The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History) by Drew Gilpin Faust

The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History) Reviews

• 
  Jim Drewery

  According to Drew Gilpin Faust, the central theme of confederate nationalism was drawn from a revival of the American revolutionary spirit of 1776, which secessionist agitators decried the North had steadily forsaken since the birth of the nation. The old guard of southern conservatives had compromised repeatedly over slavery in a valiant effort to maintain the unity of the nation for more than half a century to no avail. The newly elected, abolitionist minded Republicans led by Abraham Lincoln, would no longer merely be satisfied with the abolition of slavery in America, which would of course completely wreck the economic base of the South. Now they would demand that Negroes be granted equality in the public and private spheres, which was in their minds an abomination of God's law. As in the revolution, it would be left to southerners to defend the property rights and sacred liberty of honorable Christian society against a tyrannical government and so evoking the spirit of George Washington, they proclaimed this was not a rebellion, but rather a continuation of the betrayed revolution of their ancestors.
  So they set about to create this new paradise world of southern virtue, where God's own chosen people would benignly exercise their paternalistic power over the powerless, but contented masses. The Confederate constitution would be devoid of the compromises which had plagued the nation's founders and embrace the existing racially and class divided southern society, soundly based on Christian values and charity. In short, the ruling wealthy minority of the South wanted a change in government without any of the accompanying troublesome social changes of the Jacksonian era. This is the South which the elites tried to project as a uniform image of Dixie and which has been popularized in public memory. While this grand design may have resounded well in the heady days of the spring of 1861, patriotic zealousness faded as the realities of the situation set in and as Faust vividly reveals, this image has little basis in reality as the practicalities of the era made the establishment of this utopian Confederate state unachievable.
  Countless hours of meticulous perusal of a variety of primary sources provided the author with ample evidence that this message of intrinsic southern identity was presented to the public utilizing a variety of mediums. The most effective of which having the commonality of being easily conveyed by word of mouth, which was important given the low literacy rate in the region. Scores of songs reiterating this message were published during the Civil War years and history textbooks with a southern slant were written, as were numerous speeches and perhaps most importantly sermons. Religion played a huge part in conveying this southern ideology of the Confederacy, which was devoutly adherent to the principles of the Christian gospel and displayed publicly with nationalized days of prayer and fasting prescribed by governmental decree. However it was conveyed most directly in fire-breathing sermons preached from southern pulpits, where clergymen proclaimed the holy righteousness of the southern cause. Spouting scripture justifying white supremacy, they charged their White congregations to maintain the supremely decreed virtues of benevolent treatment of their slaves, Christian charity, and most importantly racial purity. Simultaneously reminding Blacks of their own prescribed subservient status as slaves and their own duty the cheerfully obey their betters. Women were also expected to be submissive and honor their menfolk, always maintaining respectable decorum of a lady in public.
  Despite their lack of suffrage and in many cases preparation for the added duties of running households absent of male protection or dominance, most southern women gladly stepped up to the challenge early on in the war. There was a great deal of idealism on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line early on in the conflict. Many on both sides were under the misguided illusion the war would be a splendid little affair like the Mexican-American War had been. Such delusions were quickly dispelled throughout the country however, as they had been for those wealthy Washington socialites who arrived on the scene of the First Battle of Bull Run, dressed in their Sunday best with picnic baskets, planning to watch the Union army whip the rebels. Their surprise at what happened to their army rapidly became horror as Union lines evaporated under the rebel onslaught and they found themselves in the midst of a full scale frantic retreat by the Union army. The harsh reality of the consequences of war soon quelled southerners' enthusiasm for the cause as well.
  The South was by every material measure, woefully unprepared for war having failed to embraced the industrial age in the first half of the nineteenth century as had the North. They were outnumbered by the North in men, guns, ships, and factories. The Union blockade effectively choked off the flow of everything through southern ports, quickly bringing shortages of everything imaginable in the south and creating widespread desperation. In the midst of the gathering storm of conflict there were opportunities for the daring to make handsome profits which many with the entrepreneurial spirit were inclined to pursue. Hefty profits were reaped by blockade runners and merchants as the suffocating effects of the Yankee blockade gripped the South and prices skyrocketed. Still demand and need far outstripped supply and extortion as southerners referred to profiteering was widespread and carried out by many leading citizens, despite its condemnation by both the church and the state.
