Confederate Veterans Research Articles

The Day Is Past and Gone: Family Photographs from Eastern North Carolina

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It is in fact hard to get the camera to tell the truth; yet it can be made to, in many ways and on many levels. Some of the best photographs we are ever likely to see are innocent domestic snapshots .... --James Agee (1946) One of the most envied accompaniments of high birth in the past is becoming almost universal. Almost everyone nowadays is possessed of family portraits... As in the case of jewels, there is something fictitious about the store which is set by them. Nevertheless the fascination of such heirlooms is eternal. --The Living Age (1913) (1 family photographs presented here come from a collection my great-aunt kept at the family home-place in the Rosebud community of Wilson County, North Carolina. Stowed away in shoeboxes marked The Good Ol' Days, these photographs chronicle life in a small corner of the coastal plain from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. pictures portray the cycles and rhythms of rural life and the people who shaped the region's unique landscape and language, architecture and culture. families seen in the photographs--Matthews, Taylor, Pender, Varnell, Barnes, Flowers--intermarried and created a community sustained by agriculture, barbecues, hunting, fishing, and visits on the porch. Family, private, personal, domestic photographs--however you choose to name them, they often seem unremarkable to those unfamiliar with the people and places depicted in the pictures. They do not aspire to art. If they are propaganda, it is of the familial sort. Domestic photographs can seem commonplace and pedestrian unless you care to take an empathetic, imaginative leap into the lives of the people in the images or, especially, if you have a personal connection to them. Then they seem alive and of inestimable value. They are what you would grab first in a fire. In recent years, I made regular visits to my great-aunt's house on my way to and from school in central Virginia. She and my grandfather were born in this house, which my great-grandfather built around 1900. Though many of the trees that provided shade in earlier years have succumbed to storms or pruning, the home remains a quintessential eastern North Carolina farmhouse: a white, one-story, symmetrical square plan with a low, hipped roof and wraparound porch. Each time I pulled in the long driveway toward the house, my great-aunt stood waiting by the door, ready to get right back on the road and carry to Parker's BBQ a few miles south for supper. When we returned home we would sit on the porch, weather permitting, and after a while move into the living room to watch sports, game shows, or sitcoms from the 1960s. As evening turned into night, and after three or four bottles of Coke, which my great-aunt kept well stocked for my visits, I always turned my attention to the drawer in the living room that served as a portal to my family's past. Inside was an ancient family Bible, containing birth records from the I76OS, my great-great-grandfather's Confederate veteran ribbons, scattered pages from the Primitive Baptist newspaper, scraps of paper with song lyrics composed for a funeral (The hand of death alone can blot / Those images from my heart / Forget, forsake me if you will / You never shall be forgot), a summons from 1911 to testify in court on behalf of the plaintiff, along with many other items used to mark favorite passages of Scripture. Next to the Bible sat the shoeboxes of photographs. They ranged from glass-plate studio portraits from the late nineteenth century to Polaroid Instamatics of more recent vintage. bulk of the photographs, however, originated from the 1920s through the 1940s and documented daily life on the farm, recreational activities, and interactions with family and friends. Opening the shoeboxes, I became an armchair archaeologist, carefully sifting through the artifacts in an attempt to reconstruct a society that looked at once familiar and foreign. …

The Role of Understanding in Meeting the Moral Demands of Remembrance

In 2010, the Governor of the state of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, fulfilled a campaign promise to the Sons of Confederate Veterans by proclaiming April “Confederate History Month.” The initial proclamation contained no reference to slavery, an omission for which Gov. McDonnell later apologized. He amended the text to include a paragraph on slavery as the cause of the war. Comments from Virginia citizens on the proclamation ranged from “anyone defending this act of the governor of VA is a racist” to the “main purpose of [confederate soldiers] bearing arms was to protect their homes, family, & friends from what they saw as an invading force of outsiders imposing their own will.... Those who fought for such reasons deserve to be recognized.”

A Cause Not Lost

Historians sometimes transform obscure events into oft-told stories almost overnight. Such is the case with the 1873 Colfax Massacre, which Eric Foner labeled the “bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era.”1 Nicholas Lemann used Colfax as a prologue to his Redemption (2006), and James Hogue carefully contextualized the massacre in his examination of counterrevolutionary vigilantism in Uncivil War (2007). Now, historian LeeAnna Keith and journalist Charles Lane have contributed nearly simultaneous book-length accounts of a white posse’s murder of black prisoners in Central Louisiana. Neither book aims to significantly revise scholarly understanding of Reconstruction or even the Colfax Massacre itself; instead, both Keith and Lane offer contextualized accounts of the gruesome story designed to reach a wide audience. On that limited basis, Keith and Lane deliver compelling and largely congruent accounts of the massacre. In a state renowned for disputed elections, the contested 1872 Louisiana vote created two would-be governors, each of whom appointed a slate of local officials for Grant Parish. At first, exclusively white officials appointed by the Fusionist governor (supported both by white supremacist Democrats and disaffected Republicans) occupied a makeshift courthouse in Colfax, the parish seat. A group of Republicans, however, snuck into the building at night and installed officials—black and white—appointed by the Republican claimant to the governorship. Vigilantes, including members of the Knights of the White Camelia and the “Old Time Ku Klux Klan,” began filtering into Grant Parish, preparing to attack the Republicans. Those vigilantes—a posse, mob, or army, depending on one’s perspective—were loosely led by C. C. Nash, a Confederate veteran hardened by almost two years

Scars to prove it: the Civil War soldier and American fiction

This examination of the interaction between fictional representations of the Civil War and the memoirs and autobiographies of Civil War soldiers argues that veterans' accounts taught later generations to represent the conflict in terms of individual experiences, revealing how national identity developed according to written records of the past. Author Craig A. Warren explores seven popular novels about the Civil War - The Red Badge of Courage, Gone with the Wind, None Shall Look Back, The Judas Field, The Unvanquished, The Killer Angels, and Absalom, Absalom! His study reveals that the war owes much of its cultural power to a large but overlooked genre of writing: postwar memoirs, regimental histories, and other narratives authored by Union and Confederate veterans. Warren contends that literary scholars and historians took seriously the influence that veterans' narratives had on the shape and character of Civil War fiction. Scars to Prove It fills a gap in the study of Civil War literature and will appeal to those interested in the literature, military writing, and literary studies related to the Civil War.

