Confederate Veterans Research Articles

Brother Dixon: College Fraternities and the Ku Klux Klan

Abstract: This essay argues that novelist Thomas Dixon Jr’s portrait of the Reconstruction Klan was heavily influenced by college fraternities, particularly the Kappa Alpha Order. Founded by Confederate veterans in 1865, Kappa Alpha fused ritualistic fraternalism with the myth of the Lost Cause. Dixon’s continued involvement with the Kappa Alpha Order, long after his college days, provided philosophical and aesthetic inspiration for his portrait of vigilante terrorists as white-robed Christian Knights. In his trilogy of Reconstruction novels— The Leopard’s Spots (1902) , The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907)—Dixon seamlessly assimilated the iconography and culture of white college fraternities, thereby underscoring the power of these organizations as repositories for white supremacy and Confederate memory in the wake of the Civil War .

Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll

Reviewed by: Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll Diane Miller Sommerville (bio) Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers. Dillon J. Carroll. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-0807169667. 368 pp., cloth, $45.00. [End Page 88] Eric T. Dean Jr. broke new ground in 1997 when he suggested in Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War that Civil War soldiers exhibited symptoms he suspected were related to war trauma, specifically post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; see Eric T. Dean, Jr., Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997]). Historians, however, resisted taking on the psychological impact of the Civil War on its participants for about two decades. In recent years, though, studies on the war’s impact on individual soldiers and their families have proliferated. The convergence of social history, history of medicine, gender and family history, and military history has yielded valuable works on Civil War soldiers and their families that expose the horrific and damaging consequences of war on the psyches of combatants. Dillon J. Carroll’s Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers is an important addition to this literature. Carroll’s ambitious agenda is to examine “how the Civil War damaged the minds of its participants” (10). In eleven chapters, he touches on the experience of soldiering, institutional care of soldiers and veterans, the impact of war on Black soldiers as well as US and Confederate veterans and their families, and the rise of the field of neurology. Throughout the book, Carroll identifies myriad ways the Civil War affected the mental health of its participants. He makes good use of both published and archival sources: letters, diaries, memoirs, asylum records, and pension applications. And he is exceedingly cautious, as he should be, about overstating links between war-generated trauma, like PTSD, and aberrant behaviors of Civil War soldiers and veterans. Carroll’s thesis, that participants in the Civil War suffered psychological damage, mirrors those of Dean and authors of recent studies including this reviewer, Jeffrey McClurken, and David Silkenat (Diane Miller Sommerville, Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018]; Jeffrey W. McClurken, Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009] and David Silkenat, Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011]). Carroll’s original intervention is to consider not merely those who suffered from psychological distress but those who did not. He raises a new question: what of those who emerged from war with their minds intact? Carroll identifies coping mechanisms, like religion, humor, and camaraderie that, he believes, allowed some soldiers to resist succumbing to psychic disorders. Whether he can then claim that Civil War soldiers “were not as psychologically traumatized as some historians believe,” however, remains an open question, perhaps even unanswerable (5). Scholars will no doubt grouse about the skimpy coverage of relevant historiography and Carroll’s reluctance to explicitly situate his own work in a number [End Page 89] of these debates. He makes clear his work rejects the “triumphalist narrative” and aligns with the so-called dark turn in Civil War literature. But he misses important opportunities to inform his readers about myriad conversations historians have engaged in about many of the subjects he raises. For instance, he might have more effectively used the debate about death and the Civil War spawned by Mark Schantz and Drew Gilpin Faust to elevate his own argument about war trauma and death (Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008]; Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008]). Carroll has ample goods to challenge Schantz’s assertion that Civil War soldiers were insulated from the shock of death because it was so prevalent and familiar in the nineteenth century and to instead fall into the Faust camp, which asserts that...

Taking Profits, Making Myths: The Slave Trading Career of Nathan Bedford Forrest

Taking Profits, Making MythsThe Slave Trading Career of Nathan Bedford Forrest Timothy S. Huebner (bio) The men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass without condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable. —Frederick Douglass, 1852 Although best known as a Confederate general and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest first made a name for himself during the 1850s, buying and selling enslaved African Americans in Memphis, Tennessee.1 Conforming to one scholar’s definition of “the most important type of [End Page 42] slave trader,” Forrest “bought slaves in the exporting states, transported them to the importing states, and sold them for a profit.” Existing studies of the trade focus mostly on earlier decades or rely heavily on sources from the much larger New Orleans market. An examination of a single prominent trader in late antebellum Memphis, a smaller urban center, yields further insights into the men who actually engaged in slave trading, as well as the pervasive hold that slavery’s capitalism had on the American South. Building on the innovative business practices established by an earlier generation of Southern traders, Forrest proved ruthlessly adept in running a profitable slave-dealing operation in the heart of the Lower Mississippi Valley.2 [End Page 43] The myths associated with Forrest’s biography obscure this part of his life, for during the postwar years the former Confederate general personally crafted a narrative to justify his antebellum business enterprises. In the immediate aftermath of accusations that Forrest had massacred Black Union soldiers at the April 1864 Battle of Fort Pillow, Forrest’s prewar slave trading emerged as an issue of particular interest in the North. A May 1864 article in the Chicago Daily Tribune described Forrest’s Memphis slave pen as “a perfect horror to all negroes far and near.” According to the Tribune, Forrest and his brother John disciplined “refractory slaves” with “long heavy bull whips,” which “cut up their victims until the blood trickled to the ground.” Forrest whipped one enslaved man to death, according to the article, after which “the slave was secretly buried, and the circumstance was only known to the slaves of the prison, who only dared to refer to the circumstance in whispers.”3 In 1868, after the war had ended, Forrest sought to rehabilitate his reputation by collaborating with Gen. Thomas Jordan, a Confederate veteran, and J. P. Pryor, a journalist, in producing an authorized biography. In the book’s introductory biographical sketch, Jordan and Pryor noted that Forrest moved to Memphis to establish himself “as a broker in real estate and a dealer in slaves,” and observed that Forrest “accumulated a considerable fortune.” Not content with this factual description, the authors—surely at Forrest’s urging—included a lengthy footnote arguing that Forrest “carried on his business with admitted probity and humanity.” The authors claimed that as a slave dealer Forrest “never sold separately the members of a family, and made it a rule, as far as practicable, after acquiring heads of a family, to purchase the others, howsoever widely scattered, and this, indeed, proved profitable in the end.”4 These words set the tone for later generations of [End Page 44] Forrest admirers, who offered similar justifications for his extensive trafficking in human beings. In 1898, one enthusiast went so far as to claim that Forrest gained such a reputation for kindness among the prewar enslaved community that he “was overwhelmed with applications from a great many [slaves], who begged him to purchase them.”5 Such arguments about Forrest’s benevolent motivations and actions—despite betraying a fundamental misunderstanding [End Page 45] of how the trade actually worked—endure even today in popular biographies and on neo-Confederate websites.6 Click for larger view View full resolution After the war, Forrest sought to rehabilitate his reputation by collaborating with General Thomas Jordan and J. P. Pryor in producing an authorized biography. This was the first source to portray Forrest as a benevolent trader. Myths have persisted as well due to the relative dearth of source material from this period in Forrest’s life. No records from his slave-trading business survive, so one must piece together...

