The Southern Historical Society Papers
In their writing, historians have a way of being oblique. But they can also be quite direct, as when Prof. E. Merton Coulter once declared that when the Southern Historical Society was organized in 1869, “they might well have called their organization the Confederate Historical Society, for so it was and always remained.”1 Similarly, historian Thomas J. Pressly has termed the Southern Historical Society Papers, the journal launched in 1876, “one of the most important forums of authoritative Confederate opinion on the war.”2
The purposesof the Society and its Papers were clear: “collating, preserving and finally publishing such material as would vindicate the truth of Confederate history.” Stated elsewhere, the Society’s desire was described as “to obtain
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Eliza Frances Andrews (1840–1931) received a strong education and was
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a successful writer and educator. Her War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl
Am Not a
surely ranks among the most observant
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and intelligent wartime memoirs by a Edited with commentary by Stephen Davis, I Thank the Lord I Am Not a Yankeeincludes selections of her wartime and postwar journals which are most expressive of her Confederate
patriotism and Southern pride.
Stephen Davisis author of ten books on the Civil War, most of which treat the Atlanta Campaign. His two recent volumes
on Confederate General John Bell Hood have won several prizes, including the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York CWRT.
materials for a just and accurate history of the great struggle, and representative documents and circumstantial details… to be sought for throughout the Union.”3
Broadly speaking, after the war Southerners had three goals in their historical activity: to justifyand vindicate their actions; to counter Northern misrepresentations of Confederates and their motives; and to teach younger generations of Southerners about the war and the Southern people’s conduct and sacrifices.4 Jefferson Davis put all of this more pithily in a speech made at New Orleans in 1882: “You remember the fable of the lion who, seeing a statue which represented a lion prostrate, and a man victorious, bending over him, said that if a lion had made the statue, the figures would have been reversed.”5
The story of the formation of the Society itself on May 1,1869, is modestly told by former Confederate brigadier Dabney H. Maury:
In New Orleans…I determined to set on foot a plan for the systematic collection and preservation of the Southern archives relating to the war. General Dick Taylor cordially encouraged me and…I called a meeting by quiet personal requests of nine or ten gentlemen in the office of Hewitt and Morton. After conversational discussion,
it was agreed to meet at the same place in one week from that date. Meantime, each of us agreed to canvass among his friends and bring them in to help. Next week forty of us assembled, and the noble and able Presbyterian divine, Dr. B. M. Palmer, was elected president….6
Strapped for funds, the S.H.S. at first could not launch a freestanding journal of its own. Instead, it essentially rented twenty pages in each monthly issue of the Southern Magazine, published in Baltimore. This arrangement was tried from January 1874 to July 1875, then given up.7
The Southern Historical Society consequently resolved that in order to pursue its historiographical mission, it would have to create its own publication. The Society accordingly launched its Papers as a monthly journal in January 1876. Its first issue definitively staked out the publication’s intent to preserve Confederate history. Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address was reprinted, as was a wartime message from the Congress to the people. Then, too, ex-senator Robert M. T. Hunter explained the “Origin of the Late War” in ways that argued the constitutional right of secession and denied slavery as a cause of the conflict.8
All told, fifty-two volumes form the corpus of the S.H.S.P., 1876-1959. “No other single source provides so wide a variety of information on battles, leaders and life in the wartime South,” writes James I. Robertson, Jr. (who as editor-in-chief headed a team that prepared a meticulous two-volume index for the Papers [1980] that adds immensely to their value for researchers).9
