George C. Rable, DamnYankees! Demonization & Defiance in the Confederate South. Louisiana State University Press, 2015.
Jason Phillips, Diehard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility. University of Georgia Press, 2007.
Michael T. Bernath, Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South. University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Coleman Hutchison, Apples & Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America. University of Georgia Press, 2012.
Why Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Confederates Fought: Family & Nation in Civil War Virginia. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
In January 1862 a Georgian serving in Virginia wrote home about the sunny prospects for the Southern Confederacy. “I have no more idea that the Yankees will whip us,” he declared, “than that a chicken can teach Latin.”
I quote from a recent book, George C. Rable’s Damn Yankees! Demonization & Defiance in the Confederate South (2015) as a way of introducing a point that has recently struck me: the surge of academic interest in cultural expressions of Confederate nationalism. By the way, when George told his chicken-teaching-Latin yarn to the Atlanta Civil War Round Table, we all laughed.
Historiography routinely records historians revising the findings of earlier generations of scholars—which is sort of reflected in what Henry Ford, the carmaker, once said: “history is more or less bunk.”
Thirty years ago I reviewed Why South Lost the Civil War (1986), by Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William H. Still, Jr. I noted the authors’ argument that shaky nationalism, guilt over slavery, and confusion as to why they were fighting all undermined Southerners’ spirit. The Confederacy, as they put it, “died of guilt and failure to will.”
Well, that take seems to be on its way out, to infer from a handful of books I’ve read or am reading.
One of my favorites is Damn Yankees! by Dr. Rable, now retired from the University of Alabama. He examined Southern newspapers, speeches, letters, and diaries, searching for Confederates’ denunciations of the enemy. He found that the longer the war dragged on, the more poisonous and pervasive the anti-Yankee invective became.
Jason Phillips, who teaches history at Mississippi State, is author of Diehard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility. He worked this book from his doctoral dissertation at Chapel Hill, which alone attests to academic interest in Confederate culture.
Dr. Phillips is at his best in describing Confederates’ characterization of Yankees. Southerners found them at once weak, brutal, “fanatical Puritans,” “brutish mercenaries,” “immigrant trash,” and “cowardly shopkeepers.”
No wonder that, as the wartime children’s math book taught, one Confederate could whip ten Yankees!
…er, make that seven, at least in An Elementary Arithmetic, Designed for Beginners (Raleigh, 1864): “If one Confederate soldier can whip 7 yankees, how many soldiers can whip 49 yankees?”
This brings up another of my favorites, James Marten’s The Children’s Civil War, which deals a lot with Confederate primers. It’s not so recent, but I turned to it while preparing a slide talk for the Georgia Obstetrical & Gynecological Society on women and children in the Civil War. President at the time was Dr. Cindy Mercer of Athens. I addressed her from the lectern when I told the social order, it is equally true that story of the old slave woman on people at the time incorporatthe plantation of Howell Cobb ed the oppressive elements of the (also from Athens) who explained antebellum South within abstract to the Cobb children that there’d frameworks such as democracy, be no Christmas toys that year beself-determination, and cultural cause the Yankees shot Santa (the autonomy. The fact that we value audience howled). those abstractions but not the uses
The title of Michael T. Bernath’s to which Confederates put them work tells it all: Confederate complicates matters still more.” Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South. A reviewer for the Journal of American History judged, “this valuable work finally puts to rests the notion that the Confederacy was an intellectual wasteland and that Confederates had nothing to say aside from their rebel yell.”
…which is the point that Coleman Hutchison makes in Apples & Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America (Georgia, 2012). The author, an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas, examines poetry, fiction, drama, music, and criticism produced in the wartime South and finds that “Confederate literature was an essential vehicle for Confederate nationalism, a sinewy and multifarious phenomenon that historians have begun to take seriously.”
I find striking a statement that Dr. Hutchison makes in his opening pages:
This book is by no means an apology for the Confederacy or Confederate nationalism. I find almost nothing that is admirable in the politics and culture of the Civil War South. Much of Confederate literature was deeply conservative. Emerging from a fiercely nationalistic milieu, it resounds with both racist and racialistic rhetoric and makes the case again and again for an antidemocratic republic.
But here’s the clincher: “No matter how unsavory that story proves, I think it is important that it be told.”
Reading this, I couldn’t help but think that it’s peculiar: while everyday Americans are pulling down or hiding away Confederate monuments, a growing number of academic scholars are studying aspects of Confederate nationalism that led to those statues being raised in the first place. They are detailing Confederate culture without dignifying it.
