Confederate War Research Articles

Labourer, Maid, Slave, Spy

This paper examines the role played by Black spies working on behalf of the Union during the American Civil War. It looks specifically at the Richmond-based Van Lew spy ring, and the integral role played by Black spies in many of its intelligence gathering efforts as well as secret operations designed to impede the Confederate war effort. It makes the case that the contribution of these Black spies was essential for the Van Lew spy ring to become the most successful secret service of the latter half of the American Civil War.

Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers by John M. Sacher

Reviewed by: Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers by John M. Sacher Keith S. Bohannon (bio) Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers. John M. Sacher. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-0-8071-7621-4. 296 pp., cloth, $45.00. John M. Sacher’s Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers is the first book-length study of the topic since Albert B. Moore’s Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy appeared in 1924. Moore, like some later scholars, wrote that conscription was anathema to ordinary Confederates. Recent historians like Paul Escott and David Williams who emphasize internal factors in explaining the Confederacy’s collapse also argue that conscription greatly exacerbated class tensions. The Twenty-Negro Law passed by the Confederate Congress in 1862, these historians claim, resulted in the widespread belief among white Southerners that they were engaged in a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Sacher, in contrast, claims that conscription policy is “best considered as a lens to analyze competing loyalties in the Confederacy” (6). White Southerners believed in states’ rights, Sacher argues, but also acknowledged that their national government needed additional power in times of war. Many people, including soldiers, might have admired the stern efficiency of army-run conscription but also realized that a civilian-run Bureau of Conscription would provide more protection for civil liberties. Civilians wanted conscription enforced on an equitable basis, believing that the country must meet military demands while also fulfilling the needs of the home front. Sacher’s interpretation of the debate over conscription and its enforcement is based on deep research into a wide array of government documents, newspapers, personal papers, and memoirs. While the study encompasses the entire Confederacy, Sacher pays particular attention to Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, in part because the surviving records related to conscription from these states are more complete than others. He also analyzes how the governors of Georgia and North Carolina offered some of the most outspoken criticism of conscription, while also considering themselves loyal Confederates. Historians who argue that conscription undermined the Confederate war effort, Sacher rightfully points out, often make two key errors. They fail to see that conscription was a policy that evolved over the course of the Confederacy’s brief [End Page 87] existence. Sacher believes that the South’s conscription policy represented a “give-and-take” among various stakeholders, including the Confederate president, Congress, the army, governors, state judges, prospective conscripts, and ordinary Confederates (202). Leaders listened to the complaints of soldiers and civilians, writes Sacher, striving to make the enforcement of conscription equitable. The other major mistake historians make is to conflate criticism of Confederate policies like conscription with a lack of support for the cause of Southern independence. Sacher instead provides ample evidence to suggest that while Confederates fiercely debated aspects of conscription, a majority of white Southerners saw the policy as the best means to mobilize manpower to win the Civil War. Politicians such as Jefferson Davis and Georgia’s Governor Joseph E. Brown might argue about whether the policy of conscription violated states’ rights, but Sacher says that those involved in both sides of the debate had the same shared ultimate goal of Confederate independence. The final chapter of Sacher’s book includes a detailed analysis of the incomplete records and figures for conscription in the Confederacy. Sacher points out that while there are records of conscripts brought into the CS Army by the Bureau of Conscription, it is far more difficult to assess conscription that took place outside of the scope of the bureau. Ultimately, Sacher concludes that conscription did not completely strip the Southern home front of white men. Instead, enrolling officers left a sizeable minority of men at home, “as medically unfit, in exempt occupations, detailed, or as principals [who had hired substitutes]” (196). John Sacher’s well-written and well-researched Confederate Conscription is a welcome addition to the scant body of existing scholarship on an important topic. It offers a convincing counterargument to recent studies that portray Confederate conscription as a failed policy that alienated ordinary white Southerners and contributed to the Confederacy’s defeat, a...

The Rhetoric of Insurrection and Fear: The Politics of Slave Management in Confederate Georgia

The Rhetoric of Insurrection and Fear: The Politics of Slave Management in Confederate Georgia David T. Gleeson (bio) Just after the first Confederate conscription law passed in April 1862, the governor of Georgia, Joseph E. Brown, wrote to President Jefferson Davis complaining about the usurpation of gubernatorial powers over military enlistment. He noted that “in portions of our State where the slave population is heavy almost the entire white male population capable of bearing arms (except the overseers on plantations) are now in the military service of the Confederacy.” But since overseers “over eighteen and under thirty-five” were now liable to be drafted into the army, it meant that “the peace and safety of helpless women and children must be imperiled for want of protection against bands of idle slaves, who must be left to roam over the country without restraint.” In June 1862, as the Confederate central government began drafting men, Brown told Davis the conscription law now left those “helpless women and children, subject to massacre by negro insurrection.”1 With this rhetoric of massacre common in Confederate discourse, the dominant historiographical view is that fear of servile insurrection grew exponentially during the Civil War and undermined the Confederate war effort. Conscription, for example, “generated profound fears of slave revolt, which combined with a sense of the particular [End Page 237] vulnerability of white women.” President Abraham Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862 increased this “dread” of insurrection, and fear “reached a crescendo” by the end of that year. These fears and the burdens of managing slavery with so many white men in the Confederate army contributed to “a practical pacifism born of exhaustion and despair,” seriously damaging the Confederate cause.2 The Confederacy’s raison d’être, slavery, had quickly become its Achilles’ heel. The Civil War therefore turned into “the largest slave rebellion in modern history: a rebellion that began as flight from plantations and farms,” resulting “in tens of thousands of former slaves taking up arms to help the Union army crush the Confederacy and complete the destruction of slavery.”3 This rebellion began as soon as Lincoln’s election to the presidency: “Almost everywhere . . . slaves’ willingness to fight their masters increased.” Resistance eventually became a “war between slaves and masters on Confederate plantations”; and among Mississippi and Louisiana slave owners, “few doubted that the [Civil War] had become a slave rebellion.”4 The consensus among leading historians of American slavery, then, is that slavery “proved to be [the Confederacy’s] weakest point.”5 As Armstead L. Robinson has succinctly put it, the Confederacy’s self-declared “cornerstone” transformed into its “millstone,” dragging the would-be nation down to defeat.6 The ultimate conclusion drawn is that servile insurrection on the home front, broadly defined, and white fear of it played a major role in destroying the Confederacy. In Confederate Georgia, however, there was no internal war between owners and the enslaved. Rather, the real threat to slavery was the external one of Union armed forces’ incursion, invasion, and occupation. [End Page 238] Nevertheless, as in other parts of the Confederacy, managing slavery in wartime Georgia did move “through the various levels of power and sovereignty,” creating a new politicization among white citizens. The increasing power of the central government and of individual Confederate states, as well as the burdens of service and sacrifice these governments required from civilians, led to an unprecedented increase in letters to government officials and leaders seeking “protection” from the demands of war.7 Reflecting this desire for protection, ordinary white men and women in Georgia flooded Governor Brown with correspondence. Some of their letters, especially in early 1861, dealt with organizing the military affairs of the state, but individual requests for help and support came quickly and only increased as the conflict proceeded. The array of complaints was vast and included everything from the high price of food to Confederate taxes and neighbors using grain for distilling whiskey instead of making flour.8 An examination of all these letters, however, indicates that, despite some initial concerns, real servile insurrection fears were rare. Nevertheless, individuals still used the rhetoric of slave violence to reinforce personal...

Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country by Fay A. Yarbrough

Reviewed by: Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country by Fay A. Yarbrough Christine A. Rizzi Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country. By Fay A. Yarbrough. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. [xii], 268. $32.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6511-5.) Fay A. Yarbrough’s latest book, Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country, provides a much-needed corrective to scholarship on Native experiences during the Civil War era. Yarbrough’s research does not focus on land loss, military tactics, or outside factors that influenced Native alliances with either the United States or the Confederacy. Rather, this new work highlights the internal debates and decisions that led to the Choctaw Nation’s early and consistent alliance with the Confederate States of America. Informed by sources ranging from military records to Choctaw policy, personal correspondence, and oral histories, Yarbrough’s study compellingly demonstrates that internal demands for the maintenance of slavery and the strengthening of tribal sovereignty drove the nation to support the Confederate war effort in 1861. The book provides important context by opening with two chapters that examine the role of slavery in the Choctaw Nation both before and after removal. Yarbrough demonstrates that, rather than feeling exclusively outside pressure to take on Euro-American ideas about property, race, and enslavement, Choctaws “adopted the practice of racialized slavery . . . in a manner that preserved Choctaw identity,” maintaining certain aspects of their traditional livelihoods while also building bonds with white southerners that they [End Page 149] hoped would insulate the nation from land theft (p. 48). Even after that possibility faded in the wake of removal, the Choctaws strengthened the institution of slavery in order to enshrine their own sovereignty and distinctiveness. According to Yarbrough, Choctaws’ demands for the protection of slavery and sovereignty directly informed their enthusiastic support for the Confederacy. The linchpin of her book is arguably the third chapter, which examines the internal debates within the nation regarding a potential Confederate alliance. Yarbrough’s close examination of Choctaw and Confederate treaty negotiations shows that the decision to form this alliance was far from “a foregone conclusion” (p. 111). Instead, Choctaw leaders saw “that the Confederacy proposed principles that were more in line with Choctaw goals than with federal ones” (p. 91). Yarbrough also shows that “the concrete benefits offered by the Confederate government” proved far more compelling to the Choctaws (p. 112). She demonstrates that ordinary Choctaw men and women enthusiastically supported the alliance, providing martial and material support to the Confederate war effort. Enlistment records, government policies, and personal correspondence suggest that Choctaw men willingly enlisted in the Confederate forces, especially in response to crises that threatened the status quo of slavery and sovereignty. Yarbrough further argues that Choctaw men were able to preserve traditional ideas about masculinity through their service in the war effort. The book closes with a chapter examining Reconstruction in Indian Country, comparing and contrasting the Choctaw experience with that of the larger postwar South. While the Choctaws similarly resisted efforts to incorporate freedpeople into the body politic, freedpeople within the nation had more immediate access to land than did their counterparts in the former Confederate states. According to Yarbrough, issues of kinship, sovereignty, and traditional ideas of labor and land led to the creation of complex policies regarding freedpeople in the Choctaw Nation. Choctaw Confederates succeeds mostly because of the careful use of oral histories and “side-streaming” in order to flesh out a story many considered difficult to tell due to a dearth of sources (p. 9). Using oral histories from the Indian Pioneer History Collection and ex-slave narratives recorded by the Works Progress Administration in Oklahoma, Yarbrough is able to tell this story from multiple perspectives, including those of enslaved people in Indian Territory. She uses sources from other Indian nations to supplement sources from the Choctaw Nation itself, allowing her to build a more detailed and nuanced understanding of how slavery and sovereignty informed decision making among Native peoples in the Civil War era. Christine A. Rizzi Broward College Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Sustaining the Confederacy: Informal Diplomacy, Anglo-Confederate Relations, and Blockade-Running in the Bahamas

Sustaining the Confederacy: Informal Diplomacy, Anglo-Confederate Relations, and Blockade-Running in the Bahamas Beau Cleland (bio) In early 1862, the acting governor of the Bahamas welcomed the arrival of “numerous strangers from the neighbouring continent,” as Confederates and their supporters flowed into Nassau to open a critical and lucrative trade with the nearby Confederate coast. Their friendly reception in Nassau was not simply an accident of geography.1 In an unlikely triumph of informal Confederate diplomacy, merchants, planters, and ship captains on both sides created ties of trade, self-interest, and genuine sympathy and sustained them against pressure from both the U.S. federal and British imperial governments. It was a diplomacy of personal acquaintance, business relationships, and shipping routes rather than one of formal envoys, and these informal networks gave the Confederacy a rare success in international affairs. By using British colonial partners, the Confederacy’s ad hoc collection of minor officials, merchants, and shipowners pressed claims on the British government, and, through the British, on the Union, in ways that formal diplomats could not. In doing so, this Confederate commercial-diplomatic network formed and protected the blockade-running enterprise that sustained much of the Confederate war effort and created the means [End Page 61] for expatriates and foreign allies to materially aid the rebellion. This Confederate web extended across British America, from Toronto and Halifax to British Honduras and numerous places in between, but it had its greatest success in Nassau. This reassessment of who mattered and what constituted “success” in Confederate diplomacy is important for bringing scholarship on Civil War diplomacy in line with the broader deinstitutionalization of diplomatic history.2 It is also an opportunity to reconsider how and why individuals and subnational groups shaped the course of the war and international relations in the nineteenth century—and to push back against the paradigm of the state as the most important actor, a perspective that underlies even the “new” diplomatic history of the Civil War.3 Whatever the relative claims over state capacity in this era, it was still a time of comparative bureaucratic weakness and agonizingly slow and unreliable communication. We must embrace the trend in histories of empire and sovereignty that deemphasizes the role of the state by decentering the diplomatic history of the war from the State Department or Foreign Office and placing focus on the people who personally shaped the transformation of state policy into action and, perhaps more frequently, vice versa.4 This approach allows us to ask different questions about things like blockade-running. Rather than just assessing how much it helped the Confederacy in material terms, or what it meant for formal diplomacy, we have the opportunity to reassess the actual importance of formal state power, both in blockade-running as well as in the “international” Civil War. The merchants, supercargoes, and minor officials who [End Page 62] conducted the informal diplomacy that enabled blockade-running were but one aspect of a broader universe of filibusters, ad hoc militias, settler colonists, and others who mobilized private resources and violence in behalf of (or in resistance to) empire building in mid-nineteenth-century North America.5 While they have often escaped the notice of historians, these grassroots foreign policy actors deeply affected the course of the Civil War and the shaping of sovereignty and empire. The United States government certainly took notice of the Confederacy’s friends in the Bahamas. Secretary of State William H. Seward noted, “Among those British subjects who were the first to institute a contraband trade with the insurgents, in violation of our laws, and in contempt of the Queen’s proclamation [of neutrality], is a house established in Nassau and Liverpool, under the name of Adderly & Co.” Seward, with undisguised anger, referred to the head of that firm, Henry Adderley, as “a person who is so vicious as to dishonor his own country and send desolation abroad through mine upon the motive of commercial gain.” As Seward informed a British diplomat, “I desire that the British nation may understand that . . . we do not confound the just and the good with the unjust and depraved.”6 Henry Adderley, whom blockade-runners dubbed “King...