Radicalizing Reunion: Helen Keller's The Story of My Life and Reconciliation Romance

The 1903 Doubleday, Page, and Co. edition of Helen Keller's The Story of My Life contains several photographs of Keller with prominent Americans. (1) The last photograph in book is a picture of Helen Keller and Mark Twain, arguably most famous of his time. This image reinforces Keller's status as a cultural icon, and it complements her efforts to fashion herself as a national hero in The Story of My Life (hereafter Story). In this narrative, Keller follows Franklinian pattern, portraying herself as a self-made individual who, through industry and self-reliance, conquered personal hardship and became a national celebrity. In so doing, she invites her readers to consider her work a distinctly American text, which exhibits models of selfhood established in nation's autobiographical traditions. Yet, while Story shows Keller to be a prototypical American, it also reveals her peculiarly southern roots, which Keller continually plays up. In first chapter, she claims that her paternal grandmother a granddaughter of Alexander Spotswood, an early colonial governor of Virginia, and second cousin to Robert E. Lee (13). Here, Keller links herself not only to patrician class of antebellum Virginians but also to Confederacy. She sustains this connection by informing readers that her father was a captain in Confederate Army (13). If Keller wants her readers to recognize her as a paradigmatic American, then why does she associate herself with rebel South? It is no surprise that Keller provides information about her father's past; he figures prominently in her memories of growing up in Alabama. However, her inclusion of Lee, a distant relative, in Keller family genealogy seems a conscious and symbolic statement. (2) By observing conventions of autobiography while linking herself to Confederate South, Keller asks her readers to consider her a representative and a child of South. As and southerner, she has a powerful double identity, which affords her special insight into of conciliation that characterized North-South relationship in Gilded Age years (Silber 2). After 1865, many white northerners and southerners, eager to ease sectional tensions, wrote novels and plays that dramatized North-South reunion. Providing an imaginary space for negotiating the reunion process and redefining nationalism, these romances were important products of culture of conciliation (Silber 3). (3) Set in South during Reconstruction, romances featured marriages between Union veterans and southern women or between Confederate veterans and northern women that symbolized national reunion after Civil War. These texts also romanticized lifestyle of planter class and perpetuated much of sentimentality ... of old Southern myth, which portrayed antebellum South as a pastoral paradise destroyed by war and Yankee occupation (105). Although northern writers established conventions of genre in 1860s, some southerners tried their hands at writing romances after Reconstruction. In fact, during last two decades of nineteenth century, Virginia-born novelist Thomas Nelson Page became one of America's most celebrated authors of reunion fiction (110-113). Both northerners and southerners used this fiction to work through social problems of Gilded Age America, and romances often reflected dominant cultural values of time. According to Nina Silber, many of these texts promoted an ideology of reunion tailored to interests of propertied white males. Affirming traditional class, race, and gender hierarchies, novels and plays of reunion often endorsed social marginalization of poor, African Americans, and women. By idealizing antebellum plantation culture, writers of reunion fiction expressed their sympathy with aristocratic southern values, suggesting that reconciliation remained province of social elite (Silber 106). …

Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia

Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia

The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader (review)

Reviewed by: The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader J. Adam Rogers The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader. Edited by Larry M. Logue and Michael Barton. (New York: New York University Press, 2007. Pp. 512. Paper, $26.00.) The Grand Review of three victorious Union armies through the humid May streets of Washington signaled the end of the American Civil War. However for the over two million northern and southern former combatants spread across the recently fractured nation, the struggle to return and readjust to civilian life had just begun. In The Civil War Veteran, Larry Logue and Michael Barton attempt to summarize and detail the veterans’ experiences through a collection of thirty-one previously published, scholarly essays. The result is an impressive demonstration of “the rich variety of attitudes, circumstances, and behaviors that historians and other scholars have found among the Civil War veterans” (2). Logue and Barton organize their collected essays into five roughly chronological categories, which they have identified as components of nineteenth-century demobilization and readjustment. The first—“Transitions to Peace”—unfortunately appears as the weakest of the book. Unlike the subsequent four, the initial section has little general cohesiveness. Dixon Wecter’s and William B. Holberton’s respective depictions of Union and Confederate soldiers’ journeys home connect appropriately to the greater theme, but Barton’s examination of the war’s psychological effects on southern veterans and Gaines Foster’s look at early Confederate veterans’ [End Page 398] organizations both seem badly misplaced. Indeed, their inclusion here is all the more puzzling considering Logue and Barton’s separate later sections that deal specifically with physical and mental maladies and participation in veterans’ associations. In contrast, the following two sections demonstrate the strength and possibilities of recent veteran studies, as well as Logue and Barton’s strong understanding of the subject matter. “The Problems of Readjustment” focuses on the all-too-familiar issues of criminality, alcoholism and drug addiction, and mental disorders, such as Eric Dean’s impressive and thoroughly researched essay on the occurrence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which plagued many Civil War veterans for the remainder of their lives. The next section, “Governments Provide Aid,” details how state and federal authorities reacted to alleviate and provide for ailing veterans through the creation of various Soldiers’ Homes and the retooling of the Pension Bureau. However, notable essays from Richard Reid, Donald Shaffer, and Peter Blanck and Chen Song also complicate matters by revealing that endemic racism, nativism, and nineteenth-century bureaucracy undermined the system and often prohibited African American and foreign-born veterans from receiving their due. From governmental assistance, Logue and Barton in the final two sections turn their attentions toward veterans’ activism. In “Veterans Fight Their Own Battles,” the essays focus predominantly upon the actions and interests of Union and Confederate veterans’ organizations during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. While Union associations, as Mary Dearing, Stuart McConnell, and Larry Logue argue, sought to secure Republican election victories, increase veteran benefits, and encourage camaraderie, Confederate groups concentrated on ensuring a continuation of the Old South’s honor and “traditions”—most notably that of white supremacy. Similarly, the concluding “Veterans Shape the Collective Memory” explores the ways in which veterans North and South hoped to preserve their actions for future generations. The old soldiers utilized remembrances, monuments, and school curriculums to enshrine their version of history—be it a war for nationalism or the Lost Cause—for posterity. Yet by the dawn of the new century, Logue and Barton argue, through the essays of Gaines Foster, Carol Reardon, and David Blight, the nation and many of its veterans had embraced the spirit of reconciliation. “The war,” Blight concluded, “was remembered primarily as a tragedy that led to greater unity and national cohesion . . . not as the crisis of a nation deeply divided over slavery, race, [and] competing definitions of labor” (413). [End Page 399] The Civil War Veteran provides an indelible resource for both scholars and general readers, who all too often conclude their studies of the war at Appomattox. Logue and Barton aptly demonstrate not only the broad possibilities for veteran studies, but, more important, the diversity of the veteran’s experience...