The conundrum is ably expressed by Professor Aaron Sheehan-Dean in his Why Confederates Fought: Family & Nation in Civil War Virginia: “While it is certainly true that simple answers to the question of why men fought, such as ‘for their way of life,’ or ‘for freedom,’ or even ‘for independence,’ conceal the reality of slavery, hierarchy, and inequality in the southern Think about it.
Titles By Stephen Davis
The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5–July 18, 1864 Davis’ narrative history of the Atlanta Campaign is divided into two paperbacks from Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War Series. Volume One, A Long and Bloody Task, carries Sherman’s forces from Dalton in northwest Georgia to the Chattahoochee River. There the Confederate government was forced to relieve its army commander, Joseph E. Johnston, and replace him with Gen. John B. Hood.
All the Fighting They Want
With the Yankee army five miles outside of Atlanta, Hood promised not to give up with city without a fight— which is all President Jefferson Davis asked. Davis’ companion volume, All the Fighting They Want, describes Hood’s efforts to defend Atlanta. Its fall in early September 1864 was a mortal blow to Confederate hopes for independence and a big boost to Lincoln’s hopes for presidential reelection.
1. Who sent this note to Pickett,
3. Which two regiments fought
4. Who commanded the 20th 5. Which Confederate division
6. Federal III Corps command
7. Who commanded the newly
Military Images magazine
TRIAL ISSUES
Gettysburg Trivia
“The 18 guns have been driven off. For God’s sake come 8. During the battle, who was on quick or we cannot support you. Ammunition nearly out”?
was the only Gettysburgher who fought in the battle near his home? 9. Who commanded Lee’s caveach other at Little Round Top on the afternoon of July 2?
10. Which one of Pickett’s three Maine during the battle?
commander was seriously wounded in the arm at the start of Longstreet’s attack on the afternoon of July 2?
Answers found on page 46. er took a wound to his leg on the afternoon of July 2 that led to amputation. Which general?
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formed Third Corps of Lee’s army?
commander of the Union II Corps, which took the brunt of the attack of Pickett, Pettigrew, and Trimble on the third day?
alry in the summer of 1863, who proved himself famously absent in the several days before the battle?
brigade commanders rode his horse ahead of his troops in the charge of July 3, was killed, and whose body was never identified for burial?
Engines of Rebellion: Confederate Ironclads and Steam Engineering in the American Civil War. By Saxon T. Bisbee. Photos, drawings, appendices, notes, bibliography, index, 280 pp., 2018. University of Alabama Press, www.uapress. ua.edu. $59.95 hardcover.
Reviewed by Theodore P. Savas
As everyone who reads much of anything about the Confederate Navy soon realizes, Secretary Stephen Mallory managed to accomplish quite a lot with very little—especially when compared to the deployable assets available in the North. He and the South were not always (or often) well served by those tied into the naval industrial complex. Because of Engines of Rebellion, a new book by Saxon T. Bisbee, it is much easier to understand the rich complexity of what went on within the ironclad program and especially the complex machinery needed to operate the vessels.
Early on Mallory realized that the Confederacy could not compete with the Union in building traditional warships and decided instead to pump resources into ironclad construction. By the time the war ended, the South had begun construction on fifty such vessels and had completed or nearly outfitted twenty-eight of them. The iron ships proved they were powerful in battle in Hampton Roads (CSS Virginia), on the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers (CSS Arkansas), in Charleston against the Federal blocking squadron (CSS Chicora and Palmetto State), and in Mobile Bay (CSS Tennessee) and elsewhere. What they lacked was the machinery capable of handling their massive weight. We know a substantial amount about the ships themselves and their (usually) short lives, but until now almost nothing about the engines and other important equipment found below decks.
Bisbee begins with something of an encapsulated overview of the book as a whole, a very detailed and technical introduction (though it is much more than that) describing the steam power plants of the day, the Confederate ironclad program, hull-types, auxiliary machinery, etc. While interesting, it is also very detailed and littered with engineering jargon that had me flipping to the back of the book to study the glossary (thereby proving its worth). Whether this level of detail is needed is arguable, but it sets up a much better understanding of the balance of the book for readers determined to understand the minutiae included within these pages.
