues that genuine bonds formed because of the shared experience of hardship and danger, as many camp slaves were perilously close to combat lines. Confederates’ assumptions that slaves shared their commitment to the South’s cause, however, were not supported by slaves’ actions. When slaves stayed with masters, often it was not because of a commitment to a cause, but rather out of a desire to return to their own families, among other reasons. Similarly, images of slaves in Confederate uniforms are evidence only of slaves being dressed up by owners for staged photos or of slaves having acquired an abandoned uniform because it conferred some status among other slaves. The second chapter describes camp slaves’ battlefield experience. Levin notes that although many slaves stayed with masters during the Gettysburg campaign, many others escaped as a result of their proximity to the North. Gettysburg, then, a debatable military turning point, in reality signaled “a crisis of confidence in soldiers’ belief in their slaves’ unwavering fidelity” (52). Additionally, Confederate soldiers routinely ridiculed slaves near the battlefield, and “at no point did soldiers in the field report that blacks were . . . serving as soldiers” (60). Levin hammers this vital point home repeatedly: Confederates across ranks typically thought the idea of slaves as soldiers was ludicrous and viewed such a concept as an affront to white manhood. Colonel Howell Cobb’s testimony along these lines is just one of numerous excellent examples Levin provides. Cobb, adamantly against the notion of slaves as soldiers throughout the war, was mentioned as being at Antietam by Dr. Lewis Steiner. Steiner’s account, used ubiquitously to promulgate the myth, describes sixty-five thousand black men among the ranks. And yet “at no time did Cobb ever admit that the men observed by Steiner or any other group of free and enslaved black men attached to the army were serving as soldiers during the war” (61). The men were slaves and workers, not soldiers. The first two chapters firmly establish an absence of any reliable wartime testimony of slaves serving as soldiers and provide ample testimony that slaves were never enlisted. The third chapter explores postwar memory. Into the 1940s, camp slaves were remembered only as slaves, never as armed combatants. Remembering them as soldiers would have undermined the Lost Cause’s emphasis on southern white men nobly standing [End Page...

Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin

Reviewed by: Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin James G. Mendez Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth. Kevin M. Levin. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-4696-5326-6. 240 pp., cloth, $30.00. Whether African Americans fought as soldiers in the Confederate army is a popular topic today, one being discussed among history buffs, Civil War round-table participants, and academics alike. Kevin M. Levin's book, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth, provides a definitive and convincing argument on the existence of black Confederates. He provides a [End Page 421] very well-researched case that African Americans did not serve as soldiers in the Confederate army. Yes, they were camp slaves, and, yes, they were laborers, but they were not soldiers. Levin meticulously and methodically lays out his argument and explains why black men were not Confederate soldiers and how they actually functioned in the Confederate army. He then explains how the myth of black Confederate soldiers began, its relationship to the Lost Cause narrative, and how the storyline of African Americans fighting as soldiers in the Confederate army has continued more than 150 years after the war's end. Context is very important to Levin's book. He argues that to understand how the legend of the black Confederate was created and perpetuated, one must understand the context of the explanations and what else was happening at the same time in American society. First, the maintenance of white supremacy, preeminent in Southern culture, is the underlying theme before, during, and long after the war, but especially in the Jim Crow era. Immediately after the war ended, Confederates articulated the Lost Cause narrative to help them grasp the reality of losing the war and having their slavery-based society vanish forever. A central part of the narrative is that the war was over not slavery but instead states' rights and Confederate efforts to stop an invasion of their land. To help perpetuate this storyline, it had to be argued that black people actually supported the war, fought alongside their masters, and then remained loyal to them long after the war ended. Henceforth, they were soldiers in the war. Looking at the period right after the war, Levin pays particular attention to the story of Andrew and Silas Chandler, central figures representing the relationship between master and slave and whose famous photograph (on the cover of the book) has been used through the decades to verify the existence of black Confederate soldiers. Supporters explain that the two went to war as master and slave and that throughout the war slaves like Silas remained loyal to the cause and their benevolent masters. Silas remained a faithful slave and former soldier, and proof of that relationship helps counter the emancipation narrative—thereby making it appear Confederates treated their slaves admirably. According to Levin, what the supporters forget or ignore is that camp slaves like Silas might have remained loyal because they had relatives at home who would have been treated cruelly if they did not help their masters and return home. Even more important, explains Levin, were the thousands of runaways who at their first chance ran toward Union lines, never to be seen again. Levin argues one need only study the debate among Confederate leaders—from the war's start to its end—about whether slaves should be allowed to become soldiers. The records show that these leaders believed making black men soldiers undercut the main reason for the war. The war was being fought to protect slavery and white men's supremacy over black men. However, today's advocates of the black Confederate [End Page 422] soldier theory ignore this well documented discussion among the Confederate leadership, including President Jefferson Davis. They also neglect the fact that in all the primary-source records about this argument, "not a single office or soldiers suggested that slaves were already serving as soldiers in the Confederate army" (39). Levin also argues how former Confederates' need to reestablish white supremacy after the Reconstruction era meant a need to explain...

Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin

Reviewed by: Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin Tracy L. Barnett (bio) Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth. By Kevin M. Levin. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 240. $30.00 cloth; $22.99 ebook) The image is an all too familiar one: a white and Black man sitting side-by-side, both armed to the teeth, both attired in rebel grey. To neo-Confederates, this is undeniable proof of the Black Confederate soldier. To most scholars, however, this an image of enslavement, indicative of a carefully-cultivated myth rather than any real form of racial equality. In Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, Kevin M. Levin traces the development of this myth over the course of a one hundred fifty-year period. The myth, he concludes, took hold among Confederate heritage organizations in the 1970s as a direct response to the Civil Rights movements and [End Page 539] scholars increasing efforts to place slavery—not states’ rights—as the central tenet of secession, Confederacy identity, and the Civil War. Organized both chronologically and thematically, Levin begins in 1861. Planters’ sons, marching off to war, occasionally took slaves with them. These “camp slaves” served their white owners and reinforced the South’s racial hierarchy by performing menial tasks—cooking, hauling, mending—associated with slavery. While living in military encampments, these Black men were not soldiers; only white men were Confederate soldiers. To be sure, the Confederacy relied heavily on enslaved labor (allowing more white men to bear arms) and, in the final months of the war, briefly considered more. But, as Levin rightly notes, “at no point during the debate over enlistment was it ever revealed that Black men were already serving in the Confederate army as soldiers” (p. 5). Post-war veterans reunions and publications, steeped in Lost Cause notions, only served to reinforce the image of the benevolent master and the devoted slave. Some former camp slaves qualified for postwar aid, but these pensions never classified these men as soldiers; they were “Indigent Servants of Soldiers or Sailors of the Late Confederacy” (p. 6). Only in the late twentieth century did the Sons of Confederate Veterans transform “camp slaves” into roughly 200,000, or so, “Black Confederate soldiers.” Responding to increased emphasis placed on slavery by scholars and the general public, Confederate heritage organizations crafted the story of the Black Confederate soldier in the 1970s to promote their interpretation of the war and their political agenda. The myth gained little traction at first, Levin argues, but it, nonetheless, set the narrative. In the 1990s, it began to spread over the web and, then, later, on blogs and social media. Indeed, the internet has transformed the discipline. For professionals, it offers new possibilities in the form of innovative digital humanities projects and online archives. For the layman, it provides an unregulated forum to spread alarmist information and misinformation. With a touch of Photoshop, inauguration crowds suddenly double in size and Black Confederate soldiers appear one hundred fifty years after the fact. [End Page 540] During the sesquicentennial, the myth gained traction among the Confederate heritage community and found a small but vocal number of African American supporters. Most mainstream Americans, however, have rejected it. Bold and provocative, Levin pushes for “an honest national conversation about the history and legacy of slavery,” which “can happen only if we put aside the myth of and self-serving narratives of loyal slaves and brave Black Confederate soldiers that have long played a role in maintaining the color line in American life” (p. 11). And, in our present era of deadly white supremacist rallies and debates over Confederate monuments, it is time for this conversation. A must read for academics, undergraduates, and general readers alike, Searching for Black Confederates forces us to confront the construction of racialized mythology and, in doing so, calls upon us, as a nation, to reckon with the meaning of white supremacy. [End Page 541] Tracy L. Barnett TRACY L. BARNETT is a PhD student at the University of Georgia. Copyright © 2020 Kentucky Historical Society

Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas by Stephen Harrigan

Reviewed by: Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas by Stephen Harrigan Randolph “Mike” Campbell Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas. By Stephen Harrigan. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. Pp. 925. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In 2015, the University of Texas Press announced an ambitious publishing project entitled the Texas Bookshelf, which would begin with a new overview of the Lone Star State’s history and continue with thirteen other volumes covering key subjects such as politics, business, music, and sports. Big Wonderful Thing, a title taken from artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s first reaction to seeing Texas, launches the series in the highly readable fashion that those familiar with Stephen Harrigan’s work as a journalist, essayist, and novelist would expect. The book is huge, but it deals with a huge subject—the story of Texas from its prehistory until the first decades of the twenty-first century. Harrigan intends to be inclusive of the great variety of people who built Texas and to tell their stories in ways that would interest and entertain readers today. Accordingly, he begins most of the book’s fifty-six chapters with a vignette describing an individual or a small group who played [End Page 82] notable roles in an important episode or development in Texas’s past. For example, from the Spanish colonial era, famous figures such as Cabeza de Vaca and LaSalle are featured, but so are persons such as María de Jesús de Agreda, “The Lady in Blue,” who likely are not so familiar to most readers. Perhaps the best chapter title of all is reserved for the one dealing with James E. Ferguson, the only Texas governor forced from office by impeachment. It is simply titled “Pa.” Harrigan tells stories of many famous adventures of Texas’s past, such as the revolt against Mexico, the nearly ten years as an independent republic, the cattle drives and great ranches of the late nineteenth century, and the oil booms of the early twentieth century. However, he does not shy away from the ugly aspects of Texas’s past. For example, the chapter on Reconstruction begins with the story of the murder of Lucy Grimes, a freedwoman, by two former Confederate soldiers in Harrison County, a murder that went unpunished in spite of the efforts of the local Freedman’s Bureau agent to bring the killers to trial. He also recounts the brutal treatment handed out by Texas Rangers on the border to sediciosos, people of Mexican descent who were accused of conspiracy and violence against the United States during the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. Virtually all of the biographical vignettes are informative and good reading. For example, sketches of Heman Sweatt and Emma Tenayuca offer fine introductions to minority leaders often unknown in Anglo Texas. Some, such as the one on Lyndon B. Johnson, use the extensive research of others to paint indelible pictures of their subjects. And finally, the notorious, such as Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the much-romanticized killers during the early 1930s, and Charles Whitman, the infamous shooter from the UT Campus Tower in 1966, have their places. Taken together, the biographical sketches create a great impression of Texas as a spectacular place populated over the years by people who in general never knew how to be dull. What Harrigan does not do (and, in fairness, never intended to do) is offer any general interpretation that provides Texans with what historians like to call a “usable past.” Such a history seeks to inform a people about where they have been with the intent of helping them understand where they are now as a guide to what they might try to do next. Big Wonderful Thing is a popular history that does exactly what the author intended: provide highly readable and entertaining coverage of the sweep of Texas history. By contrast, an academic history of the Lone Star State would offer an interpretive account that might ask, for example, if Texas’s heritage is essentially southern, western, or something of an amalgam of the two with a strong Hispanic influence, best called southwestern. Answers to this question differ, and all are hedged...