"Up on Cripple Creek": Limb Loss, Difference, and Disability Spectacle in Southern Roots Music

This essay explores the experiences and representations of several southern roots musicians with limb loss or limb differences. Through an examination of the lives of the one-armed Carolinian banjoist and busker "Uncle" Frank Rayborn in the 1950s and 1960s, amputee Confederate veterans who performed at early-twentieth century fiddlers' contests, the one-armed "barn dance" radio musician Emory Martin, and the African-American bluesman "Peg Leg" Howell, this essay explores wider issues of patronage, voyeurism, agency in the roots music—particularly old-time, country, and blues—in the twentieth-century US South. In the process, this essay draws attention to the juncture where disability, poverty, gender, and race meet in the South, and calls us to reconsider narratives of embodiment, difference, and spectacle not at the "extremities" of southern culture and history but at their cores.

Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877–1932 by Mark A. Johnson

Reviewed by: Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877–1932 by Mark A. Johnson H. Paul Thompson Jr. (bio) Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877–1932. By Mark A. Johnson. ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Pp. 235. Cloth, $99.00; paper, $30.00.) In Rough Tactics, Mark A. Johnson brilliantly and painstakingly uncovers and interprets the nonintuitive intersections of popular music, popular politics, and Black-white relations during the rise and height of the Jim Crow South. His argument focuses on political spectacles—such events as conventions, political rallies, and parades for various causes—and the presence and function of Black musicians at these events. Johnson's time frame covers both pre- and postdisfranchisement, but his argument is that, regardless of African Americans' voting rights, they were active participants in political spaces in ways that we might not expect. African Americans' behavior in those spaces, while at times genuinely supportive of the white agenda, often was meant to challenge or undermine the racism of that space through what is called "rough music." The story weaves through a multitude of state and local political campaigns and takes a deep dive into the southern prohibition movement, the 1903 United Confederate Veterans (UCV) reunion in New Orleans, and the 1909 Memphis mayoral election. Johnson's narrative is contextualized within the national campaign against political spectacles in general and the rise of Jim Crow. The first chapter focuses on African American bands in political spectacles through 1899, which Johnson uses as the approximate beginning of Black voter disfranchisement. Black bands were such a draw that both [End Page 139] Republicans and Democrats frequently employed them, whether for local contests or for functions, such as the celebration of the nomination of James Garfield. They were also found in local prohibition campaigns, labor movement events, and Virginia's Readjuster movement, usually to attract Black support to their cause. Chapter 2 reviews the role of musicians in Atlanta's local-option prohibition campaigns of 1885 and 1887 and Macon's in 1898. The "bridge" chapter focuses on the failed effort of New Orleans's American Federation of Musicians to require the UCV to include Black bands in its 1903 reunion. This dispute highlighted changing southern race relations, because, Johnson points out, the UCV had employed Black bands for earlier reunions and Black bands even participated in Lost Cause celebrations, such as the dedication of Richmond's Robert E. Lee statue. By 1903, however, southern racism was shifting to an exclusionary approach, as the argument of the UCV reunion committee that Black bands had no place in a "strictly social" event trumped the past practices of their own organization. As Johnson explains, "Although white southerners romanticized the enslaved Black musician, who made music willingly for the master, they balked at the new generation of professional talent, who insisted on setting terms of employment and compensation" (126). The next chapter examines Black band participation in southern prohibition contests in the early 1900s, when the prohibition movement had shifted from courting Black voters to advocating for their disfranchisement. Despite being disfranchised, like women, Black men were active participants in these contests, and, on some occasions, Black anti-prohibition bands amazingly confronted white female prohibitionists publicly without negative repercussions. Johnson's book climaxes with a look at the 1909 Memphis mayoral campaign, in which Black band leader W. C. Handy created the hit song "Mister Crump" as part of the get-out-the-vote effort for victorious candidate E. H. Crump, who went on to become Memphis's political boss until the 1940s. That song also launched Handy to the zenith of his career. Rough Tactics is based on extensive and intensive reading of ninety-two newspapers from this era, Handy's autobiography, and a few manuscript collections. The concise yet detailed and nuanced overview of several local prohibition campaigns is clearly one of the strengths of this work. But the most notable achievement of Rough Tactics is how it expands and complicates our understanding of Black politics under Jim Crow. While some Black bands' activities might have appeared to have been reinforcing racist stereotypes or advancing political agendas deleterious to Black people, in reality the bands...