Burying the Dead but not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations & the Lost Cause (review)

J U L Y 2 0 0 9 227 Integration of the football team in the early 1970s happened so seamlessly that readers might forget that this was George Wallace’s Alabama. Yet African American players such as Heisman winner Bo Jackson opened a new era of Auburn gridiron heroes. Only one receives bad press from Hemphill: Eric Ramsey, a fifth-year cornerback, who had the audacity to record Coach Pat Dye’s illegal offers (leading to Dye’s resignation). That said, A Tiger Walk Through History is well worth the price and not just because of Hemphill’s narrative. The volume is a quality product, evident from the heavy glossy pages to the numerous illustrations. Readers will delight in the many photos, images of game programs, newspaper clippings, sidebar pages devoted to memories of former students and staff, and appendixes, all designed to advance and illuminate the narrative . A lot of effort went into this volume; it deserves a place on library shelves as well as on coffee tables. JOHN SAYLE WATTERSON James Madison University Burying the Dead but not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations & the Lost Cause. By Caroline E. Janney. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xiii, 290 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-8078-3176-2. The scholarship on the Confederate Lost Cause has grown considerably in the last few decades, incorporating the actions of both men and women who celebrated the failed Confederacy. Many of the scholars in this field, however, have looked to the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), a national organization created in 1894, in order to explain women’s participation in the Lost Cause. For Caroline Janney, this focus is misplaced. In her book Burying the Dead but not the Past, Janney intends to set the record straight about the creation of the South’s postwar culture by focusing on the women of the Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMAs). She argues convincingly that these women provided the very foundation for Confederate memorial efforts during the Civil War and then continued to shape Confederate memory throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth century, the years when the UDC came to prominence. In essence, the women of the LMAs gave birth to the Confederate Lost Cause and nurtured the movement even in the midst of challenges from within. Janney’s discoveries have important ramifications for how we understand not only the creation and development of the Lost Cause, but also T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 228 the behavior of southern white women in the postwar period. The white middle- and upper-class women in this study shifted easily from their work in soldiers’ aid societies to taking care of those who had died in battle. Their tasks went beyond the decoration of tombstones and the organization of memorial parades to include the rescue and reinterment of thousands of bodies in proper burial grounds, the construction of monuments to the Confederacy, the financial support of veterans and their families, and, in later years, the education of the next generation of southerners about the Confederate past. In her analysis of their behavior , Janney claims that the actions of LMA women as mourners were political and that because they were women, LMA members were effective in stoking Confederate nationalism even at the height of radical Reconstruction. Whereas white southern men were under the watchful eye of northern Reconstruction officials, women could surreptitiously keep the pro-Confederate spirit alive well after the Confederacy had ceased to exist, and do so with the full support of their chastened men. But once political circumstances allowed men to participate on their own in Confederate memorial efforts, the women of the LMAs did not change their behavior. Instead of yielding their leadership roles to men, as had been customary for southern women before the war and as some historians have claimed took place in the postwar years, these women held on, with motherly tenacity, to their control of the movement and rebuffed efforts by Confederate veterans’ groups to push them aside. In her research, Janney uses the rich records of seven LMAs from...

Impostors of Freedom: Southern White Manhood, Hypodermic Morphine, and E. P. Roe's Without a Home

The essay examines the first U.S. novel about hypodermic morphine addiction, Edward Payson Roe's Without a Home (1881) in the context of the broader cultural history of addiction. When habituation to hypodermic morphine became a noted phenomenon in the years following the Civil War, writers described it by the temperance movement's familiar metaphor for habituation to alcohol: self-enslavement. “Opium slaves” joined the ranks of figurative “slaves to the bottle,” as implicitly white men who had ironically squandered their freedom in exchange for a degrading compulsion. At the same time, the temperance plot was updated to include the idea that such habituations might be nervous illnesses afflicting modern professional workers. Through its addicted protagonist Martin Jocelyn, Roe's novel engages these unevenly developing medical, reform, and popular early representations of addiction. A Confederate veteran inured to the slave-owning economy of the South, Jocelyn fails to become a modern professional when he moves to New York City after the end of the war. The cause of his downfall is his dependence on morphine, which is portrayed both as a diagnosable condition and as the shameful, emasculating servitude of self-enslavement. Attempting to pass as a breadwinner, husband, and professional, Jocelyn's addiction makes him an impostor of freedom. But it also shows how the history of chattel slavery haunted the late nineteenth-century conceptualization of addiction, in spite of the nation's attempt to forget its own shameful dependency on chattel slave labor.

The View from the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers. Ed. by Aaron Sheehan-Dean. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. vi, 266 pp. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-2413-1.)

