Lesley J. Gordon, John C. Inscoe, eds. Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. v + 381 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-3099-5; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8071-3231-9.
Reviewed by Paul Quigley (School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh)
Published on H-Nationalism (January, 2008)
Perspectives on a Failed Nationalism
There are obvious reasons why the general scholarship on nationalism has barely noticed the Confederate States of America. The American South's bid for independence failed, for one thing--causing many to doubt the existence of a Confederate nationalism at all. Furthermore, the whole undertaking was based largely on the protection of racial slavery, an institution that no scholar today would want to be seen to support.[1] Since it was a failed nationalism based on an abhorrent institution, it is not surprising that the Confederacy has attracted little attention from nationalism scholars. Yet, with increasing success, students of the American South have begun to utilize the concept of nationalism in their studies of the Confederate States. Inside the Confederate Nation reflects, builds on, and at times advances this existing work. In the process, it suggests that historians of the Confederacy and scholars of nationalism in other times and places might benefit from listening more carefully to each others' work.
This volume pays tribute to the career of Emory M. Thomas, a prominent Civil War historian who taught for decades at the University of Georgia and who is best known for his broad interpretations of the Confederacy, in The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (1971), and for his more recent research on the Confederacy's leading general, in Robert E. Lee: A Biography (1995). Among many other areas of Confederate history, Thomas's work has influenced debates on Southern identity and Confederate nationalism. Inside the Confederate Nation showcases Thomas's achievements not just as a writer but as a teacher and mentor as well: his former graduate students contributed about two-thirds of the contents.
The editors, Lesley J. Gordon and John C. Inscoe, are to be commended for organizing a varied group of contributions--typical of any festschrift--into thoughtful and fairly coherent sections. These sections cover "Family and Gender," "Race," and "Memory and Legacies," in addition to "Nationalism and Identity," the section containing the largest number of essays. Rather than attempting to evaluate all nineteen essays, I will focus on those with most relevance to the subject of nationalism, particularly those that seem to move the conversation on Confederate nationalism forward. Taken together, this collection demonstrates the extraordinary range and reach of nationalism as an analytical category. Nationalism, for instance, provides some common ground between James McPherson's examination of Confederates' quest for foreign recognition and Keith Bohannon's insightful look at the reasons why soldiers in the Confederate Army of Tennessee reenlisted for a further term of service even in the dark days of 1864. From diplomacy to everyday morale in the ranks--and, in other contributions, from literature to electoral politics to commemoration--readers can expect a striking variety of approaches to Confederate nationalism.
Part of nationalism's value to historians lies precisely in its ability to reveal connections between areas of life that we too often separate. This is particularly visible in one of the most stimulating contributions, Gordon's "Courting Nationalism: The Wartime Letters of Bobbie Mitchell and Nettie Fondren." Examining the wartime correspondence of a young Southern couple, Gordon exposes the two-way connections between their personal lives and their attitudes toward Confederate nationalism. "Their very definitions of man and woman, husband and wife," she argues, "became closely tied to their identity and behavior as loyal Confederates" (p. 189). Though Gordon does not say as much, her analysis resonates with studies of gender and nationalism in other times and places. This is one of several areas where students of the Confederacy and of other nationalisms might fruitfully share insights and approaches.
While these two young lovers' commitment to the Confederacy was fairly straightforward, such was not the case for all white Southerners. One of the principal ways in which this collection pushes forward the scholarship on Confederate nationalism lies in the emphasis that several contributors place on unevenness and fluidity. This theme is wonderfully captured by the title of Brian Wills's essay, "Shades of Nation," an examination of competing loyalties in occupied southwestern Virginia. The idea of "shades of nation" implicitly informs Christopher Phillips's impressive contribution as well. Phillips challenges the common assumption that often underpins the study of the American Civil War (and often the study of nations in general): "the existence of a clearly defined and static geographical line" separating the two sides (p. 148). It was not at all that simple, as Phillips demonstrates. The border between the North and the South--the boundary of the Confederate nation--was unstable, as is revealed by the existence of Southern border states that wanted to preserve slavery and remain in the Union. Torn from the outset between the North and the South, Kentucky and Missouri, in particular, went on to become more and not less "Southern" as a result of the experience of occupation by Union troops. Although they never joined the Confederate nation-state, many Kentuckians and Missourians clearly identified themselves with Confederate nationalism. As Phillips shows, the borders of nations and their nationalisms are rarely clear-cut.