Virginia Museum of History & Culture. Jamie O. Bosket

<i>Virginia Museum of History &amp; Culture. Jamie O. Bosket</i>

Marten and Janney, eds., Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America

Reviewed by: Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America ed. by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney Gaines M. Foster Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America Edited by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Pp. 312. Notes, bibliography, index. Clothbound, $114.95; paperback, $36.95.) Anyone interested in how Americans thought about the Civil War in the late nineteenth century, even those familiar with the vast scholarship on Civil War memory, will find much that they did not know in Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America. Edited by James Martin and Caroline E. Janney, the collection explores how America's emerging commercial culture portrayed the war. Its fifteen essays discuss the move of Richmond's Libby Prison to Chicago to become a museum; opiate addiction cures; veterans' publications, such as the Military Annals of Tennessee and the National Tribune; clocks, and other items offered as premiums to Tribune subscribers; United Confederate Veteran uniforms manufactured for and worn by Confederate veterans, which were different than their wartime uniforms; tobacco and other types of advertising that featured Civil War generals or battle scenes; illustrations of the Monitor and Merrimac; images of reunion and reconciliation; the greater popularity of Civil War photographs over stereoviews; the unpopularity of Oliver Optic's books for young readers; public lectures on the war; Milton Bradley's Myriopticon: A Historical Panorama of the Rebellion, which presented the war in a roll of illustrations; and Civil War cycloramas. In addition to the discussions of all these "products and services," there is also an essay [End Page 342] on attitudes toward both the Union and Confederate war debt, although it seems a little out of place. From what the editors term their "ground level view," the essays interpreting these and other commercial enterprises expand an understanding of society's memory of the Civil War on the eve of the twentieth century. They stress the important role that profit seeking and a growing commercial and industrial economy played in making references to the war common in postwar culture. In the process, as several of the essays show, commercial products not only kept the memory of the war alive, they also promoted the values of a modern industrial economy, particularly in presenting a model of behavior for young males. Demonstrating how the modernizing economy shaped Civil War memory, and how that memory supported the emerging society, is an important contribution. So, too, are the essays' observations on how many non-veterans sought to experience the war, although most of them had reservations about experiences that were too intense or realistic. Several essays also emphasize the veterans' need to have society understand the traumas of battle and acknowledge their heroism and honor. While earlier studies have stressed a common need among Confederate veterans to be recognized, these essays show that northern veterans shared that desire. Most of the essays, in fact, focus on the North rather than on the South, which reinforces the growing appreciation that the war's memory remained important above as well as below the Mason-Dixon line. Although a few essays provide evidence of northerners' criticism of southern society, and lingering hostilities toward their former enemies, most argue or assume that by 1900, both sections had embraced reconciliation. Those that stress reconciliation find it in stories or images of the period that portray common heroism and sacrifice and avoid potentially divisive issues. Slavery and the role of African Americans in the war were featured in a few northern writings or pictures, as some authors show; more often, popular culture ignored or demeaned Blacks, which facilitated white reconciliation. The collective insights of these diverse essays make a significant contribution to understanding Civil War memory, and the individual essays provide intriguing analyses of a host of things ignored in earlier studies. [End Page 343] Gaines M. Foster Louisiana State University Copyright © 2022 Trustees of Indiana University

Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America ed. by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney

Reviewed by: Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America ed. by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney Kelly McMichael Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America. Edited by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Pp. 274. Notes, index.) Historians James Marten and Caroline E. Janney have compiled fifteen essays that illustrate the ways in which the Civil War was used to reinforce and expand nineteenth-century consumer culture, creating morals and values framed around patriotism and tying these to specific, purchasable objects and experiences. Individuals and corporations commercialized war memories, which proved highly profitable. While the essays in this book focus on the period 1865 to 1900, several hint at the continued commercial success of Civil War memorialization through World War II and, of course, that iconography of the war continues to sell today. The text is divided into three sections. The first section, “Defining Veteranhood,” looks at how individuals sold products, including pharmaceuticals, publications, clothing, and even the warehouse that had been Libby Prison. For example, Shae Smith Cox details how veterans attending reunions wore their “uniforms,” not the ones they had worn during battle but rather new outfits manufactured and marketed to veterans, especially Confederate veterans. Such outfitting of old soldiers was meant to create a coherent identity, but it also provided a ready audience for the mass manufacturing of a clothing line. Section two, “Marketing and Advertising,” includes articles about how marketers used war images of battles and individuals to sell products like cigarettes, stoves, and other household products. Anna Gibson Holloway and Jonathan W. White argue in their article that the Monitor, the Union ironclad that resonated with buyers who associated the ship with durability, became a “brand” used to sell dozens of different products. The final section, “Imagining the War,” demonstrates how popular images of the war were sold as a means of entertainment. Margaret Fairgrieve Milanick’s article describes how the Milton Bradley Company manufactured a kit called “Myriopticon,” which combined twenty-four images on a hand-cranked roll, viewable through a cutout stage, with a pamphlet to be read that synced to the images. The product was sold as an educational game that featured a narrative not about reconciliation, but rather that southern states needed to industrialize and become capitalist-oriented like the North. Although the fifteen essays included in this book range widely, from highlighting children’s books about teenaged soldiers to discussing Confederate [End Page 130] bonds found in a London vault in 1987, all explore the ways that Gilded Age individuals, advertisers, manufacturers, and publishers both commercialized and racialized the war’s memory, making large profits in the process. Issues of sectionalism and reconciliation are addressed but always in the ways that capitalism overcame such political differences, especially because this consumerism was rooted in Whiteness: reconciliation was made possible not only through an emphasis on the commercial, but also because the consumers were, first and foremost, White. These essays demonstrate the ways that ordinary White Americans bought, sold, and consumed material culture linked to specific Civil War memories, many of which they knew only secondhand through their parents. In addition to the authors mentioned above, the volume includes contributions by Amanda Brickell Bellows, Crompton B. Burton, Kevin R. Caprice, Barbara A. Gannon, Edward John Harcourt, Jonathan S. Jones, John Neff, Paul Ringel, Natalie Sweet, and David K. Thomson. Kelly McMichael American Public University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Standing their ground: Southern white hegemonic defense of place through camouflaged narrative continuity

