Southern Recap and Some Postwar Musings

Freshly back from the Southern Historical Association's meeting in Louisville this weekend, I find myself thoroughly refreshed. The last few months have seen me studying for my PhD qualifying examinations in January and estranged from the archives to any meaningful extent. But, the scholarly environment of the Southern has rejuvenated me, and I figure that while I've got this burst of creative energy I could blog a bit, right?

Among the panels I attended was a session on the rise of a professional/middle class in the antebellum South. The standout presentation, in my opinion, coming from Jennifer Green, whose new -- excellent -- book traces the emergence, preservation, and reproduction of the southern middle class through the means of military education. It was my favorite new book this year. She ably used the case of brief Western-Theater-attendee Micah Jenkins to demonstrate the difficulty of distinguishing between middle class men and planters. Jenkins came from a wealthy planting family, but unlike his brothers attended the Citadel, a military school where Green shows he far outranked his classmates in land and slave ownership. After his graduation he both talked of buying land for a new cotton operation and opening a military academy of his own, having a foot in both the world of the planter and the middle class teacher.

Green challenges us to think of military schools not as bastions of Southern landed wealth and privilege as often seen in the late nineteenth- and twentieth centuries, but instead as academies of discipline, order, hard work, and a middling position of both subordination to higher authority and some independent command -- all demanded of both junior officers in the field and of the professional men of the South.

Given this training, I wonder what we might see if we take (if I remember correctly) Ken Noe's suggestion during the Bell Wiley retrospective panel on Saturday afternoon to understand more about the immediate postwar lives of the well-studied Johnny Reb. My own work on Kentucky's Ben Buckner -- though not a Johnny certainly a member of Green's Southern professional class and Kentucky Military Institute alum -- has revealed some interesting things about Blue-Gray reconciliation and cooperation to pick up the pieces of the old order. The formation of the Kuklux in a law office in Pulaski for similar ends might suggest the same. In the wake of the collapse of the plantation system was the county-seat-dwelling professional class all that was left to restore the what was salvageable of the status quo ante bellum? Can the rise of the New South in the latter part of the century be attributed to the leadership of this group, already rising in prominence by the 1850s and still standing in 1865?

Certainly, the post-Appomattox South is a cloudy picture and all these claims can be asterisked, complicated, and expounded upon. But that's no reason not to try to pitch in and find some answers. Please, Civil War public, let's not stop caring about the lives of these soldiers when they take off their uniforms.

The Simple Fifth Kentucky and Appalachian Otherness

In 1914, veteran of the 4th Ky. Infantry (CS) Lewis C. Garrigus wrote a series of articles in his (then) local paper, the Portland Morning Oregander. In one of these, Garrigus recalled nicknames that each regiment was given within the brigade.

Lieutenant-Colonel Phil Lee, of the Second Kentucky, was quite a wit and something of a wag as well, and after the Fifth came to use, he characterized the five regiments as follows: The "honest ninth," the "theiving fourth," the "supple sixth," the "invincible second" and the "simple fifth." The fifth had been recruited in the mountain counties of Kentucky, and we called them "seng diggers" when they first came to us, but we soon learned to respect them for their prowess, their indomitable courage notwithstanding their want of culture.

And in so doing, Garrigus joined what was, by then, a cultural phenomenon that considered the American mountain South another America, a retarded frontier, the contemporary ancestors of the country permanently locked in their Elizabethan past. This is not surprising for 1914 as many scholars who study the evolution of the idea of Appalachia will point out. But what is most interesting is that Garrigus' claims are backed up by wartime accounts that disparage the soldiers of the Fifth as jeans wearing, uncultured, ginseng digging, persons outside the mainstream Kentucky. The development of an Appalachian other has been linked to mountain unionism during the war, but I can't help but wonder if there are also roots of an Appalachia-as-other in intra-Confederate criticism of the mountaineer as well. I have decided to start poking around this idea this semester in a seminar with Dwight Billings to see if it has legs.

My exploratory steps thus far has been to see if the 5th was really a "mountain" regiment. Using E.Porter Thompson's 1868 annotated rosters, here's where the Orphans hailed from. Update: New maps! Red counties sent a company-sized contingent, Orange counties sent a significant (~15+) group, and Yellow counties sent a small number of soldiers into the unit:

The "Simple Fifth." While there are the large groupings from Morgan and Breathitt (2 companies in that case), there are certainly large contributions from non-stigmatized Northern Ky. Certainly, though, the 5th is the most tightly grouped of any of the units.

