A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868
336
A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868
336eBook
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Overview
Historians often assert that Confederate nationalism had its origins in pre-Civil War sectional conflict with the North, reached its apex at the start of the war, and then dropped off quickly after the end of hostilities. Anne Sarah Rubin argues instead that white Southerners did not actually begin to formulate a national identity until it became evident that the Confederacy was destined to fight a lengthy war against the Union. She also demonstrates that an attachment to a symbolic or sentimental Confederacy existed independent of the political Confederacy and was therefore able to persist well after the collapse of the Confederate state. White Southerners redefined symbols and figures of the failed state as emotional touchstones and political rallying points in the struggle to retain local (and racial) control, even as former Confederates took the loyalty oath and applied for pardons in droves.Exploring the creation, maintenance, and transformation of Confederate identity during the tumultuous years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Rubin sheds new light on the ways in which Confederates felt connected to their national creation and provides a provocative example of what happens when a nation disintegrates and leaves its people behind to forge a new identity.Historians often assert that Confederate nationalism had its origins in pre-Civil War sectional conflict with the North, reached its apex at the start of the war, and then dropped off quickly after the end of hostilities. Anne Sarah Rubin argues instead that white Southerners did not actually begin to formulate a national identity until it became evident that the Confederacy was destined to fight a lengthy war against the Union. She also demonstrates that an attachment to a symbolic or sentimental Confederacy existed independent of the political Confederacy and was therefore able to persist well after the collapse of the Confederate state. White Southerners redefined symbols and figures of the failed state as emotional touchstones and political rallying points in the struggle to retain local (and racial) control, Rubin argues, even as former Confederates took the loyalty oath and applied for pardons in droves.—>
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807888957 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2009 |
| Series: | Civil War America |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Shattered Nation
The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868By Anne Sarah Rubin
The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2005 The University of North Carolina PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8078-2928-5
Chapter One
A Religious Patriotism The Culture of Confederate IdentityThe Confederate nation appeared to be born fully formed, going from vague idea to reality over a matter of weeks. South Carolina seceded on 20 December 1860, followed rapidly by the six other lower South states. The Montgomery Convention met in February, drafted its permanent Constitution quickly, and by the summer of 1861 the provisional government was ensconced in Richmond. The Confederacy, for all of its shortcomings, did possess all of the necessary apparatus of government-an executive, a legislature, a judiciary, a treasury, a postal service, a state department. Most important, for the Confederacy had no real existence apart from war, it raised and kept an army in the field. These institutions may not have always functioned well, or efficiently-indeed in many cases they barely functioned at all-but they did exist. A state apparatus is important but does not a nation make: it alone does not ensure feelings of allegiance. But the new Confederacy did just that: almost from the moment of its creation, it inspired loyalty and commitment from its citizens. While there were Unionist minorities in every state, most Southern whites seemed willing, if not eager, to turn their back on the Union in favor of this new nation, and to do so with nary a backward glance. This was true not only of the fire-eaters who had been working for years to draw the South out of the Union but of conditional Unionists as well, of people who had done everything possible to avert secession.
These new Confederates created a national culture in large part by drawing on the usable American past. But they also added a potent mix of fear and rage to it. The fear was of the end of slavery, couched often in the language of so-called black rule or race-mixing; the rage was against invading Yankees, demonized to the point of dehumanization. Confederates disseminated this culture largely through print-in particular through newspapers and journals-but also broadsides, songs, poems, and, of course, personal correspondence. Published words show the process of nation-building at work. Indeed, as Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Communities, it was precisely the emergence of newspapers that provided the unifying means to allow nationalism to flourish. By transmitting a uniform version of events and ideology, newspapers give readers the sense of belonging to a larger imagined community, be it regional or national. Nineteenth-century Americans were voracious consumers of news, and even people who did not themselves subscribe to a newspaper would borrow someone else's copy, or perhaps have the news read to them. Thus newspapers reached and influenced even the illiterate. Depending on their individual editors' proclivities, newspapers served as civics instructors, fostered party competition, provided household hints, and furnished readers with the latest poetry and serial fiction. A shared culture of print brought Americans together as a nation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; it would do the same for Confederates during the Civil War.