Public relations research typically conceptualizes the practice as organization-centric by emphasizing strategies, tactics, and tools used to achieve objectives that advance organizational interests. Often less organizational but essential to understanding community self-governance, grassroots actors use public relations to defend, advance, or challenge ideographs such as freedom, democracy or environmental quality. The ideograph analyzed in this case is the postbellum narrative continuity of “Southern Heritage not Hate” which served as camouflage for redeeming the Lost Cause, the argument that the South did not lose the Civil War. This essay normatively identifies, interprets and judges public relations strategies southern advocates used to “stand their ground” by defining place as a cultural issue and source of relational agency. This grassroots public relations campaign sought to defeat the post-Civil War Reconstruction narrative continuity that fostered the societal agency of African Americans; postbellum activists re-imposed a narrative favorable to Southern white male hegemony. To stand their ground, “Southern” voices used military textuality, focused on CSA General Robert E. Lee, as narrative continuity during the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), Reconstruction (1865–1876), and Jim Crow (1877–1954). The term “camouflage” is used to explore this narrative and critically illuminate how text can define place so as to make it seem different than it is. Camouflage encodes messages differently to different decoders; it conceals as it reveals. Such strategies are typically more emergent contextually than the result of a grand plan. Through grassroots activism by groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans, what once was overt became covert regarding national military culture.

The War at Home: Perspectives on the Arkansas Experience during World War I ed. by Mark K. Christ

Reviewed by: The War at Home: Perspectives on the Arkansas Experience during World War I ed. by Mark K. Christ Marian Elizabeth Strobel The War at Home: Perspectives on the Arkansas Experience during World War I. Edited by Mark K. Christ. ( Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2020. Pp. x, 268. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-68226-126-2.) The one-hundredth anniversary of World War I has fostered numerous re-examinations of a conflict that shaped the modern world. Among these studies is The War at Home: Perspectives on the Arkansas Experience during World War I, a volume that contains the proceedings of two seminars sponsored by the Arkansas World War I Commemorative Committee and the Old State House Museum in Little Rock. While many retrospectives highlight the diplomatic and military aspects of the "War to End All Wars," this one wisely focuses on the home front, in a state that was 80 percent rural in 1918. The War at Home is inclusive in its content, paying special attention not only to military enlistments and industrial mobilization but also to women, common laborers, and African Americans during a time of rapid social, economic, and racial transformation. The authors, all of whom are prominent historians of Arkansas's past, present a cohesive and compelling story that links the World War I experience to the present. Especially powerful in this regard are the essays "Soldiers and Veterans at the Elaine Race Massacre" and "The Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and Its Legacy for Arkansas." Other fascinating entries focus on the woman suffrage crusade and on the rapid construction of Camp Pike and Little Rock's Picric Acid Plant. What is especially compelling is that matters of race and gender suffuse each essay and are integral to the stories told. Certain themes dominate. For many, service in the Great War became "a means to defend the valor of Confederate veterans and a way to defend the Lost Cause" (p. 12). Such a view makes clear the continuation of racial tensions in a heightened era of Jim Crow. Yet the efforts of all citizens of Arkansas, both Black and white, to win the war are integral to the volume. While hundreds of Arkansas men gave their lives in the conflict, women also made sacrifices. Women of all races assisted in the war effort whether through voluntary food conservation or through more formal Home Demonstration, Red Cross, and other work. Such efforts at times were stymied by anxious husbands who did not desire their wives to sign documents committing themselves to possible federal oversight or in support of a woman suffrage amendment. Tensions long evident in the South against the intervention of the federal government in state affairs remained. Yet the people of Arkansas proved themselves activists in their own right, be it through ingenious cantonment construction or labor agitation. On the latter topic, several essays provide confusing information on the resolution of the laundry workers' strike carried out by Black women workers during the war. Careful editing to eliminate possible contradictions in interpretation would have been helpful. The volume ends with a compelling essay titled "Paris to Pearl in Print." It is an astute examination of what Arkansas newspapers had to say about world affairs in the years between the Treaty of Versailles and the American entrance into World War II. Ignorance of world events seemed to be a key characteristic, as did pacifism and isolationism. Such a close reading of relatively rural media sources provides evidence of the prevailing views of many in the United States who hoped to remain free of foreign entanglements. Citizens of Arkansas had given their all to winning World War I and had little desire to be asked to do so [End Page 190] again, an ultimately hopeless wish. In 1917–1918, they had answered the call of a nation they had once fought to break apart. As The War at Home makes clear, they did so with dedication and enthusiasm. Marian Elizabeth Strobel Furman University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