Mississippi "Milish": Militiamen in the Civil War

Mississippi "Milish"Militiamen in the Civil War Tracy L. Barnett (bio) War fever swept through the piney woods of South Mississippi during the spring of 1861, and enthusiastic young men from rural hamlets, small towns, and cities across the South enlisted as Confederate soldiers.1 In Liberty, Mississippi, the Amite County Rifles, eventually becoming Company C, Seventh Regiment Mississippi Infantry, organized in April 1861.2 Two local siblings, Benjamin Franklin Wilkinson and Jefferson Washington Wilkinson, joined the regiment and marched off to war, leaving behind farms, wives, and young children. Then, in March 1862, their oldest brother, John Cain Wilkinson, enlisted in Company K, Thirty-Third Regiment Mississippi Infantry. He, too, left behind family—a wife and six young children—in addition to a plantation and slaves. Micajah Wilkinson, the middle brother, was the only male member of the family to remain in the Magnolia State.3 Micajah Wilkinson did not enlist in the Confederate army—a decision he never fully explained and we may never fully understand. Given his wartime letters, he [End Page 343] appears a deeply committed husband and father, so his motivations may have been based on familial concerns. They could also have been financial or, as he was a planter, occupational. Regardless, Wilkinson sought to remain in Liberty for the duration of the war.4 Though he refused to enlist, he held an ideological commitment to the Confederacy and as a plantation owner with seventeen slaves he certainly had a vested financial stake in its success. Self-identifying with the Confederate cause, both he and his wife praised Confederate victories, lamented battlefield defeats, and on a few occasions disparaged "the yanks" in their wartime correspondences.5 Moreover, Wilkinson never took up arms against his native state nor participated in any known unionist activities. For all appearances then, he fully supported the Confederacy. Nonetheless, Wilkinson's support had its limitations, and he resented the war's interference with his daily life.6 Frequently separated from his brothers, wife, and children, Wilkinson longed for peace and fervently hoped "that the day will come when we will all meet at home to stay & enjoy the society off our familys."7 Desiring nothing more than to remain a farmer in Amite County, Wilkinson nonetheless expected the war to reach his plantation's doorsteps. Conscription, implemented by the Confederate Congress in the spring of 1862, threatened to pull both youthful and middle-aged men into the folds of the Confederate army.8 Thirty-nine-year-old Wilkinson, who balked at the notion of leaving Mississippi and abandoning his family, sought legal means to circumvent the draft. But at the same time, he never questioned his devotion to the South nor did he appear to expect censure from his family or neighbors for his decision to eschew military service.9 At first he even opposed militia service but quickly reconsidered. While temporarily removing him [End Page 344] from his home and family, militia service, he thought, would protect him from the Confederate conscript officer and keep him within the confines of the state. "If I was to get off I would bee conscripted & I had rather stay with the militia," he told his wife."10 Mary concurred with her husband's judgment: "Some times I think you had as well stay there [in the militia] as to come home and be drug about from piller to post and then send off in the confederacy. I would be very glad to see you but I believe I would wait a while."11 Choosing service in the Mississippi militia instead of the Confederate army, Wilkinson officially joined Company C, Quinn's Second Regiment Minute Men on July 12, 1862.12 Numerous Southerners, including Micajah Wilkinson, served in state organized militias during the American Civil War.13 Instead of the extremely patriotic, youthful Union and Confederate volunteers, who rushed off to war in 1861 to prove their place as men and citizens, militiamen tended to be married men in their late thirties and early forties who had well-established careers. As vital components of the Southern home front, these men expressed idealistic support for the Confederacy, but intentionally eschewed prolonged period of absence from...

The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies by Peter S. Carmichael