Виправлення іменувань речей: примус війни у освіті і суспільному житті

Education reveals itself as an area of priority use of the basic vocabulary of society, and at the same time that is why in the education it is best field to start correcting and refining this vocabulary. The war aims to radically reconsider social values, to abandon unjustified compromises, and the proper way to do this is to correct the names. At one time, with the help of naming, people recorded important characteristics of the world, categorized and classified them, set appropriate markers for vital phenomena and processes. This is reflected, in particular, in the biblical myth of Adam, who gave names to living beings. The Chinese philosopher Confucius had explained and conceptualized the situation of name rectification as a necessary procedure to which society should periodically turn. However, one should not wait until a war or other deep social crisis necessitates the rectification of names – the correction of names should be carried out constantly, as a routine procedure, as an element of the application of critical thinking. However, in contrast to the traditional view of critical thinking, the correction of names also requires faith – to establish those values that are not subject to critical review. In times of war, it is faith in Victory. Correction of names has its bearer – a new generation, whose values were formed by participation in the war. Russia’s current war against Ukraine largely reproduces the value disposition of the Southern Confederate war against the North in the United States in 1861-1865 – important lessons from the war can be learned from this. One of the most important tasks is to properly name evil as evil, to oppose the unanimous public outrage at the desire of the strong to establish themselves at the expense of the weak. The naming of evil as evil opens up the possibility of establishing good as a force, of discovering the economic, political, and military advantages of moral right.

Breaking the Blockade: The Bahamas during the Civil War by Charles D. Ross

Reviewed by: Breaking the Blockade: The Bahamas during the Civil War by Charles D. Ross Stephen D. Engle Breaking the Blockade: The Bahamas during the Civil War. By Charles D. Ross. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Pp. xviii, 235. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-3135-4; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-3134-7.) As the Union and Confederate governments scrambled to put people in the right places to win the Civil War, maintains Charles D. Ross, few could imagine that Nassau, the largest city and capital of the Bahamas, would become a "mixture of Sodom, Gomorrah, and the Dutch tulip craze of the 1600s" thanks [End Page 568] to the transformative wealth that poured into the tiny island between 1861 and 1865 (p. 5). Night and day, the ships rolled in and out of the harbor, generating an illicit trade between the British and the Confederates that not only made islanders richer than they could have imagined but also kept the Confederacy alive. In Breaking the Blockade: The Bahamas during the Civil War, Ross, whose works in the past have enlightened us about technology, acoustical shadows, and gunpowder, now brings forth an underexplored aspect of maritime trade in the Bahamas and its international implications. It is a wartime story that investigates the complex interplay (economic, social, and political) present in a tiny community nearly forgotten in Civil War lore. Torn between economic riches and political loyalty, residents motivated by profits often failed to interfere with a trade that was both lucrative and divisive. In this account, Ross singles out Nassau's pivotal role in participating in a trading system that sustained the Confederate war effort through most of the conflict. What contemporaries characterized as the "Great Carnival" became a wartime history rich in its significance to the people and place of the tiny islands (p. xi). He explores the motivations behind the appreciable growth that transformed into the great wealth that the war brought to these islands, which were ideally situated for the establishment of an oceanic transshipment point. The pro-Confederate population, Ross maintains, turned a blind eye to British neutrality, which allowed massive wealth into the city that not only generated significant internal improvements that left their mark on the local society but also brought crime and corruption. He explores in detail the daily drama that defined the changing culture and describes how local government and business merchants both cooperated and collided in establishing trade and commercial relationships. Yet, as the war endured, and yellow fever epidemics and changing governing structures went in a new direction, the new Bahamian governor was more committed to the United States than to the British, and more committed to following British and international law. However, the Union success by the end of 1864 brought the Great Carnival to an abrupt end, followed two years later by a devastating hurricane that destroyed the island and the wealth generated by the war. Beyond illuminating the international crossroads between the United States, the Bahamas, and the United Kingdom, Ross is perhaps best when he devotes his attention to exploring the daily life of those shaped by the war's transformative life and economic boom. In the streets and shops, he argues, Confederate sympathy existed among the commoners and merchants alike, and the Union's blockade further contributed to the political and cultural mindset that drove them into a greater hostility toward the Union. Deeply and impressively researched in several repositories in the United States, the Bahamas, and the United Kingdom, Breaking the Blockade uses a broad lens and a deft pen to capture an important and compelling story that sheds light on the perils and rewards of blockade-running in the Civil War. Students and enthusiasts alike will find Ross's book to be a model work in every regard, and readers will come away with a better understanding of how and why the Confederacy lasted as long as it did. [End Page 569] Stephen D. Engle Florida Atlantic University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

The Enduring Civil War: Reflections on the Great American Crisis by Gary W. Gallagher

Reviewed by: The Enduring Civil War: Reflections on the Great American Crisis by Gary W. Gallagher Wilson Greene (bio) The Enduring Civil War: Reflections on the Great American Crisis. By Gary W. Gallagher. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 274. Cloth, $34.95; paper, $24.95.) The divide between academic and public history, though in some ways diminishing, retains full expression in studies of the Civil War era. Gary W. Gallagher, the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War Emeritus at the University of Virginia, stands tall among those in academia who have planted their feet firmly in both camps. The Enduring Civil War is an expression of this focus. Gallagher has reprinted, with some modifications, seventy-three short essays, most of which originally appeared in Civil War Times, the most widely circulated of the several topical periodicals aimed at a lay audience. Many of these brief pieces, measuring two or three pages of printed text, reflect themes that Gallagher more fully addresses in book-length studies. Readers conversant with Gallagher's The Confederate War (1997), Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (2008), and The Union War (2011) will find much that is familiar. Gallagher divides the essays into six distinct sections. Several overarching themes emerge throughout his work, irrespective of the specific subject being addressed. Gallagher often acknowledges the tension between history and memory, reminding us of the disparity between what actually happened and how subsequent generations interpret events. In so doing, Gallagher warns against the presentism that infects some historical inquiry. He suggests that good scholarship in the field must blend social, political, and economic history with the military, decrying the tendency by many in each of these disciplines to ignore the larger context. The essays illuminate Gallagher's belief that "narrative, chronology, and biography are essential to forging a true understanding" of the Civil War (9). The essays express Gallagher's fundamental beliefs that slavery-related issues brought on a war, decided by conventional armies that ended in the summer of 1865, resolved the constitutionality of secession, and ended slavery, but left unresolved the question of the equal role of African Americans in society. Gallagher's encyclopedic command of sources provides value to professionals and history buffs alike. Although Gallagher devotes an entire section to "historians and books," many of his most important historiographical contributions are embedded in the essays and their associated notes. His pieces on George Gordon Meade and Henry Hopkins Sibley's New Mexico campaign, among many others, include valuable bibliographies. Some [End Page 132] readers may quibble with the sources Gallagher highlights as essential reads, but few will disagree that Gallagher's command of the era's literature is deficient. Some of the articles navigate historical minefields, propose controversial conclusions, and criticize scholarship the author finds ill-reasoned. Recent studies that position events in the Far West as central to the war fall under Gallagher's disapproving gaze. He assails the "shallowness of the virulently anti-Grant literature," pronouncing one biography "virtually worthless in quality of research and soundness of argument" (57). Defenders of George B. McClellan "match his own soaring flights of self-congratulatory rhetoric untethered to any reasonable assessment of historical evidence" (73). Among Gallagher's more debatable propositions are his belief in the exaggerated significance of the Vicksburg and Gettysburg campaigns, that Jubal Early's 1864 performance in the Shenandoah Valley compared favorably with that of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson two years earlier, and that Robert E. Lee's operational preference for the bloody offensive was justified by the expectations of the southern populace. I found his argument that the Seven Days battles formed the true turning point of the war unpersuasive. His essay entitled "The War Was Won in the East" is not only controversial, but also reflective of Gallagher's unapologetic focus on the eastern portion of the conflict. The vast majority of his literary references are to sources focused on the Virginia theater to the exclusion of the many important titles pertaining to the armies in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia. His section entitled "Testimony from Participants" omits articulate...