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

The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory by Adam H. Domby

Reviewed by: The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory by Adam H. Domby Thomas J. Brown (bio) The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory. By Adam H. Domby. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. 258. Cloth, $29.95.) Adam H. Domby’s The False Cause is a welcome addition to a flurry of state-level studies of the Lost Cause, joining recent books on Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and South Carolina. It is no coincidence that the border states and Upper South are especially well represented in this set, joining geographically broader works on Civil War remembrance in Appalachia and the western guerrilla theater. If the books about South Carolina analyze the original core of the Confederacy, most of the scholarship has explored the development of the Lost Cause on the peripheries of secession. Domby is alert to the potential of North Carolina to demonstrate the postwar production of political unity in the white South. Although he begins and ends with the monument dedications, veterans’ reunions, and other commemorations that have been staples of the literature, the heart of his monograph is an investigation of Confederate pension processing in [End Page 442] North Carolina, focused particularly on Piedmont counties. Domby aims to combine his rhetorical and administrative histories in a meditation on the Lost Cause culture of dishonesty, a timely theme. Domby’s fundamental premise is that in North Carolina “white supremacist politicians ‘needed’ the Lost Cause perhaps more than in any other state” (4). He reports that North Carolina had more conscripts, more draft exemptions, and more deserters than any other Confederate state, and he highlights the relative strength of postwar biracial politics before the Wilmington massacre of 1898. He devotes less attention to labor unrest in a center of New South industrialization but organizes much of the first half of the book around tobacco and textile magnate Julian S. Carr. A conscript private who came to wear a Confederate general’s uniform because of his rank in the United Confederate Veterans, Carr offers a rewarding focus for Domby’s emphasis on Lost Cause fabrication. The book dissects Carr’s verifiable historical claims, especially his inflation of the number of University of North Carolina students who volunteered for and served in the Confederate army, and his ideological positions. Domby points out that Carr’s business and philanthropic interests gave him a reputation as a racial moderate. This proved to be a liability in campaigns for public office against more belligerent white supremacists, which Carr sought to repair on the hustings. His dispensation of patronage also led him to address Black audiences and attempt to impose his version of history upon them. As Domby writes in an account of a speech at Biddle University (now Johnson C. Smith University), “In telling an obvious lie that no one could publicly contradict, Carr expressed his power” (39–40). The second half of the book is a remarkable audit of Confederate pension records in North Carolina. Domby shows that many deserters received benefits because “no one really wanted to find fraud” and that the award of limited payments to African Americans supported the white ideal of the “faithful slave” (88). This research is an exemplary collation of pension, military, census, and genealogical sources. Domby combines his survey of broad patterns with a keen eye for dramatic individual stories. For example, his discussion of African Americans who were granted pensions for services to the Confederacy culminates with this revelation about the death record of the last recipient: his father was the soldier listed on his pension application as his master. The point draws on assiduous archival digging and clear understanding of the narratives promoted and hidden by the Lost Cause. In general, the scholarship on Civil War remembrance might better connect its cultural and social dimensions. Domby’s book is a good effort in this direction, but it never fully situates North Carolina benefits administration within the vein of scholarship initiated by Theda [End Page 443] Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1992). The argument that the pension system fostered white supremacism and harmony at a...

“A company of gentlemen”: confederate veterans and southern universities

ABSTRACT Between 1911 and 1914, four major Southern public universities – the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, the University of Georgia, and the University of Alabama – conferred honorary degrees upon former students who had abandoned their studies to join the Confederate military. Some 400 Confederate veterans received this tribute a half century after their enlistment, during a critical moment in the development of Lost Cause commemoration, of Southern Progressivism, and of Southern higher education. This essay explores how the decision to honour former Confederates at these four state universities not only reflected the desire to recognize the patriotic sacrifices of aged Confederate veterans, but also helped to solidify a political order based on white supremacy and Progressive social reform.

War, Memory, and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion by Thomas R. Flagel

Reviewed by: War, Memory, and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion by Thomas R. Flagel Albert Dorsey Jr. War, Memory, and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion. By Thomas R. Flagel. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 170. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-60635-371-4.) Historian Thomas R. Flagel’s archival research for War, Memory, and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion began with his preparation for a lecture he gave at the sesquicentennial commemoration at the hallowed Gettysburg National Military Park. His cogent argument is that when Civil War veterans, both Union and Confederate, returned to the places of “war memory, they almost invariably interpreted the site in personal rather than sectional or national terms” (p. xi). His work here is a departure from conventional scholarship, which argues that the Grand Reunion, the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, was motivated by national reconciliation of northern and southern sectionalism. Flagel places front and center the experiences of four veterans (Heman Allen of Vermont; William Fickas, a Union artillery gunner; Virginian Moses Waldron, a survivor of Pickett’s Charge; and North Carolinian H. H. Hodges, who joined the Confederate army after his regiment fought at Gettysburg) to demonstrate how the vast majority of participants came back to deal with their own physical and emotional trauma. There were over 55,000 official attendees at the reunion; thousands more came unofficially. Flagel smartly demonstrates that there were two reunions—one for the politicians and their nationalistic agendas and one for the veterans. Dignitaries made grandiose speeches praising martyrdom, death, sacrifice, and salvation for country. Gettysburg, Flagel suggests, was America’s Golgotha. The furtive juxtaposition of Christ’s sacrifice for the salvation of humankind against the gore and death of men, northern and southern alike, for the greater good and global domination of the American nation-state was a constant theme throughout the weeklong commemoration. While the average lifespan for a white man in the early twentieth century was just over fifty years, the average age of the Civil War veterans in attendance was seventy-two. The author shows that most veterans at the reunion were more concerned not with the burden of reconciliation but with living long enough to persevere through the ceremony. Aged and mostly feeble, many of those men had sustained battlefield injuries, including missing limbs. Many suffered emotional damage. Planning the historic event took years, and debate was sometimes contentious. Should former Confederates be allowed wear their uniforms or bear [End Page 199] the Confederate flag? Should the federal government pay their fare to and from the event? For the chosen few, state and local governments and veteran’s organizations, especially the Grand Army of the Republic and the United Confederate Veterans, granted train fare and small stipends, respectively. There were few African American veterans at the Grand Reunion. Many former Confederates wore their uniforms and proudly flew their battle flags. Comparatively, few Yankees wore theirs. Many contemporary military officers and politicians were slated to attend, including former president William Howard Taft and President Woodrow Wilson, who gave a short and uninspiring speech on July 3 but then immediately left. The politicians and high-ranking military officers had ulterior motivations. Under the Great Tent, they gave impassioned speeches about sacrifice because they were concerned with nation-state building, writes the author. As they did, most of the veterans were traversing the old battleground, reliving their summer of 1863 experiences; “it was more a litany of small search parties” (p. 50). They looked for grave markers and surviving comrades; they were happy when they found them, disappointed when they did not. They asked questions of each other and told stories; sometimes they wept silently and other times uncontrollably. “One survivor was seen weeping next to a [grave] marker, saying to passersby, ‘he’s under there,’” writes Flagel (p. 48). The media, military, and moguls conflated the butchering of men, who were staunchly opposed to each other, with hallowed nationalism. Flagel’s important monograph provides a nuanced existential examination of what fifty years after the battle meant to the veterans in attendance: survival. Albert Dorsey Jr. University of California, Riverside Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