As a recorder and preserver of Confederate history, the Southern Historical Society Papers has no equal. In 1876, the U.S. government’s project to publish the Official Records had barely gotten off the ground, and Southerners were rightly suspicious that Confederate documents would not be handled appropriately (or even sought). Jones accordingly invited submissions from prominent ex-Confederates, especially manuscript campaign reports and related papers. He was quickly successful. “We have scarcely touched our series of original MS. reports,” he was able to report in July 1877, “and shall, from month to month, continue to publish the more important of them.” “In a word,” he continued, “we desire to make our Papers indispensable to all who would know the truth concerning our great struggle for constitutional freedom.”10
In addition to officers’ reports, the Papers present reminiscences by soldiers and civilians. Monographs cover everything from campaigns and battles to naval engagements. To cite just one contribution, scholars have found the Papers’ extensive discussion of the Dahlgren Raid to be authoritative. Some volumes loom quite large. The Papers’ entire fifteenth volume was devoted to a listing of the 26,300 officers and men of the Army of Northern Virginia who had been paroled at Appomattox. Volume 43 (1920) presents a lengthy, pivotal account of Jackson (by Capt. James Power Smith, Stonewall’s A.D.C.) and of his Valley Campaign (from Lt. Col. William Allan).11
Not all submissions are original. In the April 1877 issue is Robert M. T. Hunter’s article, “The Peace Commission of 1865,” which had appeared in the Philadelphia Weekly Times; as one of the three Confederates who met with Lincoln and Seward at Hampton Roads, Hunter’s perspective was invaluable.12
The driving force behind the S.H.S.P. in its early, most influential years was its editor, J. William Jones. At the Society’s organizational meeting at New Orleans in May 1869, Jones was elected secretary pro tem; he assumed the Society’s permanent secretaryship in 1875. By then the Society, struggling in New Orleans, had moved its headquarters to Richmond and reorganized under rules that allowed only Virginians to serve as officers. Former Confederate lieutenant general Jubal A. Early was accordingly elected president.13
Early, Jones and William N. Pendleton (Lee’s former artillery chief), forming a “Virginia Cult” (as Alan T. Nolan has put it) then set the S.H.S.P. on a course that would apotheosize Robert E. Lee and enshrine Confederate history with a fervor and sentiment that has come to be called the myth of the Lost Cause—defined by Gaines M. Foster as “the dominant complex of attitudes and emotions that constituted the white South’s interpretation of the Civil War.”14
Gardiner Shattuck’s judgement that Jones “literally controlled the shape of the Lost Cause” is no overstatement. Neither is Charles Reagan Wilson’s assessment of Jones as “the most influential and well-known clergyman in the cult of the Lost Cause” and “one of the most popular Southerners in late nineteenth-century Dixie.”15
John William Jones was born on Sept. 25, 1836 in Louisa County, central Virginia. He was educated in local academies and at the University of Virginia. After graduation he entered a Baptist theological seminary in Greenville, S.C., and was ordained in June 1860. Returning to Virginia he started as pastor of a church in Louisa County. At the age of 24 he enlisted on June 8, 1861 in the Louisa Blues, which became Company D of the 13th Virginia Infantry. In the fall of ’61 Jones was appointed
February 2024
army chaplain. Two years later he assumed the role of army evangelist, which suited him even more.
After Appomattox Jones returned to his pastoral calling, this time at Lexington Baptist Church in Rockbridge County, site of Washington College—the presidency of which Robert E. Lee assumed in the fall of 1865. Before Lee died in October 1870, Jones had become a close friend of the general. The Lee family turned over to Jones material for a memorial volume published in 1874, Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of R. E. Lee.16
This was Jones’ first book, of the eight he would write before his death in 1909. His more notable titles include Christ in the Camp: Or Religion in Lee’s Army (1887) and Life and Letters of Robert Edward Lee: Soldier and Man (1906). But it was in his role as editor of the S.H.S.P., 1876- 1886, that Jones made his mark on Confederate history.
