Killer Angels and neo-Confederate Multiculturalism

Looking over the first page of the Introduction to The Killer Angels, I am -- no surprise here -- displeased with Shaara's characterization of the two armies.

Of the Army of Northern Virginia, Shaara writes:

They are rebels and volunteers. They are mostly unpaid and usually
self-equipped. ... It is Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Though there are many
men who cannot read or write, they all speak English. They share common
customs and a common faith...

Of the Army of the Potomac:

It is a strange new kind of army, a polyglot mass of vastly dissimilar men,
fighting for union. There are strange accents and strange religions and
many who do not speak English at all. Nothing like this army has been seen
upon the planet. ... They are volunteers: last of the great volunteer armies,
for the draft is beginning that summer in the North.

Aside from beating these two descriptions up with big sticks of scholarship that, admittedly, have come largely since Shaara wrote, I have another important question. Would the modern neo-Confederate movement agree with this characterization of the Confederate Army anymore?

I pose this stemming from Jonathan Sarris' lovely characterization of the neo-Confederate movement's recent obsession with finding -- creating -- "Black Confederates" as an effort to find a "multicultural" Condfederacy and thereby counteract their well-deserved stigma of racism. Has the Anglo-Saxon Protestant A.N.V. been replaced by the equally mythological enlightened paradise of a rainbow coalition army fighting for libertarian values?

My my, What would the old boys think?

A Rovin' We Shall Go

This summer, the staff of your favorite Western Theater blog (this one...right?) have been taking a series of research trips on our days off. There are some quality posts that are due to be written stemming from these, but I thought I'd share one of the lighter ones. Last week while headed to Montgomery to the Alabama Dept. of Archives and History, we stopped in Jacksonville, AL, the hometown of our own Chris Young. Now, Jacksonville at the time of the War was a regular metropolis, the transportation hub of the northeast (in the pre-Birmingham days), and the county seat of Calhoun.

Now it is none of those things. It is home to a fine regional university, though, and more important to our readership is the resting place of The Gallant Pelham. I know, I try to keep our posts centered on the war in the West, but I figure that since he is buried in an area that Eastern Theater partisans rarely travel to (i.e. outside the I-95 corridor) it deserves some illumination (I kid, I kid). The Gallant Pelham's memory still hangs heavy on the good people of Jacksonville, the main drag through town, the one that used to lead right to the courthouse has been renamed for him. The cemetary, too, cannot seem to move beyond his dashing Confederate legacy. The pedestaled statue of the Major dominates the cemetery, and is placed, curiously, on the edge of the cemetery, looking over the town. It struck me as the Feudal lord, surveying his lands and serfs; Pelham, Earl of Jacksonville, Defender of the Cause.

And the local SCV (Pelham Camp, go figure!) has contributed in its own way to further the cult of the glorious Cause. Their marker for some CS unknowns who died in the hospitals in the town sums up so much about the romanticization and glorification of the Confederate soldier that has taken place over the intervening years. "Carved out of the endurance of granite God created his masterpiece -- The Confederate Soldier."

Even the grave of a local reenactor (and yes, it did mention that fact quite prominently) abandons traditional imagery of death, mourning, and grief to have laser-carved Lost Cause images from Mort Kunstler's playbook. What does it mean to define your own life, and your lasting footprint on this physical world, not for any feats that you yourself have attained, but instead to define yourself in relation to an historical event? Honestly, this is not even defining yourself in relation to a historical event, but instead to the constructed memory of that event, the Beau Ideal of the Lost Cause that the sacrifice of the young, dashing, Gallant Pelham over across the way did so much to establish in both life and death. Do the people of Jacksonville still live to serve the Cause? Can't we say something else about Mr. Carter other than "He was true to the 'ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods'?"


All this stands in marked contrast to one small section of the cemetary, not far, incidentally, from the Pelham monument. The graves of the servants of the Hoke, Forney, and Abernathy families (some of the best names in the antebellum town, I'm told). "In memory of their faithful servants: Ellen, Sallie, Nancy, Jemima, Mary, Judy, Harriet, Alfred, Johnny, and others." And others? There were better than 35 "others" in that plot. The families don't know enough to name more than the handful, don't care how many there are, don't mark them with more than a rock. Those "faithful servants," apparently, should just be happy they got to be buried with their whitefolks, and in such close proximity to that dashing young artillerist who died to perpetuate their inferiority. Of course, in contrast to those CS unknowns, there isn't a Sons of Former Slaves group to come back and place nice stones on the graves of these people. They receive no eulogy, no one to tell how their own endurance must have been carved out of granite. Instead, they remain nameless, faceless, nearly forgotten. Even when remembered, these people are seen not as icons of the past whose lives we should emulate but as faithful witnesses to the Old South, as those good ol' darkies whom the paternalistic Confederacy was fighting to "care for." I don't mean to downplay the physical sacrifice of the Confederacy or of its fighting men here, but what are we to think of these slaves, of American citizens of all colors today, if the CS soldier was indeed "God's Masterpiece?"