This anthology presents the research of a new generation of historians studying American Civil War soldiers. They advance our knowledge with their findings, but a central problem remains. Aaron Sheehan-Dean's opening essay analyzes the past scholarship, properly underscoring the significance of work by Bell Wiley, Maris Vinovskis, Joseph T. Glatthaar, Reid Mitchell, Gerald F. Linderman, Earl J. Hess, and James McPherson. Sheehan-Dean argues that since the 1980s, scholars have treated soldiers as fully human actors who shaped the war at the same time as they were shaped by it. Today, he says, the study of Civil War soldiers is about more than soldiering; it is also about such issues as religion, masculinity, fatherhood, womanhood, and race. The essays that follow substantiate those claims. Writing on Union soldiers, slavery, and race, Chandra Manning argues that as white Northern troops encountered slaves and judged the harm slavery had done to women and families, they quickly came to believe that slavery was the cause of the war and had to be destroyed to end the war. However, notes Manning, soldiers could hold antislavery and racist views simultaneously. Jason Phillips studies Confederate perceptions of Union soldiers, concluding that Southerners did not see this as a brothers' war. Instead, they “usually” saw Northerners as “inept inferior adversaries or evil, barbaric ones” (p. 68). Such caricatures raised their own morale and thus helped them resist the “invading hordes” and prevent their alleged atrocities (p. 71). Ultimately, Southerners feared subjugation, of their community and their manhood. Lisa Laskin, in her essay on the morale of the Army of Northern Virginia (anv), discovers a twist: as anv soldiers learned that morale was weakening on the home front, they concentrated their loyalty on their army and its leadership. David W. Rolfs looks at the religion of Northern soldiers and the changes it went through. He contends that most soldiers usually ignored or compromised their religious beliefs to get through the war. A small group, however, tried to stay true to their beliefs and became conflicted. The experiences of these men occupy most of Rolfs's consideration. While historians have paid much attention to revivalism, Kent T. Dollar finds that the religious faith of the soldiers was also quite pronounced in the early months of the war, even before the revivals began. On the soldiers' political activism, Timothy J. Orr shows that Pennsylvania troops, by writing letters and drafting resolutions, actively supported prowar Republicans and opposed antiwar Democrats in their state. Charles E. Brooks's essay on “popular sovereignty” in a Texas regiment argues that the Confederate cause was strengthened by the belief that a soldier had a right to pick his unit and serve under a sympathetic commander. Kevin M. Levin's analysis of disputes over assigning credit for victory at the Battle of the Crater shows Confederate veterans asserting their local and state identity after the war.

Slavery, Emancipation, and Veterans of the Union Cause: Commemorating Freedom in the Era of Reconciliation, 1885-1915

Slavery, Emancipation, and Veterans of the Union Cause: Commemorating Freedom in the Era of Reconciliation, 1885-1915 M. Keith Harris In July 1913, veterans of the United States and Confederate armies gathered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to commemorate the fifty-year anniversary of the Civil War's bloodiest and most famous battle. The four-day "Blue-Gray Reunion" featured parades, reenactments, and speeches from a host of dignitaries, including President Woodrow Wilson. Striking among the event's activities was the lack of a comprehensive remembrance of the war's causes and consequences. Veterans and other public figures highlighted only the virtuous aspects of soldiery such as courage, valor, and selfless devotion. Thousands of spectators enthusiastically approved of President Wilson's remarks to former Yankee and Rebel alike: "Valor? Yes! Greater no man shall see in war; and self-sacrifice, and loss to the uttermost; the high recklessness of exalted devotion which does not count the cost." Any mention of slavery or emancipation was conspicuously absent.1 For many scholars, this event typifies the robust commemorative impulse undertaken by both Union and Confederate veterans celebrating newfound [End Page 264] nationalism in the wake of civil strife—an impulse that necessarily minimized antebellum sectionalism and war causation. Scholars focusing on collective memory and emphasizing sectional reunification contend that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, regimental and state monument dedications, patriotic speeches, personal narratives, "Blue-Gray" reunions, and even combined support for the American war effort against Spain in 1898 yielded a triumphal, national, and, most important, a reconciled version of Civil War memory. Veterans selectively drew from the past to validate the present. In so doing, they left sectionalism behind.2 A conventional interpretation illustrating the shortcomings of national reconciliation has emerged from the growing body of memory scholarship. Many have concluded that the dominant themes of war commemoration marginalized issues concerning slavery and emancipation; white Northern and Southern proponents of war commemoration welcomed reconciliation at the expense of racial change. Edward Tabor Linenthal's analysis of American battlefields, for example, examines Civil War commemorations through the lens of "tacit forgetfulness" and characterizes the "elaborate rituals of reconciliation" as a "moral myopia that ignored the real legacy of the [Civil War]." Similarly, Gaines M. Foster, in his study of Confederate memory, laments that the "sense of triumph derived from [the 1913 reunion at Gettysburg] involved little that had been at issue in the war," and Stuart McConnell's work on Union veterans reminds readers that "the question of blacks and slavery received scant mention in celebrations of the war's outcome."3 [End Page 265] The most eloquently expressed account of the implications surrounding the supposed enthusiastic and widespread support for national reconciliation appears in David W. Blight's capstone work, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Blight examines how participants at events geared toward reconciliation, such as the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion, did in fact ignore the principal issues leading to war and the Union war aim of emancipation. White supremacists and reconciliationists, Blight argues, "locked arms" and by the "turn of the century delivered a segregated memory of the Civil War on Southern terms." He concludes, "Forces of reconciliation overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture [and] the inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race."4 While painting a distinctly darker portrait of reconciliation than many of their predecessors, these recent analyses resemble works such as Paul H. Buck's 1937 publication, The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900 . Although a celebratory study venerating the "positive influences" paving the way for the "promise of ultimate peace" and applauding the breakdown of sectional animosity during the postwar years, Buck's work otherwise anticipates future scholarship. He admits that reconciliation ushered in a "period where [black people] would no longer figure as the ward of the nation to be singled out for special guardianship or peculiar treatment." Buck pays tribute to reconciliation but questions...