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

Locating Patriotism in Civil War Songs

Locating Patriotism in Civil War Songs James A. Davis (bio) Following the Union seizure and occupation of New Orleans in May 1862, Pvt. Frank Harding joined members of the Twenty-sixth Massachusetts Infantry band as they formed outside the Charles Hotel to entertain—or perhaps to taunt—the local civilians. According to Harding, the musical offering met with mixed results: "Our band went into the House and played our national airs. While they played The Red White & blue and the Star Spangled banner the crowd was very quiet[,] but when they struck up Yankey Doodly there was a great commotion in the crowd[.] I heard one man say that he had rather given one thousand dollars than to had that d—d tune played in the city."1 Three years later, in March 1865, at the Battle of Dinwiddie Court House, Virginia, Col. Stephen Clark of the Thirteenth Ohio Cavalry vividly described the first clash of the Union and Confederate lines: "Our boys cheered and our band in the rear began to play 'The Star Spangled Banner,' and almost at the same time a band on the other side began playing 'Dixie'; they cheered and began to fire which we promptly answered and the fight was on in earnest."2 Fifty years after the last shots had been fired, one old Confederate met with his Yankee counterpart at a veterans' reunion, where the topic of music came up. [End Page 380] While the Northern gentleman proudly recalled such warhorses as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "The Battle Cry of Freedom," his Southern companion countered by mentioning "Maryland, My Maryland" along with "Dixie" and "The Bonnie Blue Flag."3 These three stories place Civil War songs in predictable settings with predictable results. Taken individually, within the contexts described, each of these pieces appears to have served as what would best be described as an inspirational patriotic anthem. But when gathered together, they seem to have little in common; indeed, anomalies emerge that make it unclear what constituted musical patriotism during the Civil War. In the first example, two seemingly blatantly patriotic songs—"The Star-Spangled Banner" and the equally transparent "Red, White and Blue" (another name for "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean")—elicited no response from a hostile Southern crowd. "Yankee Doodle," however, brought forth a vitriolic reaction. In the second story, the unofficial Union national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner," galvanized the Northern troops while their Confederate opponents answered with a popular minstrel tune. In the last example, the Union veteran resurrected predictable Northern chestnuts like "The Battle Cry of Freedom" and the inescapable "Battle Hymn of the Republic" while the Confederate veteran answered with "The Star-Spangled Banner's" alter ego "The Bonnie Blue Flag" alongside "Maryland, My Maryland"—a song celebrating a state that never joined the Confederacy. Today it is taken for granted that pieces like "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "Dixie" generated and maintained commitment to the Union and the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Such pieces are summarily defined as "patriotic songs" and assigned to their respective nations without any consideration of how these songs connected with the countries they supposedly supported. Patriotism requires a locus of identity, something toward which a community's loyalty can be directed and sustained. This is often a specific place, but it can also be a significant icon or a mythologized person or event. Identifying a suitable patriotic target was no easy task for songwriters during the American Civil War. Tenacious regional loyalties and blurry political and geographic borders made locating patriotism an ongoing trial for both the Union and the Confederacy. To overcome these challenges, many Civil War songs constructed multivalent patriotic spaces instead of referencing determinate geopolitical places.4 Combining [End Page 381] locationally suggestive yet indistinct lyrics with likeable melodies, certain notable pieces generated ambiguous but substantive emotional and conceptual focal points—the Dixie of "Dixie's Land" or the republic of "Battle Hymn of the Republic." These patriotic spaces had to be locatable and definable to be effective even as they occupied a gray area around the tangible places and explicit ideas encountered in daily life.5 Some of these musical...