A staple of the Lost Cause myth was an explanation of Confederate defeat that allowed Southerners to retain their honor and pride. The Confederacy had not really been conquered, the thinking went, just overwhelmed by Northern numbers. Lee’s statement in his farewell order at Appomattox that the Army of Northern Virginia had been compelled to yield to “overwhelming numbers and resources” laid the groundwork for the notion. For instance, in his issue of March 1881, Jones published a paper on the strength of Federal forces during the war (2,320,272). Against this horde, Papers the maintained that only about 600,000 Southern soldiers fought; or, as one writer concluded, “it is a historical fact that we fought as a whole about five men to our one.”17
Another major tenet of the myth was its veneration of Robert E. Lee, endowing him with a Christ-like aura. Jones’ deeply held religious beliefs aided in this apotheosis, an element of which stressed Lee’s lofty ancestry. It was not enough that Lee was son of the Revolutionary hero Lighthorse Harry Lee; some royal blood was wanted, too. The editor thus rejoiced when a professor wrote in the S.H.S.P. that General Lee was actually descended from King Robert the Bruce of Scotland.18 The Papers’ veneration of General Lee dovetailed nicely with the “overwhelming numbers and resources” explanation of Confederate defeat. In a speech on Lee published in January 1877, an orator claimed that in
the last year of the war Lee had fought against “all the resources of the United States.”19
Diminished in stature beside the saintly Lee, but no less revered, was the common Southern soldier. Reprinting the addresses delivered at the dedication of Confederate monuments allowed the Papers to extoll his bravery and devotion to principle amidst harrowing privations. “They loved virtue for virtue’s sake, honor for honor’s sake, justice for justice’s sake, truth for truth’s sake, right for right’s sake,” waxed former brigadier Henry A. Wise, going on about Confederates’ “sense of duty and…physical and moral power of resistance to the tyranny of usurpation and oppression.” Editor Jones received so many such memorial addresses that he frankly could not print them all.20
Within the Lost Cause mythology there ran a strong undercurrent of Protestant Christian faith—an expression of moral piety that allowed Southerners to claim moral superiority over vulgar Yankees. Daniel H. Hill was only one orator whose address in the S.H.S.P. hailed “the Old South of pure women and brave men.”21
Another aspect of the myth addressed how Lee and his courageous army could have been beaten at Gettysburg. In one of his “Editorial Paragraphs” (July 1877), Dr. Jones announced that in the next month’s number, the Papers would begin a series of pieces concerning Gettysburg, “which will be simply invaluable to all who desire to know the truth concerning that great battle.” In his August issue he explained that six months before he had received “from a distinguished foreign military critic…a series of questions as to the causes of the failure of the Confederate army to win the battle of Gettysburg.” Jones then dutifully made twenty copies of the letter and sent them to “representatives of every corps and division and every arm of the service of the Army of Northern Virginia.”
One of the more notable submissions came from John B. Hood, one of Lee’s division commanders. Hood had never prepared a report on the battle, in consequence of his wound on July 2 and rapid deployment to Georgia two months later. However, in June 1875 he had written a long letter in which he related “from memory,” his role in the events leading up to and during the battle; Hood responded to Jones’ request for a statement by sending him copy of his letter. In it he recalled how, early in the morning of that fateful July 2, while conferring with his generals as to the day’s plans for attack, Lee was virtually bundled up, “with coat buttoned to the throat, sabre-belt buckled around the waist, and field-glasses pending at his side.” Hood also recalled those memorable words of Longstreet: “the General is a little nervous this morning; he wishes me to attack; I do not wish to do so without Pickett. I never like to go into battle with one boot off.”22
In focusing on Gettysburg, Jones had a dual purpose in mind: to exonerate Robert E. Lee for the Confederate defeat, and to pin the blame on James Longstreet. Both on July 2 and July 3, Jubal Early accused Longstreet for having failed to properly carry out Lee’s orders for attacks those days, writing that Longstreet had been “materially impaired by a constitutional inertia, mental and physical.” Jones followed up with a punch of his own, writing in March 1884, “if General Lee’s orders had been properly carried out at Gettysburg, we would have won that field….we verily believe that the verdict of impartial History will be that the Confederates would have won Gettysburg, and Independence, but for the failure of one man.”23
Some historians have mocked Jones for his adulation of Lee. Thomas L. Connelly terms him a “sycophant” who became “one of the most influential members of the Lee cult” for self-serving purposes. He makes the same point about Jubal Early, who damned Longstreet for Gettysburg out of “fear for his own reputation.” Connelly is more than mildly critical of how the S.H.S.P. “fell under the control of Lee devotees,” such as Jones, Early and Fitzhugh Lee, the general’s nephew. Early and Jones in particular constructed an “exaggerated image of Lee.” Connelly and co-author Barbara Bellows go further in God and General Longstreet (1982): “one must give a generation of Jubal Earlys its due: in a frenzy of writings in the two decades after Lee’s death, they elevated him to the plane of a southern demigod.”24
Jones’ and the Papers’ pursuit of Confederate history has its limitations, starting with the biases of the editor and his confreres. When the S.H.S.P. published “Jeb” Stuart’s report on Gettysburg, Jones omitted a key paragraph in which Stuart criticized Early.25 After Longstreet published an article in Century on the Maryland Campaign, William Allan wrote a long rebuttal for S.H.S.P. in which he criticized Longstreet’s essay “for its ill-natured allusions to General Jackson” (another darling of Jones and the Papers) and “its severe and unfair criticism of General Lee’s strategy.”26
Under Jones’ editorship the Papers gave a lopsided emphasis to the war in Virginia (where Lee and his army had won so many victories) at the expense of other fronts and theaters.