Hopkins and Lanier: A Transatlantic Note

Hopkins and Lanier: A Transatlantic Note Gerald Roberts ‘I know scarcely anything of American literature’1 At the time in April 1884 when he became (briefly) acquainted with the name of the American poet Sidney Lanier some three years after the latter’s death, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s knowledge of his transatlantic contemporaries was certainly very limited. Although American writing, especially in the novel, was beginning to make an impact on a wider British public, his personal reading remained stubbornly English. He knew a little Poe and rather more – but not much – of Whitman, and still less of Sidney Lanier, whose name he came across when reading an American periodical in a Jesuit establishment outside Dublin. Hopkins’s personal circumstances as a fully occupied Jesuit priest at University College Dublin, with teaching, examining and professional study occupying much of his time, hardly lent itself to a wide knowledge of the American scene, and the time when Hopkins came across Lanier’s name in the American review The Century Magazine2 coincided with a particularly unsettling period for the English poet. Plunged in the depths of despondency, as testified in his letters, Hopkins was spending time in what seems to have been a personal retreat3 at the prestigious Jesuit boarding school of Clongowes Wood, not many miles west of the Irish capital. Recently (and unwillingly) transferred from the relatively comfortable Jesuit atmosphere of Stonyhurst College in his English homeland (‘I shall be sorry to leave Stonyhurst’4 ) to the unfamiliar, even hostile environment of the Irish capital where he was virtually friendless, Hopkins’s depression led to his heartfelt ‘What does anything at all matter?’ and the confession to Bridges: ‘I am, I believe, recovering from a deep fit of nervous prostration (I suppose I ought to call it): I did not know but I was dying’.5 It was in these low spirits that he came upon a review of the life and work of the ill-starred American poet, whose early death in 1881 was a tragic witness to his failed literary (and musical) ambitions, and might well have suggested a parallel to Hopkins’s own experience. Born in 1841 (making Studies • volume 109 • number 433 48 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 48 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 48 27/02/2020 13:59 27/02/2020 13:59 him almost a contemporary of the English Jesuit), the son of a middle-class Georgia family, Lanier had been caught up in the Confederate War, and as a result spent five months of that time in captivity. The sporadic writing of poems that followed his eventual release, a tedious period of work in the law firm of his father, followed by private teaching and public lectures to Johns Hopkins University students, were not enough to ensure financial stability for an ambitious writer. With a young wife and a family of three children to look after, he eventually succumbed to the tuberculosis which he had been fighting since his experiences as a prisoner of war, and died in September 1881, at the age of thirty-nine. His opus of poems and miscellaneous works (which included a study of English poetics) were still uncollected when he died, with his name hardly known across the Atlantic. Lanier’s life experience was therefore a tragic story of a cultured and civilised family background that clashed with a hard and ultimately unsuccessful struggle, in the years of Reconstruction after the Civil War, to achieve literary and musical independence. As well as his writing ambitions, he also took an interest in musical theory and played in the local symphony orchestra at Baltimore (with rather more success than Hopkins’s musical dabblings in Ireland). The latter’s interest in Lanier was raised by the memoir of the latter’s life which appeared in The Century in April 1884, leading Hopkins, with perhaps a touch of fellow-feeling, to describe the critique as ‘the saddening account of a young American poet … who had good notions about poetical form ... and died young, in struggling circumstances’.6 This reaction was sent to Bridges in the same month and is the sole reference to Lanier’s name in Hopkins’s writing (‘I know scarcely anything of...

Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi: Essays on America's Civil War, Volume 3 ed. by Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott

Reviewed by: Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi: Essays on America's Civil War, Volume 3 ed. by Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott Christopher Bean Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi: Essays on America's Civil War, Volume 3. Edited By Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2019. Pp. 374. Illustrations, appendix, bibliography index.) Neglected by Confederate officials in Richmond, unknown by the public at large, and considered a backwater by historians, the Trans-Mississippi Theater generally gets scant treatment in examinations of the Civil War. Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi: Essays on America's Civil War highlights the region's importance not only to the war but also to the Confederate defeat. This volume, the third and final in a series, follows the same template as the previous two by highlighting prominent Rebel generals in the theater. Some of them, such as Earl Van Dorn, Edmund Kirby Smith, and Richard Taylor, should be familiar even to novice students of the war. Others, such as William Boggs, James Fagan, and John Wharton are largely unknown. Hamilton Bee, if not altogether forgotten, tends to be mistaken for his more prominent brother. Most of these men lacked meaningful talent or were unable to overcome political and [End Page 368] military circumstances beyond their control. Yet, as the work shows, the familiar problems that plagued the Confederacy—paucity of talent at the highest levels, lack of infrastructure, and infighting—were certainly present in the Trans-Mississippi. With one exception, each of the essays examines the Civil War experience of its subject in one of three ways: a short, yet useful biography, an examination of generalship, or a combination of the two. The first, second, and third essays are biography; the fourth and fifth fall into the second category; the sixth and seventh combine the two approaches. In the final, unique, essay, Richard H. Holloway, who penned three of the eight essays, examines Richard Taylor's famous post-war memoir, Destruction and Reconstruction (D. Appleton, 1879). Holloway highlights the "subtle inconsistencies" in Taylor's post-war version of war-time events, noting the omission of his "Herculean effort" (262) to get Confederate troops secretly across the Mississippi River to continue the fight. The manuscript begins with quite possibly the most chronicled of all the region's generals, Earl Van Dorn. Historian Joseph G. Dawson III, while parroting past conclusions of Van Dorn as "out of his depth as an army commander" (24), still makes a deeper point about the Confederate war effort: President Jefferson Davis "too often chose or re-appointed high-ranking officers from a limited pool of generals unsuited or unfit for their assignment" (24). Further highlighting a deficiency of the Confederacy as a whole is Stuart W. Sanders's essay on James Fagan. Born in Kentucky but calling Arkansas home, Fagan was an infantryman turned cavalryman. More than capable, especially when compared to many Trans-Mississippi contemporaries, Fagan struggled to get out from under the pall of his incompetent superior. Sanders notes that this "over-shadowing" during the war and obscurity afterwards was in part due to his post-war politics (he supported Reconstruction and converted to the Republican party) and to his superior, Sterling Price. All combined to cast "a shadow of questionable repute that continues to obscure Fagan's true capabilities." (81). Similar to Fagan in obscurity and ability is John Wharton. Paul R. Scott, currently researching a much-needed update on Terry's Texas Rangers, examines this "citizen soldier." Wharton quickly rose through the cavalry ranks in the Western Theater. Personality conflicts with his superior, Joseph Wheeler, however, caused his transfer west of the Mississippi, where he was killed in April 1865 by John R. Baylor in "an affair of honor." Scott argues that Wharton "remains one of the least known Confederate cavalry generals," in part because he lacked the cavalryman's "dash and flair" and in part because he lacked acolytes to protect his memory (218). This work is a fitting end to an already superb series. Well-written and researched, and including a very helpful appendix detailing the often confusing and convoluted Confederate command structure in the...