Confederate Statues and Their Dirty Laundry

AbstractSince 2015, America has witnessed a profound shift in aggregate public sentiments toward Confederate statues and symbols. That shift was keenly felt on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin (UT), culminating in the removal of four such statues in 2015 and 2017. However, an inquiry into their creation points to an equally significant shift in sentiments during the 1920s. UT's statues were commissioned in 1919 by George Littlefield, a Confederate veteran and university regent, as part of a larger war memorial. The ostensible purpose of that memorial was to commemorate veterans of both the Civil War and World War I. However, during the 1920s, a new generation of university leaders rejected Littlefield's design—and with it the assertion that the services of Civil and World War veterans were morally congruent and united in a common historical trajectory. This article tracks the ways in which they quietly and yet profoundly undermined the project, causing it to be significantly delayed and then extensively altered. Meanwhile, students and veterans improvised their own commemorative practices that were in stark contrast to the Confederate generation—the latter wanted to remember, while the former wanted to forget.

Guest Editor's Introduction: Reconsidering Civil War Veterans

Guest Editor's IntroductionReconsidering Civil War Veterans Susannah J. Ural, Guest Editor (bio) In 2015, James Marten, Brian Matthew Jordan, Barbara Gannon, and Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh offered broad analyses of veterans within a national and global context in this journal's first special issue on veterans. Their work reflected a strong body of scholarship that has continued to grow and enrich our understanding of veterans' readjustment to civilian life, the challenges they faced as their age advanced and their health declined, and the battles they waged over how their service would be remembered and who would tell that story. But for all of this rich scholarship, significant holes and flawed interpretations remain in our work on veterans, which this special issue seeks to fill. Scholars are well versed, for example, in the tensions that existed between northern civilians and Union soldiers who came home. But how did this relationship collapse? It began with eager, devoted aid workers volunteering time, energy, and capital to the plight of the soldier; with civilians raising funds for hospitals and supplies; with parades and meals prepared for men heading off to war. It ended in deeply entrenched resentment and miscommunication. That disconnect inspired Sarah Gardner's article, which opens this issue. What caused such angst and such—from our perspective—coldness in civilian activists devoted to veterans in need? One source of that friction, Gardner observes, is Americans' talent for honoring their battlefield dead and their habitual failure to care for soldiers who survive. Victorian concerns over the degrading influence of charity partly explains this failure, Gardner agrees, but her close study of a Pennsylvania chapter of the U.S. Sanitary Commission reveals something more. These were not simply Gilded Age reformers frowning at veterans who failed to meet society's expectations. Relief workers truly struggled to reconcile their drive to uplift with their compulsion to maintain a stable society, but in the end, they sacrificed empathy in the name of stability. By examining the metamorphosis of soldier to veteran—a puzzling process when, in the cases of most Confederates, there was no formal [End Page 1] demobilization—Caroline Janney's essay spotlights another gap in our understanding of veterans. Janney follows the soldiers of Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia from Appomattox Court House through the post-surrender period, tracing moments of continued military order and discipline as soldier-veterans journeyed home as companies and even brigades. But that discipline was tenuous and often went unenforced by officers who, Janney observes, had no official authority and who, along with their men, resented the myriad symbols of what Union victory wrought: the unraveling of slavery, debilitating poverty, and armed occupation by both white and black Union soldiers. Kurt Hackemer shifts our attention to Dakota Territory as he seeks to understand what drove veterans west after their Civil War service. Scholars have tied this movement to military service, but until now there has been little evidence to support such claims. Through a close statistical analysis of a special census of more than six thousand veterans, he finds that some men were escaping lingering wartime trauma after especially hard service, but in other veterans, Hackemer uncovers patterns of mobility that started before the war. In these cases, prewar experiences affected veterans' postwar lives as much as their military service. We should not, Hackemer warns, grant too much causation to a war that was a brief, though exceptionally intense, period of a veteran's life. Mississippi's Confederate home—known as "Beauvoir"—inspired my own essay. Beauvoir challenges historians' understanding of Confederate veteran facilities as places where aging men sat in fading gray uniforms, isolated from society, and waiting to die. That flawed narrative is the result of an overreliance on a Lost Cause framework to interpret these homes. My close analysis of the gender and racial diversity of Beauvoir's residents and administrators at this state-funded, state-run facility reveal that New South modernization and segregation shaped Beauvoir just as much as its Lost Cause roots. Ian Isherwood closes this special issue with a review essay that brings two fields awash in veteran studies in conversation with one another. In a...

Archiving Regiments: Thomas M. Owen and the Collection of Alabama's Confederate Records