During 1876, its first year in operation, the Papers published twenty-nine articles on Lee and his army, but only five on events in other military theaters. When readers criticized this Virginiacentrism, Jones coolly replied that if readers contributed more material on the war in the west, he would print it. Some of these “western” submissions are as valuable as the Papers’ “Virginia” articles; a good example is Benjamin Franklin Cheatham’s long article on the Spring Hill affair of Nov. 29, 1864, which has become a staple in the literature of Hood’s Tennessee campaign.27
Jones’ last volume of S.H.S.P appeared in 1886; the following year Robert A. Brock became Society secretary. Brock was responsible for almost a quartercentury of the Papers, 1887- 1910. Subsequent editors included the renowned Douglas Southall Freeman (1930-43). Despite the aging of Confederate veterans, the S.H.S.P. continued publishing articles on the war till September 1920. The last nine volumes, 1923-1959, reprint the proceedings of the Confederate Congress; the last of these were under the charge of the Papers’ final editor, Frank E. Vandiver.28
Thus the Southern Historical Society Papers are important for at least two broad-based reasons: as an extensive reservoir of important historical source material, and as an illuminating reflection of post-Appomattox Southerners’ thinking about their failed war for Southern independence.
1 E. Merton Coulter, “What the South Has Done About Its History,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 2, no. 1 (February 1936), 19.
2 Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret their Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 106.
3 “Origin and History of Our Society,” S.H.S.P., vol. 6, no. 6 (December 1878), 244; R. A. Brock, “The Southern Historical Society: Its Origin and History,” S.H.S.P., vol. 18 (1890), 352.
4 Lloyd Arthur Hunter, “The Sacred South: Postwar Confederates and the Sacralization of Southern Culture,” doctoral dissertation, Saint Louis University, 1978, 204, 206,
5 “Address of President Davis” (New Orleans, Apr. 25, 1882), S.H.S. P., vol. 10, no. 5 (May 1882), 228-29.
6 Dabney Herndon Maury, Recollections of a Virginian in the Mexican, Indian, and Civil Wars (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 251.
7 “Origin and History of our Society,” S.H.S.P., vol. 6, no. 6 (December 1878), 245; Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature 1607-1900 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1954), 717.
8 “Inaugural Address of President Jefferson Davis at Montgomery, Alabama, February, 1861,” “Address of Congress to the People of the Confederate States” and “R. M. T. Hunter, “Origin of the Late War,” S.H.S.P., vol. 1, no.1 (January 1876), 1-13, 19-38.
9 “Introduction” in James I. Robertson, ed., An Index-Guide to the Southern Historical Society Papers 1876-1959, 2 vols. (Millwood NY: Kraus International Publications, 1980) vol. 1, xvii.
10 Richard M. McMurry, “The Official Records of the Rebellion,” in Clyde N. Wilson, ed., American Historians 1866-1912 (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1986), 367-69; “Editorial Paragraphs,” S.H.S.P., vol. 4, no. 1 (July 1877), 45.
11 J. William Jones, comp., “The Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid Against Richmond,” S.H.S.P., vol. 13 (1885), 515-60; “Paroles of the Army of Northern Virginia,” S.H.S.P., vol. 15 (1887) 1-508; James Power Smith, “With Stonewall Jackson in the Army of Northern Virginia” and William Allan, “History of the Campaign of Gen. T. J. (Stonewall) Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia From November 4, 1861 to June 17, 1862,” S.H.S.P., vol. 43 (1920), 1-295.
12 R. M. T. Hunter, “The Peace Commission of 1865,” S.H.S.P., vol. 3, no. 4 (April 1877), 168-76.
13 Christopher C. Moore, Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2019), 142.
14 Alan T. Nolan, “The Anatomy of a Myth” in Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 14; Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5.
15 Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., A Shield and Hiding Place: The Religious Life of the Civil War Armies (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987), 121; Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865- 1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 119.
16 Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 120; engaged in a “Ghost Dance” to make Moore, Apostle of the Lost Cause, the white man go away. 18-25.
17 “Official Statement of the Strength of the Federal Armies During the War,” S.H.S.P.,vol. 9, no. 3 (March 1881), 134-35; “Relative Numbers of the United States and Confederate States Armies,” S.H.S.P., vol. 32 (1904), 46-50.