Antebellum and Civil War-era Southern newspapers were largely creatures of their editors. The tradition of "personal journalism" that was fading away with the rise of the Northern penny press held firm below the Mason-Dixon line. Southern and Confederate newspapers tended to have smaller staffs and older presses and technology and to be more sectional and partisan in orientation than their Northern counterparts. They also suffered greatly during the war, from a lack of supplies and labor, as well as from occupation and destruction at the hands of the Union army.
Prior to the war, Southern editors gathered much of their news through a process of exchanges with Northern papers. After the war began, that was no longer a viable option, although Confederate papers continued to exchange news and anecdotes with one another. Confederate editors began casting about for other sources of military news and attempted to form news-gathering consortiums-one in Richmond and one in Atlanta. Neither was particularly successful, and eventually the editors of the Confederacy's forty-three daily papers met in Augusta, Georgia, in February 1863. This time they founded the Confederate Press Association and hired J. S. Thrasher to be the service's superintendent. Thrasher worked tirelessly on behalf of the PA, as it was known, negotiating telegraph contracts, challenging military censorship, and trying to instill objectivity and nonpartisanship in his reporters. The PA proved quite successful at news-gathering and dissemination, further adding to the Confederacy's shared print culture.
Confederates were also united by a less public culture of words, through their writings for and to each other. One consequence of a war is that it separates people who might not have been apart under ordinary circumstances, and the Civil War provides historians with an almost limitless supply of personal correspondence. Husbands wrote to wives, fathers to children, distant friends to each other. Letters buzzed with rumors and gossip, war news and local happenings. Complaints about the Confederacy's erratic mails mingled with advice and gentle criticism, political opinion, and intimate endearments. No matter how personal and unmediated these letters appear, it is important to remember that nineteenth-century men and women wrote to one another in patterned ways, with formalized expressions and ideas of appropriateness. Too, especially in the case of letters written by soldiers to their families, one could expect a letter to be at least read aloud if not passed from hand to hand, which might have increased circumspection in observation and opinion. When Confederates told each other to keep their spirits up, to remain confident that victory was just around the corner, they might well have been lying to themselves as much as to their correspondents.
Journals or diaries, which might seem to be the most personal and private sources of all, were no less bound by convention or secrecy than letters. Since the mid-eighteenth century, it had been typical for young women to keep journals, and many women continued the practice after marriage. Men, too, kept diaries, often recording both personal thoughts and business transactions. The sense that both men and women had that they were living through extraordinary times also increased the ranks of diarists during the war. Most wrote with the understanding that others, whether their contemporaries or posterity, would read their words. "My journal-a quire of Confederate paper-lies wide open on my desk in the corner of my drawing room," wrote one of the Confederacy's most famous diarists, Mary Chesnut. "Everybody reads it who chooses." Even less literary-minded folk then Chesnut kept their potential audiences near the forefront of their minds. "I write for the information of my Northern friends, should any of them have the curiosity to read this journal, & leave herewith the request that it may be forwarded to them at some future time if it should not be in my power to do it myself," explained a resident of Augusta County, Virginia, as she began a lengthy description of a Union raid. Though Confederates wrote with varying degrees of self-consciousness, their private writings tended to echo the themes and language of more public sources. Regardless of where they lived, Confederates received news through the same channels, read the same books, and sang the same songs. Words bound Confederates together, regardless of class or gender, allowing, for example, a man in Louisiana and a woman in North Carolina to imagine themselves part of a viable national whole.