The first iron ships were conversions from existing ships: the CSS Manassas from the steamer Enoch Train; the CSS Virginia from the steam frigate USS Merrimack; and CSS Baltic from a prewar iron and cottonclad sidewheeler. Unable to match their needs with the right engines and machinery, the South had no choice but to use what was available. That they proved ineffective is no surprise, but the technology was still in its infancy, and that it worked as well as it did under the circumstances is something of which the author takes note.
Most of the balance of Engines of Rebellion is segmented by the type of ship under discussion, for example, the Richmond Richmond, Class — CSS Chicora, Palmetto State, etc.— the Tennessee Class—CSS Tennessee, Columbia—and so forth, and how the various designs selected worked with the machinery available to power them. Different hull designs, for example, worked better with different engine plants, boilers, and so on. One thing made clear is that the Confederacy got better at designing and building ironclads as the war went on.
To a degree, part of the failure of the ironclads had to do with their conflicting purpose. Harbor defense or oceangoing to break the blockade? Slow lumbering behemoths in still waters, or faster offensive ships, nimble but powerful? The conflicts led to compromises that created serious flaws in each of the ships built from scratch, rather than created on the fly via conversion.
As the war progressed, the Confederacy needed smaller and simpler designs with a focused need on ships capable of defending harbors like Mobile, Wilmington and Charleston. Still, the iron added significant weight that increased draft in often notoriously shifting and treacherous waters. Finding good reliable steam plants plagued the South until the end of the war. Dwindling skilled labor helped induce cleaner designs, including diamond-shaped hulls, though few records seem to exist to make definitive conclusions as to their efficacy (the Albemarle being, perhaps, the lone exception). Late-war designs came too late to see any combat but promised much, since they were constructed or undergoing construction on the shoulders of several years of trial and error.
Readers seeking a complete history of ironclad warfare will be disappointed, but that is not the purpose of Engines of Rebellion. An appendix featuring a list of each of the ironclads, its specifications, machinery and final location (if known) is interesting and helpful. What is not helpful is the manner in which the nearly 50 illustrations were reproduced. The drawings, plans and photographs are especially valuable because of the technical nature of this study. Unfortunately, most of them are reproduced too small to be of any use—a curious design oversight for a book of this nature.
Those caveats aside, Bisbee is to be applauded for his level of research and the organization of his groundbreaking study. This information is available nowhere else, and without it students only had an incomplete picture of the complex creatures that were Southern ironclads. Why they worked as well as they did—and why they didn’t—has now been answered much more satisfactorily. Stephen Mallory was right: Southern naval efforts accomplished much more than most people ever realized.
Theodore P. Savas is the owner and managing director of Savas Beatie Publishing in El Dorado Hills, Cal. He has written about and lectures frequently on Civil War naval topics.
Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America. By Matthew Fox-Amato. 105 color photographs, notes, bibliography, index, 360 pp., 2019. Oxford University Press, www.oup.com/ us. $39.95 hardcover.
Reviewed by Stephen Davis
Continuing in that spirit of imaginative scholarship is Matthew Fox-Amato’s Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America.
The institution of slavery had
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existed in America more than two centuries when daguerreotypy was invented in France in 1839. Reported in newspapers, the process was brought to this country, where experimenters improved it as wet-plate collodion photography. By 1850 almost a thousand cameramen were in business in the U.S., offering everybody a chance to have their pictures taken.
Enter Prof. Fox-Amato, who teaches at the University of Idaho, and who developed this book from his doctoral dissertation at Southern California. Exposing Slavery looks at how photography was used in distinctly different ways by slaveowners, abolitionists, Union soldiers and enslaved African Americans themselves.
Take the photograph on the cover of the book, that of little Charlotte Middleton and her enslaved nurse, Lydia, taken by Charlestonian George S. Cook in the late 1850s. The author puts it best: “through the circulation and display of images of well-dressed bondspeople and portraits of enslaved caretakers with white children, enslavers projected a comfortable, harmonious, and familial form of bondage,” allowing Southern whites to “persuade themselves and others of the just and beneficial nature of slavery.”
But danger lurked here. The Lydia posing as “property” is simultaneously having her personhood affirmed and preserved by Cook’s camera. “In the first
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decade of the medium,” the author explains, “enslaved people had begun entering southern daguerreotype saloons of their own volition, posing for cameras, and leaving with visual treasures they could keep in their pockets.”
The same thing happened in the antebellum North. Frederick Douglass had his picture taken more than 160 times—more than Lincoln—and in doing so he was casting his image as not only a man, but a defiant one at that (see Samuel Miller’s daguerreotype 1847/1852).