Deploying Technological Innovation in “Real Time”

The Industrial Revolution provided the environment and opportunities for the large-scale development and deployment of military technological innovation in “real time,” that is, in time to influence the conduct and outcomes of a major conflict while that conflict was in progress. The case of the Union and Confederate strategies and their implementations during the American Civil War is particularly exemplary because both sides looked to ironclad warships in opposing ways. For the first year of the war each side pursued real-time ironclad warship deployment efforts to influence three different strategic races on a continental scale. Confederate success could have had enormous impacts on the course and outcomes of the war, but by August 1862 the Union had won all three races. Each was won in a different way, each portended how the conduct of the war on water continued, and each provided lessons for both navies to learn. Both sides went forward with revised strategies and renewed vigor to try to build and deploy more than one hundred ironclad warships between them. Over the next three years, the extensive Confederate ironclad program failed in multiple and costly ways to deliver much to the Confederate war effort. The even more extensive Union ironclad program did better primarily by securing what had been won the first year and neutralizing the continuing Confederate ironclad threat, although it failed in other important ways.

Georgia's Civil War: Conflict on the Home Front by David Williams

Reviewed by: Georgia's Civil War: Conflict on the Home Front by David Williams Scott A. MacKenzie Georgia's Civil War: Conflict on the Home Front. David Williams. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8814-6631-7. 284 pp., cloth, $35.00. The causes of Confederate defeat continue to attract scholarly attention. Debate rages between the external force and internal collapse schools of thought. Valdosta State historian David Williams's Georgia's Civil War aims to add that vital state to the discussion. Expanding on his previous work on the Georgia-Alabama home front, he examines the impact of the war via the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" perspective. He argues that deteriorating conditions at home motivated widespread desertions to the point that Georgia became practically ungovernable. Despite this sound approach, Williams makes some critical errors that undermine his thesis. His failure to engage the broader literature and treatment of Georgia as a homogeneous unit limits the book's potential to address the bigger questions surrounding the Civil War's effect on southern society. Williams stumbles in his introduction with an absurd claim. "For more than a century and a half," he writes, "historians have often ignored the South's home front difficulties" (xi). This statement flies in the face of the superb literature on this topic. Worse, he cites as source material the same books that he claims ignored the topic, including the multiauthored Why the South Lost the Civil War, Michael P. Johnson's Towards a Patriarchal Republic, and Mark Weitz's A Higher Duty. Bizarrely, he omits Mark Wetherington's Plain Folk's Fight, which, along with Weitz's work, counters his claims about internal collapse. The closest Williams comes to a historiographical critique is a biting comment on Gary Gallagher's Confederate War. His failure—and that is the right description here—to place the book within the larger scholastic community creates a missed opportunity. The extent of this oversight becomes apparent in the book's body. Williams treats Georgia as a homogenous unit. He fairly claims that planters' obsession with cotton production exacerbated wealth disparities and corrupted its democratic institutions. Yet, he cites raw electoral numbers to show how close the secession vote was instead of showing regional variations. Despite an initial enthusiasm for war, the home front fractured soon after the men left for the front. Williams bombards the reader with numerous examples of discontent among Georgians of all classes, races, and genders. He makes effective use of citizen letters to the governor and newspaper editorials that complained about rising prices, taxes, impressment, and conscription. The planter-led government both refused to help and proved to be powerless even when it tried. Governor Joseph Brown won reelection in 1863 for his promises to help the lower classes but only maintained planter rule. The arrival of Union armies in 1864 hit Georgia at her weakest. Their presence, Williams argues, turned unrest into virtual anarchy throughout the state. As before, however, [End Page 392] there is no regional nuance in his analysis. Desertions began almost immediately and became pandemic. Williams could have used them to engage Weitz's study of regional variations in desertion patterns, which would have shown a more nuanced view of the problem. Using Wetherington's study would have shown how the ability of some white Georgians to cohere across class lines during the war. At times, Williams's narrative appears repetitive, but the multiplicity demonstrates his point about the extent of the discontent. His treatment of a unitary Georgia, sadly, undermines many of his arguments. His conclusion mirrors the weak introduction. Williams discusses Georgia's postwar status in an epilogue. Like before, the state appears as a homogenous unit. Citing mostly secondary works, he maintains the same argument that planters remained in power by exploiting poverty and racism—segregating poor whites from blacks, denying the latter voting rights, combined with tenancy, company towns, and debt peonage to keep most Georgians under control. In addition, planters created the Lost Cause narrative to paper over wartime divisions. Offering little new to the discussion on the Civil War home front or Reconstruction, his routine conclusion should disappoint many readers...