Not Shaara's Longstreet

Well this doesnt fit into the Longstreet character from Killer Angels; Army before Richmond, June 17, 1862., "Soldiers: You have marched out to fight the battles of your country, and by those dates you must be rescyred from the shame of slavery. Your foes have declared their purpose of bringing you to beggery; and avarice, their natural characteristic, incites them to redoubled efforts for the conquest of the South, in order that they may seize her sunny fields and happy homes. Already has the hatred of one of their great leaders attempted to make the negro your equal by declairing his freedom. They care not for the blood of babes nor carnage of innocent women which servile insurrection thus stirred up may bring upon their heads. Worse than this, the North has sent forth another infamous chief, encouraging lust of his hirelings to the dishonor and violation of those Southern women who have so untireingly labored to clothe our soldiers in the field and nurse our sick and wounded. If ever men were called upon to defend the beloved daughters of their country, that now is our duty. Let such thoughts nerve you up to the most dreadful shock of battle; for were it certain death, death would be better than the fate that defeat would entail upon us all. But remember, though the fiery noise of battle is indeed most terrifying, and seems to threaten universal ruin, it is not so destructive as it seems, and few soldiers after all are slain. This the commanding generals desires particularly to impress upon the fresh and inexperienced troops who now constitute a part of this command. Let officers and men, even under the most formidable fire, preserve a quiet demeanor and self-possessed temper. Keep cool, obey orders, and aim low. Remember while you are doing this, and driving the enemy before you, your comrades may be relied on to support you on either side, and are in turn relying upon you...James Longstreet, Major-General, Commanding."

Glatthaar Too Good to be Ignored

Now, I'm a dedicated Western Theater man. That is, my Civil War research interests lie west of the Appalachians and I mainly focus myself there. I know that many on this side of the Ridge tend to ignore Virginia as strategically indecisive at best and little more than romantic Lost Cause memory in the making at worst. All of this is to say, that I rarely read titles on the war in the East. A recent Kevin Levin post, here, at Civil War Memory, however, made me want to correct that oversight. Kevin posted some excerpts from Joseph Glatthaar's new book, General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse; excerpts that were good enough to make this new book an instant Amazon purchase for me. Even though I am just past the Seven Days right now (about p. 150 of 480 pp. of narrative, and a total of 600 with notes!), I'd just like to add my voice to the chorus of praise for this book. There's too much to cover everything, but there are two themes I'm especially pleased with so far.

To put it simply, Glatthaar wins in my book because he almost constantly keeps the war contextualized. He has finally brought statistical analysis to bear on the rank and file soldier. True, the Confederate soldier was many things, but he was most commonly the unmarried son of a solidly middle-class family.

Among the enlistees in 1861, slightly more than one in ten owned slaves personally....Yet more than one in every four volunteers that first year lived with their parents who were slaveholders. Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveowning family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent....Thus, volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population. (p. 20)

Glatthaar took a random sample of men from various units in the ANV, and compiled a detailed picture using data from the census. Age, occupation, real and personal wealth, and slaveowning all come into the picture. What's more, this demographic sketch does not appear briefly and fade away, lost in the narrative. Nearly every diary entry or letter excerpt (and believe me, there is no shortage of them) is bracketed by information about its author. For example, "Twenty-six year-old bachelor James A. Maddox echoed Hileman's frustration. A prewar overseer on his father's huge farm in western Georgia, Maddox let his impatience get the best of him. 'We did not come here to lie in camps and do nothing...' (p. 78)" The reader is constantly, yet subtly, reminded that the economic and social standing of these soldiers and their families is reflected in their opinions, decisions, and fighting performance. (Long a favorite refrain of the Chickamauga interp staff, I assure you)

The contextualization of the ANV goes beyond the soldiers' prewar lives. It extends to the war's broader causes as well. In nearly every section of the book so far, slavery has been a constant and undeniable theme. It sets the tone for the entire story. Glatthaar takes care to demonstrate that the desires to protect family, home, and country - the issues most commonly harped upon by neo-Confederate groups who wish to deny slavery's centrality - were all inseperably linked to preserving the institution or fearing its demise. On combat motivation in mid-62 (and, incidentally, the passage that made me put the book down and type up this post),

The slow breakdown of their coveted institution aroused Southerners' greatest fear: a loss of control that could lead to servile insurrection.... Before the Seven Days' Battle, Longstreet sought to inspire his men for combat through the use of racial fear.... "Already has the hatred of one of their great leaders [Fremont] attempted to make the negro your equal by declaring his freedom," Longstreet pronounced. "They care not for the blood of babes nor carnage of innocent women which servile insurrection thus stirred up may bring upon their heads." (pp. 152-3)

Glatthaar successfully interweaves slavery, racial fear, insecure white masculinity, and other motivating factors into his narrative of the life and battles of the ANV. Finally, we are able to see these same themes that scholarship proves were present in every facet of antebellum Southern life and thought, the same themes which have been desperately missing from Civil War military history, the same themes that too often have gone unnoticed and forgotten by the popular Civil War community.

This is an exciting, landmark study. No, it is not AoT, but Glatthaar proves that the literature which has provided us with such a rich (and admittedly complex) picture of the antebellum South can be brought to the battlefield. I'm excited for the next 300 pages, and I'm even more excited for where this just pushed Civil War military history.