Seventy-six and Sixty-one
That process of national imagining began in earnest with the Montgomery Convention. Nations depend on myths of origin to inspire both domestic loyalty and foreign recognition. These new Confederates had one ready-made in the form of the American Revolution and they returned again and again to that deep well of national symbolism. Indeed, if Thomas R. R. Cobb, a member of the Georgia delegation to the Montgomery Convention, had gotten his way, the new Southern nation would have been known as the Republic of Washington. His motion failed, and in a clear and conscious echo of the rejected United States, the country became the Confederate States of America. Thus did the national story created by Confederates have its roots in the story of the American nation. As Confederates went about the work of nation-building, they self-consciously drew on a ready-made myth of national origin, rejecting the recent American history of sectionalism and centralization and instead seizing on the American Revolution as the defining moment of their past. Most interestingly, in looking to the distant Revolutionary past, Confederates rejected the antebellum bursts of Southern sectionalism as exemplified in the nullification crisis and the debates over the Compromise of 1850. Confederate nationalism would be propagated by antebellum moderates like Jefferson Davis; the fire-eaters like William Lowndes Yancey and Robert Barnwell Rhett would be largely shunted aside.
Even before the shots were fired on Fort Sumter, Confederates were christening their struggle the "Second American Revolution" and praising Jefferson Davis as a second George Washington. Few, if any, Confederates actually remembered the Revolution, but its iconography-with its language of patriots and inalienable rights, heroes like George Washington and Light-Horse Harry Lee, stories of heroism and fortitude-gave Confederates a vocabulary and a conceptual framework with which to make claims for national legitimacy. Unionists were condemned as Tories, Yankee soldiers as Hessians. The Revolution of 1861 was the logical completion of the Revolution of 1776. In essays, speeches, newspapers, poems, and popular songs, Confederates told the story of a virtuous nation led astray by fanatical, greedy, and power-hungry Yankees. As Confederates sought first to inspire people to support the new nation and later to sustain them as their own struggle for independence seemed to founder, they drew on the patriotic example of colonists fighting for seven years, surviving material hardship, and eventually vanquishing a more numerous and better-equipped foe. Confederates were not destroying the Union; they were restoring it to its earlier glory. They were not rebels but patriots. Their ancestors had fought a glorious revolution to create a great nation; Confederates would do the same. Rather than representing a challenge to the ideals of the Founding Fathers, the Confederacy would be the perfection of their vision.
Confederates thus used the language of ancestry to emphasize their connection to the past. Whether an individual Southern soldier had descended from a Revolutionary fighter was largely irrelevant. What mattered was that Confederates, as a whole, cast themselves as a people apart. They were the Anglo-Saxon Cavaliers to the Northern Puritans and immigrants. Indeed, Northern Founders like Benjamin Franklin and Samuel and John Adams were rarely mentioned. In this construction, the courage and fortitude of the Revolutionary generation flowed through all Confederate veins: those of women as well as men, yeomen as well as aristocrats, Mississippians as well as South Carolinians.
Too, when Confederates cast themselves as the guardians of Revolutionary ideals, they avoided discussing other causes of the war, specifically slavery. The word rarely appeared in evocations of the American Revolution, and when it did, it was usually in the rhetorical sense of Confederates fearing enslavement to Northern masters. This silence on the subject of racial slavery suggests that Confederates used the Revolutionary War to shift the terms of debate, and to make the war more palatable to conditional Unionists, nonslaveholders, and outside nations. A powerful example of this rhetoric can be seen in a Richmond Enquirer editorial clearly designed to urge Unionist Virginians to throw their support behind the Confederacy: it warned that "those who will hesitate to fly to arms at such a momentous crisis cannot be the legitimate descendants of the brave and chivalrous race of '76." A war to recreate the glory of the Founders' nation was more honorable and less divisive than a war to protect the slaveholding prerogatives of a small percentage of the Confederate population. A war to recreate a virtuous America might appeal to conditional Unionists by convincing them that the Union as it existed needed to be destroyed in order to be replaced by a better one, a Confederate one.