  Still less than two years after the first shots of the war were fired, the confederate capital of Richmond was besieged by bread riots, as were a host of other southern cities. The general public demanded relief which the government was unwilling or unable to supply highlighted in contemporary writings like letters and diaries. Preachers added the sin of extortion to the list of mortal sins which they deplored their parishioners to abstain from and law makers added legal teeth to the condemnation of the practice. Meanwhile profiteering blockade runners grew wealthy without incurring the risks of fighting at the front, and furthermore many of those engaged in such traffic had procured substitutes to fight in their stead with the army at a price far beyond the means of commoners. Although this was a common practice on both sides, given the acute shortage of southern manpower along with the economic hardships it placed predominantly on the lesser classes left many common folks very resentful of the elites. Many southerners also called loudly for slavery reform, declaring practices such as separating mothers and children or husbands and wives be prohibited, while at the same time others advocated for the reopening of the African trade. Here again the clergy pointed the way with their Sunday sermons, reminding slave owners of their paternalistic duties to their people obliged them to treat their slaves kindly. Furthermore and most controversially, preachers implored slave owners to Christianize their slaves, even teach them to read the gospel. Such progressive notions were scoffed at and dismissed by the planter class who controlled political power and enacted the new, slightly less democratic social order of the Confederacy.
  Faust's conclusion that a national identity was seen as a crucial element which the Confederacy failed to achieve is spot on and certainly has to be considered when pondering the questions of why the South went to war and why the Union prevailed. Every army must believe in its cause and its leadership or else it ceases to be civilized and degrades into nothing more than an armed barbaric mob bent deprivation.
  It is important to study this genre which Faust has enlightened us in order to better understand the real forces which shaped and embodied the old South, as contrasted to the stereotyped images of dime novels and the silver screen. It reveals much about the differences between the regions of the South as well. Even now there really is no single trait which marks the southerners of today as genuine ancestors of Confederate veterans, but certainly there were marked differences between the upper and lower regions of the Confederacy. It also shows us that Victorian ideals of honor and piety were undoubtedly highly cherished in the South and the church wielded considerable influence with the congregation in this era. Lastly it rather does lend credence to the idea that many in the South had conceded defeat long before Appomattox, but felt honor bound to persevere and fight on.
  The author's analysis is perhaps a bit too tightly focused however on several counts however. The real gist of Faust's argument is that the lost cause myth, as the popularly memorialized history of the confederacy has come to be described, is entirely lacking in any basis in the realities of the times. Expounding upon her central thesis, mentioned in the essay prompt; “that from the first days of southern independence there existed a widespread and self-conscious effort to create an ideology of Confederate nationalism to unite and inspire the new nation”, Faust asserts that Confederate nationalism was “built upon antebellum attempts to encourage southern distinctiveness” (p. 14). It is important to remember however, that ideas of a separate and sovereign southern nation had been around for more than a quarter century. Radical southern fire-eaters of the era; men like William Lowndes Yancey, Edmund Ruffin, Robert Rhett, and Louis Wigfall, all of whom had been staunch secessionist advocates for many years and indeed worked to divide the southern Democrats in the 1860 elections in order to force the secession issue, yet these men are hardly mentioned by the author. Also weakening her argument significantly is that despite a mountain of sources, there is little mention of how the lack of a distinctive nationalism directly affected the average private in Lee's army. Finally one feels compelled to add that comparisons of the American Civil War and the generation long struggle by Ho Chi Minh and his followers in Vietnam is just too far fetched for a host of reasons. Briefly the Vietnamese fought for their independence against three succeeding foreign armies; the French, Japanese, and Americans for more than thirty years. During the Japanese occupation Minh was an ally, highly thought of by American personnel of the Office of Strategic Services who worked directly with him. Yes there were draft riots and civil protests during both wars, but if anything the conflict perhaps more closely resembles Korea, but hardly so other than a geographic reference of north versus south. Also the Vietnamese had a long established national culture which the confederacy lacked, that was the point in creating one. Still this is an enlightening if not particularly easy read which highlights a great deal of truth about the real Confederacy.
• 
  Joe