McClellan's Epidemic: Disease and Discord at Harrison's Landing, July–August 1862

McClellan's EpidemicDisease and Discord at Harrison's Landing, July–August 1862 Zachery A. Fry (bio) As he sat down to write a letter on July 20, 1862, Brig. Gen. David B. Birney had recently survived the hardest week of his Civil War experience to date. After lingering in the Chickahominy swamps and fighting to a standstill in the Seven Days' battles, the Army of the Potomac under Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan retired to a new position nestled in the humid marshes and meadows along the James River southeast of Richmond. There, the battered and traumatized army faced a new threat—rampant diseases that exacted an unprecedented toll on the troops. Birney summarized the army's plight when he wrote to a friend, "Malaria has decimated our troops. We have lost more by fatigue [and] exposure … than we would have in twenty battles."1 The last six weeks of George B. McClellan's 1862 Peninsula campaign deprived his army of as many effective soldiers as Ulysses S. Grant's six-week bloodletting from the Wilderness to Petersburg in 1864. The difference between the Overland campaign and the 1862 campaign lay in the nature of those casualties: Grant's persistence against the Army of Northern Virginia cost nearly 55,000 combat losses, while most of McClellan's number came from diseases contracted during occupation of the Chickahominy River and, especially, Harrison's Landing on the James River. Records indicate the Army of the Potomac exhibited 42,911 cases of various illnesses in July 1862, while the month of August, half of which witnessed the army still languishing on the James River, totaled 20,836 cases. Furthermore, most of these losses came on top of an official total of 15,855 combat casualties from the Seven Days' battles proper. [End Page 7] To be sure, remarkably few of McClellan's soldiers actually died from the summer outbreaks, but the lack of a stark mortality statistic should not cloud the fact that diseases like diarrhea and malaria lingered with the affected soldiers for weeks and even months. Kathryn Shively Meier's groundbreaking study of the environment and soldier identity in 1862 Virginia has established that many soldiers recognized the threats of such disease outbreaks. Official army medical systems failed widely enough that soldiers adopted self-care methods for health maintenance, Meier insists. But even these efforts of individual soldiers could not keep up with the scale of the Harrison's Landing health crisis, where diseases incubated in the Chickahominy swamps hatched to render the summer of 1862 a landmark medical catastrophe in American military history.2 This article bridges the two topics of Civil War disease and army politics by arguing that the summer of 1862 shaped the partisan dynamic inside the Army of the Potomac for the rest of the war. It begins with evidence that the six weeks on the James River from July 2 to August 15, 1862, were an unprecedented medical disaster for the United States Army. Coming on the heels of the Seven Days' battles, this experience with disease drained the army. Harrison's Landing, therefore, energized the emergence of a partisan divide in the army because soldiers expressed such intense and public disgust with their situation, their leadership, and the progress of the conflict. On the Peninsula, these volunteers dealt with the physical and psychological aftermath of a massive and costly campaign for the [End Page 8] first time. While the army languished, its naïve rage militaire of 1861 evaporated, and officers and men wondered aloud what their sacrifices had achieved. Who was to blame for the failure to take Richmond and end the war? Survivors of the Seven Days looked at the crowded hospital tents of an army entrenching just miles from the Confederate capital and came to believe they were the victims of mismanagement somewhere at the top.3 Historians have filled insightful volumes discussing how the Seven Days battles upset the war's balance and turned the Confederate war effort in a different direction under Robert E. Lee.4 Likewise, McClellan's biographers have dissected his famous "Harrison's Landing Letter" to President Lincoln, which offered policy advice on emancipation and...

Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands: 1861–1867 by Andrew E. Masich

Reviewed by: Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands: 1861–1867 by Andrew E. Masich Kevin Waite Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands: 1861–1867. Andrew E. Masich. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8061-5572-2. 464 pp., cloth, $34.95. Andrew E. Masich's important new book is not your typical Civil War history. Extending well past Appomattox and spilling across international borders, Civil [End Page 312] War in the Southwest Borderlands fundamentally reorients our perspective on this familiar period. It also greatly expands the cast of characters involved. In addition to the standard Union and Confederate soldiers, Masich's study contains a whole host of ethnic and national groups—Hispanic Americans, Mexican Republicans, French imperialists, Apaches, Navajos, Pueblos, Pimas, Papagos, and the list goes on. It's precisely this diversity—and the sovereignty that these various groups claimed—that transformed a conflict between North and South into a series of wars throughout the borderlands of the West. In short, the Civil War multiplied within the Southwest. And after six years of the bloodiest combat that the region had ever witnessed, the balance of power tipped irrevocably in Anglo-Americans' favor. For centuries, cycles of raid and reprisal had defined the military rhythm of the Southwest—which, for Masich roughly encompasses New Mexico, Arizona, northern Mexico, and parts of Texas and California. But beginning with Confederate secession in 1861, the nature of warfare changed dramatically. As federal troops were relocated to eastern theaters in order to put down the rebellion, bands of Apache and Navajo warriors responded by greatly expanding the scope and scale of their raiding. This federal power vacuum did not last, however, and within a few years U.S. forces established a much greater western military presence than ever before. Thousands of professional U.S. soldiers first beat back a Confederate invasion, then virtually destroyed the military power of these nomadic and seminomadic tribes. In the process, they brought to the region a system of "total war" and remade nearly every aspect of life in the Southwest. Masich covers a range of interrelated civil wars, though three major conflicts comprise the bulk of his study: the Confederate invasion of New Mexico and subsequent Union counterattack; James H. Carleton's total war against primarily Navajo and Apache tribes; and Benito Juarez's military campaign against French intervention in Mexico. To students of the Civil War, the most familiar element of this story will likely be the Confederate invasion of New Mexico in 1861–62, led by Col. John R. Baylor and then Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley. Several scholars—Roy Colton, Donald Fraser, Alvin Josephy, L. Boyd Finch, and Megan Kate Nelson, among others—have chronicled this history, and Masich's new account ranks right up there with the best of them. He explains how Confederate forces seized most of New Mexico, carving out the southern part as the Confederate Territory of Arizona by August 1861. But the key to the control of the arid Southwest, Masich argues, was logistical forethought, and in this capacity Sibley was sorely deficient. When Union forces destroyed his supply train at the battle of Glorieta Pass, Sibley and his invasion force—which once numbered over twenty-five hundred men—had to beat a hasty and costly retreat to Texas. [End Page 313] Masich's conceptual masterstroke is in linking this Confederate war with the interrelated conflicts between Americans and Indians, as well as Juaristas and French imperialists. After turning back Sibley's Confederates, U.S. troops consolidated control over the American Southwest by unleashing a brutal campaign against the Mescalero Apaches and Navajos. Whereas Native American warrior tribes held the balance of power within the region prior to the 1861, Masich argues, after several years of war and internment on the Bosque Redondo they were decisively displaced. Meanwhile, U.S. soldiers funneled materiel to Juarez's beleaguered forces in Mexico, which helped him even the odds and eventually dethrone the ill-fated Emperor Maximilian. 1865, of course, marks the formal end of the American Civil War. But the civil wars of the Southwest borderlands continued for another two years, as Masich compellingly demonstrates. Only by that point would the...

An historical tract in Irish relating to the confederate wars in Ireland

The hitherto unpublished historical tract which is presented here was written by a Fermanagh scholar called Conchabhar O Luinin during the period c. 1652–1700. It affords us a unique insight into Irish feelings about the Confederate Wars in Ireland. O Luinin shares with us his personal reflections on the campaign in the first section of the tract before proceeding to list in the subsequent sections the battles fought and the names of the eminent Irish soldiers killed in combat. The text has survived in fragmentary form among the O’Conor Papers and is preserved in Dublin, Royal Irish Academy B i 1a (Catalogue Number 1078).