The language of betrayal pervaded the rhetoric of Confederates who insisted on the essential conservatism of their actions. In his inaugural address as president of the provisional government in February 1861, Jefferson Davis explained, "We have changed the constituent parts, but not the system of government. The Constitution framed by our fathers is that of these Confederate States." The author of "Too Much Nationality," in the Southern Monthly, stated simply, "The Government of the Confederate States is in conformity to that established by the fathers of the American Revolution, and a continuance of the Government they established." That government, this writer and others like him complained, had been perverted and betrayed by the Yankee tendency to (wrongly) place the interests and power of the nation above that of the individual states. That tendency, combined with the Yankees' generally corrupt and materialistic character, led to a "national decadence" that one writer dated to "the close of the administration of the last Revolutionary statesmen," James Monroe.
This idea found reinforcement in the 1863 pamphlet Our Home and Foreign Policy, in which Henry St. Paul described a split between the Northern and Southern people that predated even the American Revolution. Northerners, St. Paul and others like him argued, were descended from the Puritans, whereas Southerners were the heirs of the more dashing Cavaliers. This divided heritage, and the different values implicit in it, necessarily fostered two separate societies. During the years following the Revolution, the people diverged and "in the South, Northern stock got elevated and purified, and in the North, Southern blood became corrupt and degenerated. In less than a quarter of a Century, the North hated the South and the South despised the North." Constant association with immoral Northerners, who were tainted by their pursuit of money and power, according to St. Paul, "debased" Southern society, and the Missouri Compromise, with its limitations on the expansion of slavery, was "a standing insult and defiance." Only the moral fitness of Southerners allowed them to "steer clear of northern infamy" and escape "the contagious influence of northern immorality."
Continues...
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. War
Chapter 1. A Religious Patriotism: The Culture of Confederate Identity
Interlude: A Hope Fully Authorized by the Facts
Chapter 2. Love of Country, Love of Self: Challenges to Confederate Unity
Interlude: Only Not a Victory
Chapter 3. Enemies Like an Avalanche: Yankees, Slaves, and Confederate Identity
Interlude: Peace (with Independence Always)
Chapter 4. Blue-Black Is Our Horizon: The End of the War
Part II. Reconstruction
Chapter 5. Nursing the Embers: Race and Politics during Reconstruction
Interlude: To Receive the Oath and Brand of Slave
Chapter 6. To Restore Their Broken Fortunes: Reconstructing White Southern Identity
Interlude: The Vicarious Sufferer
Chapter 7. Who Shall Subjugate the Women? Gender and White Southern Identity
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
A comprehensive discussion of the ideas and feelings of supporters of the Confederacy during the Civil War and Reconstruction.—American Historical Review
A sophisticated explication of the creation, manifestation, adaptation, and persistence of Confederate nationalism.—The North Carolina Historical Review
Rubin's study provides valuable contributions to understanding the creation of the Confederate identity.—The Courier
Offers a perceptive treatment of the complex nest of issues Confederates confronted as they faced the prospect of taking loyalty oaths to the Union, both during and after the war.—Arkansas Historical Quarterly
A well-conceived book.—Georgia Historical Quarterly
Provides a compelling argument concerning the relationship between southern nationalism and the Confederate state. . . . Extensive and focused. . . . A valuable contribution to understanding the nature of Confederate identity. . . . Essential and instructive.—Southern Historian
An excellent, well-written book with narrative flair, keen insights, thought-provoking perspectives on Confederate nationalism, identity and memory, and, given the recent squabbles over the Confederate battle flag, timely in its arrival.—History
Rubin's careful delineation of southern nationalism is rich and rewarding. . . . Historians of the South and of American nationalism will learn a great deal from this book.—Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Rubin presents a broad, clearly written and well-documented argument on the formation of postwar Confederate consensus.—Military History of the West
A Shattered Nation makes many valuable contributions. . . . [Rubin] pushes readers to see Confederate nationalism as a work still in progress in 1865, and to consider questions of how shared experiences of war and defeat contributed to a distinctive white southern identity long after reunion.—Civil War History