Letters to the Editor

To the Editor: I have just received your October 2006 edition and find it lacking in balance as usual. Your book review section always contains slams at the South and southern history. Attention is especially called to the review of The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest. First of all the very title of the book is in a way scurrilous enough, but then your reviewer goes far beyond in suggesting there is a great debate as to whether any celebration of the Confederacy is appropriate. Let me tell you, we in the Confederate community will decide what is appropriate regarding our history and heritage. General Forrest was one of the most significant figures and yes heroes of the War for Southern Independence. No denigration of the man will ever diminish his status in history. By the way, the claptrap about a massacre at Fort Pillow is utter nonsense . All of Lincoln’s war could be so categorized, but it is a false charge against Forrest to say that he conducted a massacre when in fact he took numerous black prisoners at the fort. It seems to me that The Alabama Review should say good things about our state and the South. LEONARD WILSON Commander, Alabama Division Sons of Confederate Veterans To the Editor: I appreciate The Alabama Review giving me the opportunity to respond to Mr. Wilson’s letter. Let me start off by saying that I have no control over the title of the books I am asked to review. One would have to contact the authors for their reasoning in the naming the volume. However, The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest is an apt title since the book is a history not of Forrest himself but of the legends, myths, and popular images of the man over the years. Letters to the Editor T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 160 As for Confederate memorialization and celebration, a close reading of my actual words and the book in question will reveal that I am not suggesting that the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or any southern heritage group cannot or should not celebrate the Confederate past. I am instead pointing out the obvious truth that there is a regional and indeed nationwide debate concerning the appropriateness of such celebrations. Mr. Wilson has surely noticed that all across the South there are challenges to the display of Confederate battle flags, Confederate holidays, and Confederate monuments . I agree with him that southern heritage groups have the right to advocate their position on how the Confederacy is to be remembered. However, other groups such as the NAACP have an equal right to advocate their position as well. Finally, in regard to the Fort Pillow affair, a careful examination of the facts leads virtually every scholar of the Civil War to the obvious conclusion that, although Forrest may not have ordered his men to refuse to take black prisoners, many of them did indeed execute black soldiers attempting to surrender. To say otherwise is to ignore the huge body of evidence which is available to anyone interested enough to sift through it. In conclusion, I would like to add that I applaud Mr. Wilson for his love of the South. I, too, am a southerner, and I am very proud of my region and sensitive to unfair portrayals often found in the media. However, I am open to honest and constructive criticism of my home, its past, and the Confederacy’s place in that past, especially if it aids in a better understanding of our history. John D. Fowler Kennesaw State University Editorial note: Except for corrections of spelling and other purely formal matters, letters to the editor are printed as received. ...

Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior, Conservative Statesman (review)

Reviewed by: Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior, Conservative Statesman Justin Nystrom Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior, Conservative Statesman. By Walter Brian Cisco. (Dulles, Va.: Brassey’s Inc., 2004. Pp. 399. $35.00.) After many years of neglect, there has been a recent groundswell of interest in the life of Wade Hampton III, South Carolina's most iconic figure of the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Walter Brian Cisco's new biography comes hot on the heels of Ed Longacre's Gentleman and Solider: A Biography of Wade Hampton III (2003), and it is quite possible that these two works are only the beginning of an overall reevaluation of Hampton's place in nineteenth-century American history. In a public career that spanned over four decades, Hampton had some hand in almost every key political issue of both regional and national significance. He had been one of the South's wealthiest antebellum planters, a Confederate general, a Redeemer, and a New South politician. As such, an astute biography of Hampton [End Page 80] has the potential to tell us much about the experience of elite Southern whites during their convulsive journey from slaveholding antebellum days to the dawning of the New South. Cisco clearly set out to produce an exhaustively detailed portrait of Hampton, and in this regard he has succeeded handsomely. Readers will not go wanting for a lack of information on Hampton's genealogy, family anecdotes, or wartime exploits. The author portrays Hampton as a man of impeccable moral rectitude, courtly honor, dash, and political sagacity. According to Cisco, Hampton was a paternalistic and kind slaveholder, adored by slaves, admired by his peers, and feared by scoundrels of all stripes. During the war, the Carolinian was the forgotten genius among Lee's lieutenants. Because he lacked a West Point education and a Virginia pedigree, the sober and heroic Hampton languished under the flamboyant and even irresponsible leadership of the young J. E. B. Stuart. In peace, argues Cisco, Hampton represented the voice of reason and principle. Equally revered by freedmen and Confederate veterans, Hampton ultimately championed the redemption of South Carolina through the Red Shirt campaign. In his final phase of public service, Hampton fought the good fight against the race-baiting bigotry of "pitchfork" Ben Tillman and the upcountry lowlifes who stood incapable of understanding his white aristocratic vision of racial harmony. Without question, Cisco's treatment of Hampton's war years is the book's strongest component. As a solider, Hampton has long stood in the shadow of other cavalry commanders such as Stuart, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and even John Hunt Morgan. Cisco ably chronicles Hampton's ongoing feuds with Stuart, Robert E. Lee, and even Jefferson Davis—disagreements that had as much to do with Hampton's desire to defend South Carolina from invasion as they did with overall strategy. Like so many tales of the Civil War, this story is full of daring feats, tragedy, and personal sacrifice. Unfortunately, Cisco's work on Reconstruction bears the dated stamp of Dunning school scholarship. The Republican government of South Carolina certainly had tragic flaws, but Cisco's characterization of it as a "coalition of blacks, opportunists, and turncoats" (189), as well as "philistines" (190), will undoubtedly strike many readers as being a bit over the top. In sum, this portrait of Hampton borders on infallibility, if not sainthood, no doubt due to the author's strong admiration of his subject. Unfortunately, such hagiography, combined with a preference for secondary sources on Reconstruction published before 1950, undermines the impact of Cisco's assessment and will undoubtedly limit his audience to those already inclined to agree with his conclusions. This is a shame not only because many valid themes are obscured [End Page 81] by the author's presentation, but because a more nuanced approach to Hampton would have undoubtedly increased our understanding of Southern politics, race, and the challenges faced by the planter class in the second half of the nineteenth century. Justin Nystrom Virginia Tech Copyright © 2007 The Kent State University Press

Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the Civil War Alan K. Lamm Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the Civil War. By David J. Eicher. (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2006. Pp. 368. $27.95). Why did the Confederacy lose the Civil War? That is a question that has intrigued historians for years and has led to the publication of many fine works such as Why the South Lost the Civil War (1986) by Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still Jr., and The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat (1997) by Gary W. Gallagher, to name but two. Now David J. Eicher has joined the discussion with a well-written new book. Eicher sides with the school of thought that concludes that the Confederacy lost largely due to internal pressures and divisions. That conclusion is not a new one, but he has added to our understanding by fleshing out the people and personalities involved. At times, the book tends to drift off into distraction, such as an early section that spends too much time describing the fight at Fort Sumter. But Eicher finally gets back on point by showing how the confusion at Sumter over who was able to offer terms to Major Anderson was perhaps a preview of the infighting to come. From there he continues and discusses the tensions within the Confederate War Department, the Cabinet, general officers, conscription, the city of Richmond, and so forth. As far as new information, Eicher includes [End Page 91] little, but again his focus on so many aspects and his creative telling of the story is interesting, such as in the case of food shortages in Richmond and the high-handed tactics of Gen. John Winder, Provost Marshal, and his agents in arresting people, which he describes with telling effect. The author's telling of the story from various vantage points, such as from the highest levels (Jefferson Davis, Robert Toombs, etc.) to the lowest (Sgt. John Worsham of the 21st Virginia), gives the work a more complete dimension and makes the familiar arguments such as Jefferson Davis's "thin skin" and tendency toward micromanaging more human and understandable. Indeed, the book at times seems to be composed of little biographies that Eicher skillfully weaves together and holds in place by his theme. In the end, he shows how men of great ego and personality worked against the Jefferson Davis government due to their own short-sighted self-interests. Finally, the book ends on a strong note in the epilogue, where Eicher discusses the revisionism that took place almost immediately after the war ended. That revisionism promoted a view of unity within the Confederacy, as well as the theme that the South lost only because of overwhelming Yankee numbers, conclusions supported by the Southern Historical Society Papers and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. And the postlude is enlightening as well because it describes what happened to the key participants after the war, a story not always told. As noted, the strength of the book is the great character sketches of familiar and not-so-familiar politicians and generals, and Eicher tries to show the tensions, squabbles, and debates that caused internal divisions within the Confederacy. One wonders, though, could not the same be said of the Union side? Perhaps one should read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln for that answer. Alan K. Lamm Mount Olive College Copyright © 2007 The Kent State University Press

"The Boys Will Have to Fight the Battles without Me": The Making of Sam Davis, "Boy Hero of the Confederacy"

On recent Confederate Memorial Day at the Tennessee State Capitol, the General Joseph E. Johnston Camp No. 28, Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), performed pathetic little ceremony under the portico of the antebellum building. A small band of die-hards, their numbers were more than doubled by curious tourists, conscripted children, and an entertainment troupe called the Dixie Picks. A history professor from local community college began proceedings with an angry and passionate recitation of Father Abram Joseph Ryan's poem the battle flag. Turning southwards, the speaker pointed the statue of the Confederate martyr Sam Davis, erected on Capitol grounds in 1909, and proclaimed that the story of the boy was a living reminder of the valor of your flesh and blood. Executed by the Union army in 1863 for scouting behind enemy lines, Sam Davis had become folk hero by the end of the nineteenth century; almost Christ-like in his representation of duty, bravery, and honor, he embodied the South's idealized image of itself during the crisis of the 1860s. The martyr's honor, however, was besieged at the turn of the twenty-first century by those who wished associate the memory of his matchless glory with the shame of slavery. Within fifteen feet of the Confederate statue, the speaker's friends had thrown tarpaulin over simple monument erected in 1999 by the Black Caucus of Tennessee state legislators the victims of the Middle Passage who died en route slavery in the Americas. The dedication of this simple granite block, set beside Scarlet Oak sapling, had infuriated members of the SCV who called the monument's proximate placement the Davis statue a foolish little sophomoric prank. In testy exchange of opinions in the press, spokesperson for the Black Caucus claimed no intent to disrespect Confederate soldier or have it overshadow him in any way and said that that the location for the monument slavery's victims was determined by horticultural factors alone. Nonetheless, on Confederate Memorial Day the monument was covered erase any suggestion that slavery was part of the secessionists' cause. (1) Once defiant public celebration for southern whites, Confederate Memorial Day has never been moment for ambivalent thinking about southern identity and the meaning of the Civil War. The days when governors eulogized the Confederate cause, and the most prominent citizens jockeyed for position on the speaker's podium, are long gone. But though the crowds no longer come, time has not diluted the moral imperative--the passionate certitude--of Confederate symbolism, which, like Corinthian columns, continues dominate the temple of the South's historical imagination. As readers of Southern Cultures are well aware, however, the white South's public commemoration of the Civil War era tells highly selective, carefully orchestrated, and incomplete story of the service, suffering, and sacrifice of Americans during the terrible crisis of the 1860s. In recent years, scholars of the American Civil War era--taking cue from historians of the First World War and the Holocaust--have moved into the study of historical memory both explore how we have come know what we think happened during the 1860s and reconceptualize the questions we ask about one of the most critical events in U.S. history. In southern context, the move into memory studies seems especially appropriate because so many popular assumptions and sources about the war and its aftermath continue be stained with resilient dye of sentimentalism, white supremacy, and martial nostalgia. (2) The commemorative history of Sam Davis is case study in collective memory making as part of the reconstruction of white southern identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; these memories and identities, moreover, are sustained and perpetuated today by many white southerners. There is puzzling lack of ambiguity in the commemoration of Davis. …

Soldier of Southwestern Virginia: The Civil War Letters of Captain John Preston Sheffey, and: Lone Star Confederate: A Gallant and Good Soldier of the Fifth Texas Infantry (review)