Confederate Sharpshooter Major William E. Simmons: Through the War with the 16th Georgia Infantry and 3rd Battalion Georgia Sharpshooters by Joseph P. Byrd IV

Reviewed by: Confederate Sharpshooter Major William E. Simmons: Through the War with the 16th Georgia Infantry and 3rd Battalion Georgia Sharpshooters by Joseph P. Byrd IV Lisa L. Denmark Confederate Sharpshooter Major William E. Simmons: Through the War with the 16th Georgia Infantry and 3rd Battalion Georgia Sharpshooters. By Joseph P. Byrd IV. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2016. Pp. xxviii, 292. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-568-6.) Joseph P. Byrd IV grew up listening to his father recount childhood memories about "Uncle William," a "Confederate War hero" (p. vii). Aided by a previously unpublished manuscript produced in the 1960s by a second cousin, an unreconstructed Byrd proudly recounts the Civil War experiences of his ancestor, Major William E. Simmons. In the first two of twenty-five very short chapters, Byrd briefly relates the early life of Simmons, who was born to a prominent family in Gwinnett County, Georgia, received his education at Emory College, and edited the Lawrenceville (Georgia) News, established by his father, himself a prominent attorney, politician, slave owner, and cotton mill owner. In contrast to his Unionist-leaning father—an interesting individual deserving of greater attention—the younger Simmons took an uncompromising stance on the expansion of slavery and supported John C. Breckinridge's candidacy in the presidential election of 1860. Byrd moves hurriedly through secession and employs only one direct quotation from Simmons's newspaper, noting that secession was "the only safe and honorable course left to the South" (p. 9). Simmons's service in the American Civil War constitutes the bulk of this conventional military biography. In the spring of 1861 Simmons was elected a lieutenant in the Gwinnett Volunteers, which became part of the Sixteenth Georgia Infantry. As part of the Army of Northern Virginia, Simmons's regiment saw action in most of the war's major engagements, including the [End Page 430] Seven Days, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Chattanooga, Knoxville, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, and Cold Harbor. In 1863 Simmons received promotion to captain of the newly formed Third Georgia Sharpshooter Battalion, commanded by a fellow Georgian, Brigadier General W. T. Wofford. Byrd provides some interesting details about sharpshooter training exercises, particularly range finding; however, beyond noting that the Third Battalion was "in the thick of the action," Simmons's battlefield activities remain rather amorphous (p. 143). During Wofford's poorly planned attack on George Armstrong Custer's Union cavalry at Front Royal in 1864, Simmons, recently promoted to major, was captured and sent to Fort Delaware. He remained in prison until well after April 1865 for refusing to take the oath of loyalty after the surrenders of Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston. The final four chapters recount Simmons's postwar experience. Byrd relates that "the Major" put the war behind him and looked to the future (p. 178). That future included a stint in the Georgia General Assembly during the 1870s, a career as a successful attorney, involvement in the newspaper business, an appointment to the Georgia University Board of Trustees, and familial responsibilities as a generous and devoted husband and uncle. Byrd makes use of the Official Records in detailing the movements and activities of the Sixteenth Georgia Infantry and the Third Sharpshooter Battalion and the actions of the generals who served under James Longstreet. As a member of Longstreet's regiment, Simmons indeed may have been present, but his personal experiences and individual voice are largely lost in the minutiae of troop movements and battle descriptions. In describing the soldier's perspective of life in the regiment, Byrd provides numerous block quotations derived from other personal accounts. With few exceptions, such as Simmons's compassion toward injured enemy soldiers and his postcapture meeting with Custer, the reader never really gets a sense of Simmons's personal experience. Confederate Sharpshooter Major William E. Simmons: Through the War with the 16th Georgia Infantry and 3rd Battalion Georgia Sharpshooters is generally well written. The author utilizes the most common official sources, several personal memoirs, and a few of the most recent secondary works. While specialists will find little that contributes to our overall understanding of the role of sharpshooters during the American Civil War, general readers and...

Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War by Catherine Clinton

Reviewed by: Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War by Catherine Clinton Angela Esco Elder Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War. By Catherine Clinton. Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. xx, 144. $27.50, ISBN 978-0-8071-6457-0.) When Catherine Clinton received an invitation to deliver the seventy-third annual Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History at Louisiana State University, she was in the midst of several projects. Faced with the prospect of choosing just one to share, she ultimately decided that since "there was just the slightest hint that I might want to offer lectures on the topic of women … how could I resist revisiting the topic of southern women and the Civil War?" (p. xiii). This book is not simply the product of those lectures; it is also the result of a lifetime of research and thought on the topic and reveals a wartime female experience that was anything but monolithic. "I believe in taking every opportunity to afford women a platform, a place at the table—even if we don't like the menu," writes Clinton in her preface, warning that the book to come is not simply a reflection on the state of the field (p. xvii). The first chapter focuses on elite white women, the "band of sisters" who sacrificed for the Confederate war effort, wrote their way through the war, and often embraced blind patriotism (p. xv). Clinton traces the wartime experiences and writings of familiar nineteenth-century names including Mary Boykin Chesnut, Winnie Davis, Louisa McCord, Sarah Morgan, Sallie Pickett, Kate Stone, and Augusta Jane Evans Wilson. Clinton maintains that "the blood of the lash could not be whitewashed away by even the most eloquent of memoirists, and yet the band of sisters would die trying" (p. 39). In her next chapter Clinton turns to "impermissible patriots," white women defined by "their defiance rather than their accomplishments" (p. 41). These women tested gender norms and challenged societal expectations even as they expressed deep loyalty to the Confederacy. A driving force in this chapter is Loreta Janeta Velazquez, a woman who published a memoir claiming she fought as a Confederate officer, and historians' mixed treatment of her tale. This chapter is particularly thought provoking as Clinton manages to tie topics like the need for research on nineteenth-century dress reform to recent gendered language about Hillary Clinton and pantsuits. "Whatever their political and personal agendas," Catherine Clinton concludes, "scholars might reframe and recast Confederate women's defiant careers in more balanced terms, in order to recognize women who seized the opportunity to serve their country" (p. 74). The final chapter analyzes the history and implications of "Mammy," a "carefully cultivated" image replacing the real African American women who fought for and redefined freedom (p. 100). Clinton argues, "African American women have been absent not only from historical accounts of the Civil War but from any appreciation of its legacy for black women and the incredible transformations wrought" (p. 84). In addition to discussing the debate over which woman should appear on the twenty-dollar bill, vintage racist collectibles, the use of the term Mammy in Ireland, and the #SayHerName Twitter [End Page 990] campaign, this chapter studies the conflict between recognizing black women as historical actors and addressing "the mythical symbols of black womanhood whites have projected" (p. 93). Clinton cautions scholars against "replacing a caricature with an emblem" by creating historical work that presents "emancipated slaves as indefatigable heroes" without human flaw (p. 102). Clinton's writing is accessible and conversational, challenging readers with admonishments like, "We must not hold women in the past hostage to historical standards that keep them in the sidebars and footnotes, only including those who achieve status 'within a man's world'" (p. xviii). At under 150 pages this book is by no means exhaustive, though the footnotes offer a fairly comprehensive map of where this field stands. Clinton reminds us of the significant work that has been done as well as the significant work that remains to be done in original research, textbook publications, and college lectures. Those...

Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South by Susanna Michele Lee (review)

Reviewed by: Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South by Susanna Michele Lee Daniel Ritchie Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South. Susanna Michele Lee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1-107-01532-6, 256pp., cloth, $95.00. Susanna Michele Lee’s book focuses on the work of the Southern Claims Commission (1871–80), which awarded compensation for property losses during the Civil War to southerners who could prove they had been loyal citizens. It helpfully elucidates how loyal citizenship was conceptualized and disputed in the aftermath of the conflict. The author has provided us with an engaging, clearly written, and well-researched account of the commissioners’ work. Lee argues that the commissioners initially defined loyal citizens as white men who had opposed secession at the ballot box and on the battlefield. Southern claimants were expected to prove they not only possessed Union sympathies (ideological citizenship) but had also vigorously contributed to the Union cause (active citizenship). The supposition that loyal citizens were to be defined as white men was undermined by both the complex relationship of former slaves, free blacks, and women to the state and the efforts of these groups to prove that they had been loyal citizens during the war to the commissioners. During its ten-year lifespan, the Southern Claims Commission acted as a bulwark against the Democrats’ idea that postwar loyalty should be the basis for access to the rights and privileges of citizenship in the United States. Lee’s first chapter situates the work of the Southern Claims Commission within a wider context of congressional debates over citizenship and loyalty, while the second examines the efforts of white men to demonstrate their loyalty. What is perhaps most striking about the chapters on white men is how strict the Southern Claims Commission was in its definition of loyalty. The three commissioners (Asa Owen Aldis, Orange Ferris, and James B. Howell), all Republicans appointed by President Grant, believed that residence in a seceded state was prima facie evidence of disloyalty. They assumed that a real unionist could not have remained in these localities without being subjected to severe harassment. Unsurprisingly, many white southern claimants did not meet the commissioners’ standards of loyalty. The author suggests that [End Page 323] the Southern Claims Commission’s elevation of wartime actions over ideology, moreover, promoted an understanding of citizenship that ensured that the passive unionists in the South could be marginalized as cowards who had shirked their obligations to the nation. It is significant that the Southern Claims Commission did not ask claimants about their position on slavery unless they mentioned it. The commissioners did not view slaveholding as evidence of treachery, but they did see criticizing emancipation as incongruous with loyalty to the Union. This position posed a significant problem for those unionist slaveholders who claimed allegiance to the Union on the basis that it was a proslavery compact. In the case of southern women who were pro-emancipation and who had opposed the Confederate war effort, the Southern Claims Commission was forced to recognize that white men did not possess a monopoly on loyal citizenship. The common law tradition of coverture, the notion that women possessed no relationship to the state unmediated by a father or husband, had made it difficult for women to claim to be loyal citizens. Coverture, however, allowed some white southern women to claim the political sympathies of their husbands while preserving their essential feminine domesticity. In harmony with these principles, white women sometimes presented their opposition to male enlistment on behalf of the Confederacy as an action appropriate to their sphere of influence. There were some obvious cases of inequity in the commissioners’ treatment of women, which the author usefully highlights. For instance, on the one hand, cooking for or nursing Union soldiers was dismissed as merely circumstantial evidence of loyalty. On the other hand, the Southern Claims Commission regarded even cooking and sewing as indicative of assistance for the Confederacy. The chapters on non-white southerners are useful, if only for reminding us of the need to avoid the tendency of conflating southerners with whites. The Southern Claims Commission had initially not...

River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands

River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands

Evangelizing for Union, 1863: The Army of the Potomac, Its Enemies at Home, and a New Solidarity

Evangelizing for Union, 1863The Army of the Potomac, Its Enemies at Home, and a New Solidarity John J. Hennessy (bio) In late January 1863, Joseph Hooker took command of an Army of the Potomac still muttering at army commander’s George McClellan’s November 1862 removal, still stung by the disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg in December, deeply conflicted by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and still cleaning its boots after the drudgery of Burnside’s infamous Mud March. Hooker deserved and received much credit for the rehabilitation of the army that followed his appointment; the transformation in mood, food, health, and routine started almost immediately. But, like McClellan after Second Bull Run (when Lee electrified a demoralized Union army by crossing the Potomac into Maryland), Hooker benefitted immensely from an outside force over which he had no control—not Lee this time, but rather a threat from the home front: the Copperheads. The burgeoning clamor for war’s end among northern Peace Democrats that winter and spring not only challenged the will of the Army of the Potomac’s soldiers to continue the war but also the value of all the army had sacrificed and accomplished to this point. As it had against Lee in September, the army rose to this emergency in noisy response. The springtime battle of words and sentiment between the army and Copperheads at home would be an unexpected turning point. The army had long been a pot boiling with internal dispute over the nature and purpose of the Union war effort—officers and men alike had dispensed scattershot opinions in public and private on everything from slavery to southern civilians to Washington politicians. In early 1863, the convergence of the Emancipation Proclamation and the rise of the Copperheads brought focus to everyman’s opinion, permitting easy classification on a suddenly oversimplified political landscape: for the war or against it? Opinions thoughtlessly dispensed in 1862 carried important labels in early 1863, forcing officers and soldiers to choose their words and express their sentiments carefully. At a tumultuous time when one might expect challenges from the outside to provoke greater unrest within an [End Page 533] army beaten, discouraged, and internally conflicted, the opposite, in fact, happened: the army largely coalesced around a collective determination to dispute the Copperheads and see the war through to victory. The public involvement by officers in the debate over war aims and the wisdom of the administration waned. The army recognized in itself a political voice and political power precisely at the moment when the question of soldiers voting was bubbling up as an issue of consequence in Union states. In many ways, the overwhelming support among soldiers for Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 was forged in the spring of 1863, during its rhetorical war with the Copperheads. Prior to Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s appointment on January 26, 1863, few armies in American history had had a more contentious relationship with the government it served than did the Army of the Potomac. The army of 1862 was emphatically McClellan’s army, an emerging organization dominated by Democratic-leaning officers in a still-young republic, where the boundaries of civil-military discourse still stood fuzzy. By proxy and direct action, the army’s leaders—notably McClellan and Fitz John Porter—leapt into the debate over the nature and purpose of the war, relentlessly arguing for a war largely confined to the clash of armies, sparing southern civilians and, except incidentally, southern slavery. All the while, the government edged toward harsher war. Congress authorized the confiscation of slaves and other property integral to sustaining the Confederate war effort. Maj. Gen. John Pope arrived in Virginia flashing novel (for Virginia) general orders that would bring war’s hardships to southern civilians (though by late-war standards, in a decidedly gentle way). Most importantly and most provocatively, in late July President Lincoln set upon a policy of formal, legal emancipation of slaves in the southern states still in rebellion. The war for the Union would also be a war for freedom. In 1862, the North— including many officers and soldiers—saw the transformation in a less dreamy light.1 Philosophical...