Phillips is not the only contributor to emphasize change over time. This theme builds on existing work on Confederate nationalism, including, very appropriately, the contributions of Thomas himself. In The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, Thomas advanced a fresh and provocative interpretation of Confederate history. The experience of fighting to establish the Confederacy's existence, he argued, fundamentally transformed the meaning of the Confederacy itself. Having commenced a fight for the rights of states against the central government, they ended up centralizing governmental power to an unprecedented extent. The values of the antebellum South fell by the wayside. Slavery, the institution that caused the war in the first place, was in some quarters surpassed by independence per se as Confederates' primary objective. For Thomas, then, Southern values and objectives--including nationalism--underwent "revolutionary" transformation through the course of the Civil War.
Several of the contributors take this interpretation up and test it in their particular areas of expertise. Frank Byrne, for example, explores the literary output of two Southern writers before, during, and after the Civil War in an attempt to chart changing ideas about Southern identity. Both Daniel R. Hundley and John Beachamp Jones advanced in their prewar writings a Southern identity based largely on slavery and white supremacy. But this identity was, Byrne rightly concludes, "inchoate" (p. 84). For both writers, it was only with the experience of war (Hundley was a soldier and then prisoner of war, Jones a Confederate bureaucrat) that it took on a genuine "cogency" (p. 88). The idea of nationalism as an evolving process also informs Rod Andrew Jr.'s essay on the Georgia congressional elections of 1863. In one of the strongest essays in the collection, Andrew takes on traditional accounts of the 1863 elections that interpreted them as evidence for the weakness of Confederate nationalism. Proceeding from the intelligent assumption that nationalism is "a process as much as it is a fixed quotient of patriotic feeling at a given point in time," Andrew reinterprets the elections as "a critique, not a rejection" of the Confederate government and Confederate nationalism (pp. 130-1). Rather than simply undergoing a straightforward decline, he concludes, "Confederate nationalism changed over time" (p. 143).
Nowhere was this change more evident than in the Confederate debate over arming slaves, a debate that took place in the final months of the Confederacy's existence and that forms the subject of Philip D. Dillard's essay. Though the possibility of using slaves as soldiers had been broached earlier in the war, it only became viable in the increasingly desperate atmosphere of late 1864 and early 1865. Focusing on two quite different parts of the Confederacy--Lynchburg, Virginia, and Galveston, Texas--Dillard skillfully analyzes the course of the debate. Resistance to arming slaves stemmed from the widely acknowledged fact that if slaves were expected to fight, they must also be granted their freedom. Because the Confederacy had been created primarily to keep black Southerners in slavery, this became a debate over the very meaning of the whole enterprise. Was Confederate independence a means to the end of preserving slavery? Or, could slavery be sacrificed as a means to the end of Confederate independence? The Confederate Congress did decide, in the spring of 1865, that slaves could take on combat roles, leaving open the question of whether they should be emancipated in return. The decision came too late in the war to have much effect. But the debate it inspired, as Dillard makes clear, helps illuminate Confederates' understandings of what their bid for independence really meant. This essay exemplifies the extent to which this volume is a genuine tribute to Thomas: not only does his name appear in its title, but the interpretive framework that he advanced more than thirty years ago informs its contents as well.
The collection is also influenced by other scholarship on Confederate nationalism. Pioneered by Drew Gilpin Faust, recent work has moved beyond an older and rather stale debate primarily interested in quantifying Confederate nationalism (was it strong or weak? Did it exist at all?), and has instead explored its character, evolution, and diverse meanings.[2] Though some contributors to Inside the Confederate Nation cast a backward glance at the old debate, several of them position themselves within the latest trends. To make the collection even stronger, they could have taken the same care to engage meaningfully the broader scholarship on comparative and theoretical nationalism (Wills is the only contributor who attempts to do so). Many of the aspects of nationalism that this collection covers--gender, borders, politics, literature, warfare--have figured centrally in that broader scholarship. Drawing on the insights of this historiography could have enriched these essays. But even so, they already provide students of both the American Civil War and of nationalism in general much to think about. This volume demonstrates not only the significant contributions Thomas has made to the study of the Confederacy and its nationalism, but also the rich possibilities of studying even a nationalism that so dramatically failed.
Notes
[1]. As David M. Potter argued in a highly influential essay on nationalism in the Civil War-era United States, to grant or to deny the label "nationalism" to a given movement is often a "valuative" act. David M. Potter, "The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa," American Historical Review 67 (1962): 924-950.
[2]. Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Robert E. Bonner, "Americans Apart: Nationality in the Slaveholding South" (PhD diss., Yale University, 1998); Robert E. Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Ian Binnington, "'They Have Made a Nation': Confederates and the Creation of Confederate Nationalism" (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004); and Anne Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
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Citation:
Paul Quigley. Review of Gordon, Lesley J.; Inscoe, John C., eds., Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas.
H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14024
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