Reviewed by: Soldier of Southwestern Virginia: The Civil War Letters of Captain John Preston Sheffey, and: Lone Star Confederate: A Gallant and Good Soldier of the Fifth Texas Infantry Joseph G. Dawson III Soldier of Southwestern Virginia: The Civil War Letters of Captain John Preston Sheffey. Edited by James I. Robertson Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Pp. 239. $39.95.) Lone Star Confederate: A Gallant and Good Soldier of the Fifth Texas Infantry. Edited by George Skoch and Mark W. Perkins. Foreword by Robert K. Krick. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. Pp. 163. $27.50.) Civil War soldier memoirs, diaries, and letters abound. Historians continue to find them in archives and attics, and readers and libraries continue to buy them. These two accounts from Confederate veterans, one a Virginian and the other a Texan, provide additional valuable personal glimpses into wartime service. John Sheffey served as a captain in the 8th Virginia Cavalry, riding in the Shenandoah Valley and other western counties of the state. Routinely on the periphery of the war's major campaigns, Sheffey wrote more than ninety letters, mostly to his fiancée, whom he married in 1863. While not involved in recounting strategic battles, Sheffey provided other worthwhile points, ranging from support for secession in 1861 to his experience as a prisoner of war at Camp Chase, Ohio, beginning in August 1864. Captain Sheffey was not bashful about giving his opinions of leaders, people, and circumstances of his day. For instance, he characterized Virginia governor Henry Wise as "tyrannical" (44) and President Abraham Lincoln as "vested with absolute dictatorial powers" (148). By 1861 it appeared to Sheffey that Northerners and Southerners were "two separate and distinct peoples" and thus he would not support a "reconstruction" of the sections (15). He found ways to compliment Confederate general John B. Floyd as an "able" (86) aggressive commander feared by northerners (72–73), but he also criticized Floyd for pushing this troops too hard (86). Sheffey disparaged Union general William S. Rosecrans, misspelling his name "Rosecrantz" (43). The captain had nothing good to write about German immigrants; they were to him "the villainous Dutch with their outlandish lingo!" (218). Sheffey's letters are a pleasure to read and demonstrate how a well-educated Southerner infused his writing with his knowledge. Sheffey made numerous references to poetry and literature. He found connections with the Bible and with events and figures from ancient times. He also observed potential links between his war and the American Revolution, characterizing his unit's winter hardships with the Continental army at Valley Forge and their crossing of a river with George Washington's famous crossing of the Delaware. In an excellent editing job, James Robertson's informative footnotes explain Sheffey's references to readers from another century. In contrast to Sheffey, Texan Robert Campbell served with one of the Confederacy's most famous units, the Texas Brigade, commanded by John Bell Hood. [End Page 211] Campbell's regiment, the 5th Texas Infantry, fought in major battles, including Second Manassas, Gaines's Mill, and Chickamauga. A few years after the war ended, Campbell put pen to paper to recount his wartime experiences, including being wounded six times. Some of those wounds took him out of action for weeks. The memoir stresses events from his enlistment at the age of seventeen through 1862 and so editors George Skoch and Mark Perkins supplement it with wartime letters. Campbell received part of his education in Louisiana and his travels (often by rail) took him from Texas to Virginia. The editors support Campbell's writings with good maps and helpful endnotes, identifying most people, places, and events, but one deficiency is the editors' failure to include in the index Campbell's references to Louisiana and some of its towns, including New Orleans (7), Baton Rouge (87), and Shreveport (87–88). Campbell included many worthwhile observations in his memoir and letters. He made numerous references to the tremendous vocal enthusiasm of his regiment's soldiers, emphasizing the physical release that "fierce yells and shouts" gave the Texans (67) in contrast to the Yankees' "tame 'huza' 'huza'" (68). Desertion was mentioned only a few times, but...

The Correspondence of Sarah Morgan and Francis Warrington Dawson, with Selected Editorials Written by Sarah Morgan for the Charleston News and Courier (review)

Reviewed by: The Correspondence of Sarah Morgan and Francis Warrington Dawson, with Selected Editorials Written by Sarah Morgan for the Charleston News and Courier Jonathan M. Berkey The Correspondence of Sarah Morgan and Francis Warrington Dawson, with Selected Editorials Written by Sarah Morgan for the Charleston News and Courier. Edited by Giselle Roberts. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Pp. 274. $39.95.) Readers of this journal know Sarah Morgan as the member of an elite Louisiana family who recorded her Civil War exploits in her diary, most recently published as The Civil War Diary of Sarah Morgan (1991). Giselle Roberts has edited a collection of postwar correspondence and editorials that explores Sarah Morgan's worldview in the years following Confederate defeat. The book effectively illustrates Morgan's struggle to reconcile her antebellum expectations of Southern womanhood with the realities of life in the postwar South. The refugee life Sarah chronicled in her Civil War journal continued after the war. With the family home in Baton Rouge in ruins, Sarah and her mother moved into the South Carolina household of Sarah's brother James. When James married in early 1873, Sarah felt unwelcome in the household, and James and his new wife did little to discourage this notion. About this time, Frank Dawson, a recently widowed newspaperman and Confederate veteran, began corresponding with Sarah. Hoping to alleviate her plight, Dawson boldly proposed that Sarah become a correspondent for the Charleston News and Courier. Although she was ambivalent about taking the position, Sarah accepted Dawson's offer and wrote more than seventy articles during 1873. By the fall of that year, Sarah had determined to move out of her brother's household and succeeded in securing lodgings in [End Page 199] Charleston. Dawson's persistent pursuit of Sarah paid off in January 1874, when he married her. Giselle Roberts draws upon more than 190 letters and numerous editorials to document Sarah's writing career and her relationship with Frank during 1873. The collection reveals Sarah's uncertainty about her place in the postwar social order. Many of her editorials criticized Southerners' view of women's social roles. Sarah stressed that unmarried women could contribute to their families and society, and she urged Southerners to provide opportunities for poor women to support themselves through honorable occupations. Sarah and Frank's personal correspondence reflects and complicates Sarah's editorial persona. While she publicly championed honorable work for dependent women, she remained ambivalent about her own career as a newspaper correspondent. She was loath to reveal her identity to others, even when they praised her editorials. Her relationship with Frank only added to her ambivalence. Frank's letters were a mixture of business details and personal proclamations that often made Sarah uncomfortable. Throughout their correspondence, Frank pledged his love and suggested marriage. Sarah parried his advances but remained reticent about his future prospects. Roberts has done a fine job editing this collection. She groups the editorials topically in chapters that roughly correspond to the chronology of the letters. Most pieces feature a brief introduction placing each document in its proper context. Roberts references the many literary allusions the couple used that might be unfamiliar to modern readers. Few of the people mentioned in letters or editorials escape identification. Roberts's editorial prowess cannot overcome the one significant weakness of the collection, however. None of Sarah's letters survives between January and June 1873. While the reader gains some sense of Sarah's point of view by inference from Frank's letters, the absence of her own correspondence weakens the first half of the book; Sarah's first letter, dated July 25th, appears on page 141. The relative paucity of primary sources by Southern civilians during Reconstruction makes this flaw less glaring. The Correspondence of Sarah Morgan and Francis Warrington Dawson contributes to the historiographical debate over how the Civil War affected Southern women. Sarah's correspondence and editorials suggest that the war did not lead women to embrace new opportunities, but rather forced them to forge new identities by reconciling their antebellum views of Southern womanhood with the realities of Reconstruction. This collection will not disappoint readers interested in rituals of courtship and the...