  An eye opening research paper, but horrifically difficult to read. In the hands of a skilled writer, the research and ideas therein would be educational and interesting to consume. Still, I am pleased to have upgraded my understanding of the CSA's internal struggle to rationalize its existence.
• 
  Stephen Morrissey

  Drew Fuast's compact take on Confederate nationalism and ideology is a thought-provoking look into the contradictions and intellectual contortions Southerners assumed in seceding from the Union. In Faust's telling, Confederate nationalism had certain fundamental tensions within it: an evangelical strain that scorned "extortion" (i.e., war profiteering) opposed to a conservative strain that detested revolutionary excesses a la the French Revolution; a movement founded upon the protection of slavery but also strains within the South to seek consensus through those very slaves, as well as non-slaveholding whites; and a revolution that sought not to be a revolution, but rather a return to a certain form of political and ideological purity.
  
  There are many reasons why the Confederacy lost the Civil War: the material advantages of the North; sheer numbers in terms of military strength; the zealotry and stubbornness of the Lincoln administration to prosecute the war. Perhaps to that list should be added that Jefferson Davis and his followers could never quite come to an agreement as to the contradictions identified by Faust and others.
• 
  Kyri Freeman

  A slim volume discussing the elements and development of Confederate national identity.
  
  I did not get as much from this book as I hoped to. It discusses the roles of religion, ideas of morality, and concepts of race in forming Confederate nationalism, while offering some analysis of the paradoxes inherent in Southern thought during the time period. Sources are primarily "public" texts such as newspaper articles and commercially published songs; the lack of diary or letter sources leaves the reader unsure as to how public discourse influenced individuals' thought. In particular, it would have been interesting to know how the nonslaveholding whites who made up the majority of Confederate soldiers responded to both the expressions of elite morality and the propagandistic pro-slavery songs and writings: were they convinced? Were they even involved in the cultural conversation?
  
  The analysis overall has an abstract quality that fails to connect thought and theory with concrete fact and action.
  
  The picture of the hair sculpture, though, is worth a thousand words: Victorian ghoulishness at its appalling pinnacle. The book is worth looking at for that alone.
• 
  AC

  Dry as dust
• 
  The Angry Lawn Gnome

  Overall, I think this work does an excellent job of explaining how "Confederate Nationalism" came into being, and how it actually seemed no great help to the people running the Confederacy. Quite interesting discussions of bread riots virtually across the entire South, how Confeds had to delude themselves into thinking that their slaves loved not only them, but also their condition.
  
  Faust also makes what I would consider a rather controversial argument that the South "threw in the towel," long before they were required to from a military standpoint. Her comparison was the CSA vs. Ho Chi Minh and his revolutionaries in North Vietnam. She notes that Ho carried on a guerrilla war for almost two full generations, vs. the French, the Japanese and US. Yet he never lacked for followers, and his followers always seemed motivated to fight. She might be right, at least to a degree, but I would consider her comparison failing on several points:
  
  ͏͏ None of the opponents Ho faced were based in his own backyard, and I would argue none were nearly as motivated as the Union was to keep the US together.
  
  ͏͏ By the end of the Civil War the North was on the verge of assuming a huge technological advantage, had the war continued long enough for the average Northern soldier to be outfitted with repeating rifles. Perhaps things like Gatling guns would also have been available, but repeating rifles vs. muzzle loaders alone would have been slaughter.
  
  ͏͏ Important to this issue, and also in a wider sense, Faust seemed to consider the "South" qua South an indivisible whole. And I don't see how a case can be made along these lines. The "Upper South," "Mid-South," and "Lower-South" were certainly different places, and may or may not have even ultimately have had the same interests. Whether slavery was truly dying out in the "Upper South" or not (debatable), the percentage of the total population either enslaved or slave owning was certainly shrinking. This contrasted radically with the Deep South, which had a vastly higher percentage of slaves, and slave-owners who considered themselves virtually an aristocracy, despising the Jacksonian-style democracy popular in the mid and upper south. I'll go out on a limb and hazard a guess that the North Vietnamese had no such groups with such widely diverging interests.
  
  I'd argue a more valid comparsion -- since it even overlapped a part of the US Civil War -- was the
  Paraguayan War (link) of 1864-70. By the end of it Paraguay was essentially extinct; and I think Lee and Davis had some sense the same thing would have happened to the South had the war continued.
  
  Eh, long enough, but there's also some interesting stuff about Southern War Profiteers (so much for that crap of Noble Southern Gentlemen), the cultural changes the war brought to the south that would have made any return to something remotely antebellum almost impossible, etc.
• 
  Chris

  GREAT Book. One of the best books on Confederate Nationalism. The author goes into great detail about the ideology and identity of the Civil War South. A must read for anyone that is into Civil War and the Confederate history. THUMBS UP!
• 
  Sean Chick

  The style is too academic and it seems more like a half-baked series of essay. Still, there are not enough books on the topic and Faust does have some interesting ideas about slavery and politics in the CSA.
• 
  Alejandria

  This book was too analytically and logical for me to really be interested in. There were moments where I'll be reading this book and I'll fall straight to sleep but then there were moments were it captivated my attention. Overall it wasn't an easy read.
• 
  Kate

  Very dense and hard to read. Interesting chapter about slavery, though, and how integral slavery was to the new nation and even the morality.