Reviewed by: The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies by Peter S. Carmichael Jonathan M. Steplyk (bio) The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies. By Peter S. Carmichael. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 408. $34.95 cloth; $27.99 ebook) The study of the common soldier represents one of the most storied and engaging fields within Civil War historiography. Soldier [End Page 360] studies range from broad surveys of soldier life, such as Bell I. Wiley's studies of "Johnny Reb" and "Billy Yank" and Reid Mitchell's Civil War Soldiers (1988), to explorations of specific topics, such as James McPherson's study of soldier motivation in For Cause and Comrades (1997) and Chandra Manning's examination of soldiers' attitudes toward slavery in What This Cruel War Was Over (2007). In The War for the Common Soldier, Peter Carmichael offers a new soldier study that is both broad in scope and intense in focus, arguing that Civil War soldiers, caught between romanticized notions of conduct and conflict and war's harsh realities, espoused a "hard-edged pragmatism" that privileged victory and survival (p. 7). Carmichael casts his work as a study not of what Civil War soldiers thought but how they thought. He presents Yankees and Rebels as citizen-soldiers whose sentimentalized notions of warfare and manly conduct were challenged by the rigors of homesickness, privation, terror, loss, and doubt. He concludes that "pragmatism gave them the flexibility to act in ways that actually helped them preserve their faith in ideas" (p. 8). Carmichael's work might be understood as a middle ground between Gerald Linderman, who suggested Civil War soldiers' prewar values did not survive the brutality of combat, and James McPherson, who argued that ideology and comradeship sustained most men throughout the war. Carmichael's conclusions align more closely to McPherson's—he finds soldiers' religious beliefs, national identity, and sense of duty generally survived contact with the enemy, yet these elements did not necessarily provide conclusive answers to the trials they faced. A soldier's Christian faith might endure, yet he still might struggle with why God should delay or withhold victory on the battlefield. A veteran might espouse his cause to the bitter end but still rationalize attaining a safer post or even desertion. Carmichael contests the notion that deserters and skulkers were simply lacking in ideology or commitment. "Emotional management" is a key concept in the book and for Carmichael's soldiers, the life of the mind is as much a battlefield as the war's actual killing fields. [End Page 361] Carmichael structures his work around seven thematic chapters, addressing topics that include adjusting to military life, religion and values, letters home, competing ideas of courage and cowardice, desertion and military justice, attitudes toward the enemy and the war's outcome, and the collection and preservation of wartime relics. Each chapter centers on case studies of writings by several Union and Confederate soldiers through which Carmichael explicates how they responded and adapted to the war's challenges. As with a needle and thread, Carmichael weaves his analysis between in-depth examination of his core individuals and supporting evidence from other soldiers while drawing out his broader conclusions. This hybrid of macro- and micro-investigation might at times prove challenging to the reader, but more often than not Carmichael makes it work. Among his many intriguing observations is the suggestion that Union soldiers were far more likely to enjoy irony and self-mockery amid the war's hardships than their Rebel foes. Yankees could laugh at themselves even as their patriotism and sense of purpose endured, while a steely absolutism marked most Confederates' self-image. Did this reflect the rigid code of southern honor? Did it stem from Confederates' sense that the war had much more immediate physical and emotional stakes for them than their foes? Carmichael encourages us to ponder such questions with him. In The War for the Common Soldier, fighting men's worldviews bend but do not necessarily break as they are tried by fire. Carmichael plumbs the psyches...

The United States’ Civic Myth of the Citizen-Soldier in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction

Civic myths are stories a country tells itself that help determine a sense of national belonging. An important one in the United States evokes the legend of Cincinnatus, who allegedly abandoned his pastoral retreat to save Rome from military defeat only to return to his farm rather than assume political power. In the wake of the Civil War, when the Union was saved and slavery abolished by an army made up primarily of citizens rather than professional military men, the myth of the citizen-soldier took on increased importance, with conflicting effects. On the one hand, it helped immigrants and African Americans who served as soldiers make a case for citizenship. It was also used to criticize the inequities of postbellum society that adversely affected some veterans. On the other hand, the myth’s implied distrust of standing professional armies played a part in undermining the occupation of the South during Reconstruction, which was needed to protect freedmen after the war. White supremacists went so far as to exploit it in justifying the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. In addition, it shaped opinion on how former Confederate soldiers should be reintegrated into the national community, as they were memorialized more than former African American soldiers.

CONFEDERATE MONUMENT INSCRIPTIONS

AbstractConfederate monuments are a contested piece of the public landscape. Debates generally focus on the division between “heritage” and “hate,” but some scholars have argued that the meaning of monuments is more complex. There is little research examining variation among Confederate monuments, but this may be critical to understanding their social foundations and consequences. We provide insight into Confederate monuments and their complexity by examining their inscriptions and how the use of different inscriptions changed over time and varies between the Upper South and Deep South. We employ content analysis to organize the inscriptions associated with 856 Confederate monuments located in public spaces throughout the U.S. South into common themes. Our results suggest three distinct types of inscriptions: those connected to the lost cause ideology that glorifies the Confederacy and its cause; those that were comparatively plain in their description of people, places, and events; and others that focused exclusively on mourning the death of Confederate soldiers. The majority of monuments (59%) contain a Lost Cause inscription. Plain monuments comprise 35%, and only 6% of public Confederate monuments were dedicated purely to the dead. Our descriptive analysis also indicates substantial temporal and spatial variation in the use of these different types of inscriptions. Despite sharing a connection to the Confederacy, we assert that the specific messages associated with a monument are more varied and, in part, reflect the social conditions of the time and place in which they were built.