In his chapter “Realizing Abolition,” Fox-Amato discusses how abolitionists recognized and employed photography as a powerful antislavery weapon. The Branded Hand of Captain Jonathan Walker, a daguerreotype made in 1845, shows closeup Walker’s outstretched left hand branded with “SS”—slave stealer. (Walker, a northern white shipwright, had helped seven slaves escape from Florida to the Bahamas, but was caught, tried and sentenced to brief imprisonment but a lifetime scar.) Abolitionists reproduced the picture widely in newspapers and pamphlets as an irrefutable portrayal of slavery’s horrific violence.
“Years later, as the Civil War raged,” the author states, “Union soldiers would orchestrate pictures with fugitive slaves that envisioned racial hierarchy as slavery fell.” When Timothy O’Sullivan photographed a group of Union officers in Virginia in the spring of 1864, he included in the scene a young black man holding a pitcher—an image, Fox-Amato writes, that “fused racial hierarchy with a sense of place, white privilege, and black subservience.” To Northern whites worried about the status of millions of soon-to-be freedpeople, such pictures offered assurances that after emancipation, blacks were ready to accept a subordinate role in white society.
These instances only hint at the intellectual richness of Exposing Slavery. I echo the observation of one admirer of Fox-Amato’s book: “the links between photography and American thinking about slavery are so clear here, one wonders how they could have remained hidden in the archives for so long.”
Stephen Davis is Book Review Editor for Civil War News. His new book, 100 Significant Photographs of the Civil War--Atlanta Campaign, is due out August 2019.
Understanding Confederates’ Hearts and Minds
Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers. By James J. Broomhall. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, 240 pp., 2019. University of North Carolina Press, www.uncpress.org. $29.95 softcover. Reviewed by Meg Groeling
Author James J. Broomhall is an assistant professor of history at Shepherd University and director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War. This book is part of Civil War America, edited by Peter S. Carmichael, Caroline E. Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean. Civil War America is a series of books interpreting the history and culture of the Civil War-era and beyond in a broad and diverse manner.
Broomhall has followed the private writings (letters, diaries) of several Southern men from the antebellum years through the Civil War, emancipation and Reconstruction. He has chosen a diverse group of men, although each is from a slaveholding family. For example, Georgia native George Anderson Mercer kept a diary from the age of fifteen. His words represent a complex but familiar portrait of southern masculinity based on “Christian gentility, ideological expression, and emotional communication.” Future Confederate general Edmund Kirby-Smith wrote of similar feelings. When these men became soldiers, they continued to write. For southern men, the crises of war forced a transfiguration of ideas upon the private, emotional worlds of those who fought for the South.
Before the war, a “southron” defined himself by his relationship to slaves, women, and children. White supremacy and control denoted his role in society. In the Confederate armies, however, men were forced to associate with a variety of other men, many not from the elite or even middling class. The decisions of other men now controlled his daily actions, his food, and his clothing. Men, now separated from their families, created other support groups from within the military. Without this support, the chaos and trauma of battle, wounding, illness, and death could have seemed impossible to bear. How each man dealt with these issues is the premise of Private Confederacies.
When southern soldiers returned to civilian life, the changes they experienced once again left many emotionally vulnerable. There were several outcomes of these experiences. Most men found ways to define themselves once again, even in times of emancipation and Reconstruction. Some others, however, found that bitter, aggressive masculinity defined their reaction to such significant changes. Sadly, the latter choice led to the creation of vigilante organizations with their legacy of lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan.
Private Confederacies is an essential contribution to a growing number of resources concerning the mentality and actions of southern men and women before, during, and after the Civil War. Good, new work is appearing in this area, and each one takes a step toward helping readers understand just how the myth of the Lost Cause not only came into existence but persisted for so long. Books such as Joanne Freeman’s The Field of Blood, Ben Wynne’s The Man Who Punched Jefferson Davis, Diane Miller Sommerville’s Aberration of Mind, and Jarret Ruminski’s The Limits of Loyalty join Tony Horowitz’s seminal Confederates in the Attic as the waning of the Lost Cause pushes us to more clearly understand the hearts and minds of southerners who fought in the Civil War. James J. Broomall’s book makes a significant contribution to this worthy effort.
Meg Groeling, of Hollister, Cal., received her Master’s degree in military history, with a Civil War emphasis, from American Public University in 2016. Her next book, First Fallen: The Life of Col. Elmer Ellsworth, will be published by Southern Illinois University Press.