18 Moore, Apostle of the Lost Cause, 4-5; “Notes and Queries,” S.H.S.P., vol. 9, no. 4 (April 1881), 190; William Winston Fontaine, “The Descent of General Robert Edward Lee from King Robert the Bruce, of Scotland,” S.H.S.P., vol. 9, no. 5 (May 1881), 193-206.
19 John Hampden Chamberlayne, “Address on the Character of General R. E. Lee,” S.H.S.P., vol. 3, no. 1 (January 1877), 30.
20 Henry A Wise, “The Career of Wise’s Brigade, 1861-5,” S.H.S.P., vol. 25 (1897), 20; Stephen Davis, “Empty Eyes, Marble Hand: The Confederate Monument and the South,” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 16, no. 3 (Winter 1982), 17; Douglas Southall Freeman, The South to Posterity: An Introduction to the Writing of Confederate History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951 [1939]), 34.
21 D. H. Hill, “The Old South,” S.H.S. P., vol. 16 (1888), 424.
In “Riposte in Tertio,” Faulkner’s Brother Fortinbride expressed well this religious tenet of the Lost Cause myth: “He just said how victory without God is mockery and delusion, but that defeat with God is not defeat” (William Faulkner, The Unvanquished [New York: Random House, 1938], 155).
Yankee wretchedness is captured in a story told by Father Ryan, the poet-priest of the postwar South. Once, as he saw his young niece gazing at a painting of Jesus on the Cross, he asked the lass if she knew the evil men who had crucified her Lord. “O yes I know,” she promptly answered, “the Yankees” (Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 25).
22 “Editorial Paragraphs,” S.H.S.P., vol. 4, no. 1 (July 1877), 45; “Letter from General John B. Hood,” S.H.S.P., vol. 4, no. 4 (October 1877), 147-48.
23“Letter from J. A. Early,” S.H.S.P., vol. 4, no. 2 (August 1877), 65;“’Within a Stone’s Throw of Independence’ at Gettysburg,” S.H.S.P., vol. 12, no. 3 (March 1884), 111.
Gaines Foster suggests that the “Virginia coalition” of Early, Jones, Fitz Lee and others “seemed to be searching for some factor that would have changed the results of the war. If only they had not faced overwhelming numbers, if only Longstreet had been on time.” In a lighter mood than one sees in Connelly’s strictures, Foster likens the Virginians to the Plains Indians who late in the nineteenth century
Similarly, the Virginians seemed to believe that if they wrote their articles and kept southerners from deserting after the war, the Yankees and all that had occurred after Appomattox would simply disappear. One can easily imagine a gathering of Early and company, wearing 60). their gray ghost shirts and Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His clutching volumes of the SHSP Image in American Society (New that Jones promised would be impervious to the slings and York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 41, arrows of northern slander. 48, 87, 91; Thomas L. Connelly
MILITARY ANTIQUE
Formed in a circle about a statue of a recumbent Lee, the true believers dance in and back, chanting, on one foot, “overwhelmed by numbers,” and on the other, “betrayed by Longstreet”—waiting for an undefeated, marble Lee to rise and lead them to victory.
(Ghosts of the Confederacy, 55, The 24 Thomas L. Connelly,
M A G A Z I N E
and Barbara L. Bellows, God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 84.
25 Connelly, Marble Man, 88; Stuart report, Aug. 20, 1863, O.R., vol. 27, pt. 2, 708-709; “Gen. J. E. B. Stuart’s Report of Operations after Gettysburg,” S.H.S.P., vol. 2, no. 2 (August 1876), 76.
26 Connelly, Marble Man, 89-90; “Review of General Longstreet by Colonel W. Allan,” S.H.S.P., vol. 14 (1886), 102.
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Cause, 163; “Editorial Paragraphs,” S.H.S.P., vol. 5, no. 3 (March 1878); 143; “The Lost Opportunity at Spring Hill, Tenn.—General Cheatham’s Reply to General Hood,” S.H.S.P., vol. 9, nos. 10, 11 & 12, 524-40.
28 Robertson, “Introduction,” xvii
Stephen Davis has been studying Confederate literature since graduate school, when he wrote his doctoral dissertation on “Johnny Reb in Perspective: The Confederate Soldier’s Image in the Southern Arts.”