Archiving Regiments:Thomas M. Owen and the Collection of Alabama's Confederate Records Daniel E. Cone (bio) There is a light-gray photocopy of a typed letter tucked into a manila folder in a collection at the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH) in Montgomery, Alabama. It is from the office of the director, and is addressed to a Mr. Edmundson. Within a few lines, it becomes clear that Edmundson is an American Civil War veteran, a former Confederate Army officer, and that the director wants a few things from him. First, he needs to know when Edmundson's military unit, originally Company C of the Forty-fifth Alabama Infantry Regiment, became Company D. Second, he wants Edmundson to name living descendants of two other officers; and while he is at it, could Edmundson please confirm the first initial of another officer's name—is it C or J? Edmundson should also send papers, "any old documents, such as letters, reports, rosters, or commissions," that deal with his military service. "The value of [this kind of] contemporary data cannot be overestimated," the director tells Edmundson, and he will take good care of it. He eagerly awaits Edmundson's reply, for time is of the essence, and the director needs all the help he can get: "[Alabama] is doing all it can to preserve the materials for its history, and to clear up all obscurities before all of the actors themselves have passed away. What we do will be well or poorly done, in proportion as we have cooperation."1 [End Page 210] The letter to Edmundson was neither the first nor the last of its kind that Thomas M. Owen wrote over the nineteen years that he managed Alabama's fledgling state archives. That Owen was seeking information from the Civil War era was, on the one hand, unimportant; what he sought was historical information, period. Described as a man of "undiscriminating" tastes in old records, when it came to archival accessions Owen seemed to want it all. His initial funding proposal to the Alabama legislature envisioned that the state archives would have a broad mandate for "the collection of historical facts, records, and antiquities." The archives' first press release in the Montgomery Daily Advertiser announced Owen's desire to secure "copies of all books and pamphlets . . . relating to the State, as well as general historical works . . . maps, prints, charts . . . historical pictures, photographs and old oil paintings . . . school and college catalogues, all church literature" and "files of newspapers." Within Owen's personal library, state and national government records, periodicals, and publications of educational and religious institutions bulked largest. Personally and professionally, the director did not privilege any subject or era over another.2 From this standpoint, Owen's preservation of Civil War-era records was a topical sub-point of a larger goal. However, Owen insisted that his efforts "to gather authentic data, statistics, documents, reports, plans, maps, and other material for an impartial history of the Confederate side" of the war were not merely incidental; rather, they ranked as his "second duty" overall. Even a cursory perusal of his voluminous correspondence, official and unofficial, suggests that Owen probably did more work in gathering wartime records than in those of any other topic or time period. While Owen's role in establishing America's first state-supported archival repository is relatively [End Page 211] well known, his documentation of Alabama's Confederate soldiers has received less specific attention. 3 Born the year after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, son of a Confederate veteran, Thomas McAdory Owen studied law at the University of Alabama, hung out his shingle in Bessemer, served as justice of the peace and county solicitor, and became involved in local politics. Always interested in history, Owen spent his spare time rummaging through the Library of Congress while clerking briefly at a Washington, D.C., post office. After returning to his law practice in Alabama, Owen helped found the Southern History Association in 1896 and reactivated the Alabama Historical Society in 1898.4 Still loftier ambitions motivated Owen. Since preparing an Alabama bibliography in 1897, he had become concerned about archival preservation. On one occasion, Owen...

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South by Diane Miller Sommerville

Reviewed by: Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South by Diane Miller Sommerville Brian Matthew Jordan (bio) Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South. By Diane Miller Sommerville. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 448. $105.00 cloth; $34.95 paper; $27.99 e-book) In this exhaustively researched, methodologically innovative, and brilliantly executed book, historian Diane Miller Sommerville describes "the psychological and emotional damage of the Civil War on Southerners" (p. 12). In the author's sensitive hands, suicidal activity and the responses it stimulated in Southern society and culture yield new clues about the ways in which soldiers and veterans, wives and widows, the enslaved and newly-freed people wrestled with the period's "uncharted territory and unrelenting hardship" (p. 81). Allowing that motivations for suicide "are complicated, multilayered, and largely obscured," Sommerville explains that the Civil War was nonetheless "the social and cultural context" for many self-murders (p. 8–9). Building ties between the war's trauma, personal biographies, and individual "lived experience"—connections that historical actors were unequipped to make—the result is a much "fuller accounting of the war's costs on its participants" (p. 12). Aberration of Mind unapologetically joins a wave of neo-revisionist scholarship focused on the war's less than ennobling characteristics and enormous human consequences. Some critics have dismissed the so-called "dark turn" for purportedly misrepresenting "marginal" experiences as mainstream; others allege presentism. Sommerville smartly responds that "it is unreasonable to expect historians to refrain from considering links between psychiatric distress among soldiers and their experiences in military service, knowledge that we have at our disposal, simply because nineteenth-century Americans did not" (p. 272, n13). Further, she makes clear that taking the war's psychological and emotional scars seriously does not make an argument about their typicality, something that her necessarily qualitative evidence proscribes (p. 14–15). Sommerville's book is divided into three parts. The first considers [End Page 398] Confederate men and women during the war itself. While a "flurry of wartime suicides" became "less stigmatized than in earlier periods," at the same time, "few Southerners seemed willing or able to link the war to the mental distress of combatants" (pp. 37, 41). Though southern women were less inclined than men to commit suicide, they "appear to have been much more engaged in contemplating death as an exit from their suffering" on the home front, something Lost Cause narratives effaced after the war (p. 50–51). The second part examines African Americans in slavery and after emancipation. In the book's most powerful chapter, Sommerville maintains that using "slave suicide as prima facie evidence for resistance . . . risks ignoring or discounting slaves' suffering as a motive for suicide" (p. 97). Slaves resorted to taking their own lives because it "brought an immediate end to emotional or physical pain" (p. 99). Of necessity, southern whites denied the frequency of slave suicides—a pattern that persisted after the war, when African-Americans were deemed "constitutionally incapable of experiencing the same emotions as whites" (p. 147). Only whites could suffer or experience loss; instead, blacks were diagnosed with "mania," which some white southerners interpreted as the predictable result of emancipation. The final part probes the experiences of Confederate veterans and widows. Southern asylums teemed with new patients who not only witnessed the horrors of a brutal war but experienced the humiliating sting of defeat. Emasculated, Confederate men faced "financial ruin" and "dim job prospects" as they returned to civilian communities that seemed unable to comprehend their experiences (p. 179). At the same time, foisted into new and often disconcerting roles, their nerves frayed and emotions knotted, "thousands of southern women . . . collapsed in the wake of defeat" (p. 210). In the last chapter, Sommerville ties together the threads of her argument that the war invited a "change in the cultural meaning of suicide" (p. 48). The enormity of pain and suffering unleashed by the Civil War demanded that white southerners rework antebellum ideas about suicide. Obituaries and coroner's reports began to evince sympathy [End Page 399] for those who took their own lives. Edmund Ruffin was...