Written in Stone: Gender, Race, and the Heyward Shepherd Memorial

After nearly a decade of struggle with local authorities and the surrounding black community, on the afternoon of October 10, 1931, the United Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated a memorial to Heyward Shepherd, a black man and first victim of John Brown's 1859 raid, in the small town of Harpers Ferry. The ceremony opened with a welcoming address by Henry McDonald, the white president of a local black college. McDonald described the dedication not as a day to "remember discord" of the past, but rather highlighted the monument as a tribute to "fidelity to duty, faithfulness in times of stress, [and] vigorous defense of honor." He encouraged black men and women to see that whites were indeed willing to share their advantages with all those races who were submissive to the will and desires of whites. Matthew Page Andrews, a white historian from nearby Baltimore, was more explicit than McDonald in his efforts to invoke the proper black-white relations in regard to the events of Harpers Ferry and slavery. By contrasting Brown's "vociferous exit" to Shepherd's "quiet passing," he implied that blacks should imitate the faithful and humble freedman rather than the violent, crazy Brown. "Heyward Shepherd may be used to exemplify . . . what America has done for transplanted Africa," he argued, insisting that America had served as a civilizing force on the Africans, while Brown had attempted to "uncivilize" the race.1 [End Page 117] Although some members of the African American community believed that the monument would serve to bridge the sectional gap and increase the "very best feeling between the white and colored races," the black press overwhelmingly expressed displeasure with the monument and its dedication. The Pittsburgh Courier printed an editorial by Jesse Max Barber, president of the John Brown Memorial Association, denouncing a memorial to a man who "didn't do a single thing to merit a monument." Barber challenged the speakers' comments regarding Brown and accused the South of "still hanker[ing] for the filthy institution of slavery." Perhaps most significantly, the Afro-American referred to the memorial as the "Uncle Tom Slave Monument" and proclaimed that Brown was not the criminal "rebel daughters" and Andrews had implied. It applauded Brown's use of force as "the only way" in which slavery could be ended and celebrated his violence in opposition to Shepherd's "cowardliness and ignorance." Noting that many of the speeches were not heard because of the laughter of the crowds, the paper concluded that "most of the better thinking people of Harpers Ferry look[ed] upon the whole thing with disgust." According to them, Brown, not Shepherd, remained the hero of the "better" black men and women.2 West Virginia, a border state during the Civil War, seemed an unlikely site for a faithful slave monument organized by descendants of Confederate veterans. But, in fact, the site was quite symbolic, representing a literal border between white and black memories of Brown and his raid. The notion that memory was (and still is) contested is not a new idea; historians such as David Blight and Kirk Savage have demonstrated the ways in which Northerners and Southerners, white and black, contested Civil War memory through veterans' reunions, memorial celebrations, and the construction of monuments. But the Heyward Shepherd monument and the controversy [End Page 118] that surrounded it serves as a rare instance in which white and black memories overtly confronted one another and one in which white "victory" was not guaranteed. Framed in terms of gender, race, and heroism, the debate reflected much larger ideas about slavery, race relations, and resistance to violence in the early twentieth century.3 In the early morning hours of October 17, 1859, John Brown and twenty-two of his followers seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in hope of starting an insurrection that would attract slaves from across the region. After capturing the arsenal and cutting...

Confederate Veteran Pensions, Occupation, and Men's Retirement in the New South

Confederate Veteran Pensions, Occupation, and Men's Retirement in the New South

Honoring the Civil War dead: commemoration and the problem of reconciliation

By the end of the Civil War, fatalities from that conflict had far exceeded previous American experience, devastating families and communities alike. As John Neff shows, commemorating the 620,000 lives lost proved to be a persistent obstacle to the hard work of reuniting the nation, as every memorial observation compelled painful recollections of the war. Neff contends that the significance of the Civil War dead has been largely overlooked and that the literature on the war has so far failed to note how commemorations of the dead provide a means for both expressing lingering animosities and discouraging reconciliation. Commemoration--from private mourning to the often extravagant public remembrances exemplified in cemeteries, monuments, and Memorial Day observances--provided Americans the quintessential forum for engaging the war's meaning. Additionally, Neff suggests a special significance for the ways in which the commemoration of the dead shaped Northern memory. In his estimation, Northerners were just as active in myth-making after the war. Crafting a Victorious myth that was every bit as resonant and powerful as the much better-known Lost Cause myth cherished by Southerners, the North asserted through commemorations the existence of a loyal and reunified nation long before it was actually a fact. Neff reveals that as Northerners and Southerners honored their separate dead, they did so in ways that underscore the limits of reconciliation between Union and Confederate veterans, whose mutual animosities lingered for many decades after the end of the war. Ultimately, Neff argues that the process of reunion and reconciliation that has been so much the focus of recent literature either neglects or dismisses the persistent reluctance of both Northerners and Southerners to forgive and forget, especially where their war dead were concerned. Despite reunification, the continuing imperative of commemoration reflects a more complex resolution to the war than is even now apparent. His book provides a compelling account of this conflict that marks a major contribution to our understanding of the war and its many meanings.