For comparison:

The "Invincible Second"

The "Thieving Fourth"

The "Supple Sixth" (not as South-Central as I had previously assumed)

The "Honest Ninth"

Happy New Year: From the New South

A bit of a New Years celebration here at AoT. This is a poem I came across during my thesis research that I've always loved. It's from the Lexington Observer & Reporter, owned and edited by W.C.P. Breckinridge, Colonel of the 9th Ky. Cav (CS), and lately (by the time of this poem) passed off to Confederate sympathizer George S. Ranck. The paper was a leading spokesman for the Kentucky Democracy, a New South booster, eventually a New Departure paper following Henry Watterson's lead, and one of the best sources I have for news and (favorable) opinion about anti-black militia and Kuklux activity.

Notice the "cut down in the prime of life" and "whipped but defiant" South imagery. And, of course, the section towards the end about guarding the "annals and altars of state" from the "wolf" is, going into 1869, a commentary on Kentucky's position on the upcoming 15th Amendment debate.

ADDRESS OF THE CARRIERS OF THE
Lexington Observer & Reporter,
TO THEIR PATRONS,
The 1st of January, 1869.

PROLOGUE
Looking backward for the glory,
Of a gilded summer dawn,
Down a weary waste of whiteness,
Down a dreary winter lawn.

Looking backward, down the shadow
Of an iron beaten way,
Whence the armoured TIME came silent,
On the animate to-day.

Oh, it startles human reason;
Oh, it withers human pride,
Looking backward, ever backward,
On the living things that died.
...
ADDRESS
Tread lightly – tread softly – oh, merciful Time,
O’er the land of the sun, and the lemon and lime,

For leaves of the flowers so faded and strewn,
Were fair in the morning and fallen at noon.

Go back to the plane of your ice-hidden lakes –
Go back with your breath of the frost and the flakes,

Go northward, oh, season of winter and gloom,
From the emerald South and its odorous bloom.
...
Oh, better to die and be hidden away,
Than to live in the circle and sight of decay.

Our metals of life in their crucibles run,
When the pulses are red in the glow of the sun.

But come to the South with the ice of your heel,
And the channels are still and the currents congeal.

Go backward, oh, winter, go back to the lakes,
With your withering frost and your wandering flakes.
...
The bush is borne down, and the blossom is shed
And we gather to-day at the grave of the dead.

The course that is stark, and the body that’s cold,
Is a lick of the past to be lost in the mold;

And armies may go the sepulcher plain,
To laurel the bier of the body that’s slain,

But never again at the death of the years,
Will the heart of the Southron be lavish of tears,

Go seek in the far-reaching fields of his land,
For the shade of his column and capital grand;

Go look for the mosque of his worship and pride;
Go look for his brother go look for his bride;

Go look for all things he has cherished and loved,
The garden be haunted – the valley be roved,

And the desolate track, and the ravens that fly.
Will tell that the fount of the Southron is dry.

Time was, when a sentinel stood at the gate,
And guarded the annals and altars of state;

When the gleam of his eye and the glare of his blade
Kept the wolf in the covet afar and afraid;

When the good and the pure, and the noble and true,
Were all in the land that the sentinel knew –

Time was when the tyrant would blanch in the sight,
Of the column and arch of our temple of right,

When the marbles of state in their purity stood –
That our fathers had builded and hallowed in blood;

But time is long gone with the sands of the glass,
When honor was watchword, and virtue the pass.

Go banish the dust from your lexicons old
Ye people that glitter and seek to be gold;

Go back to the schools of your earlier days,
For their lessons of truth, and their patriot lays;

Go study the greatness, that tried in the fires,
Shone bright in the glory that covered your sires;

Go feel in the spell that encircles their graves
That tyrants and cowards are meaner than slaves.

Oh, men of the nation – oh, rulers and kings,
Do ye know that your riches and powers have wings?

Do ye know that the ashes ye scatter and spurn,
Must quicken in time, and arise from the urn?

Do you know that the gates where ye gather your tolls,
Are peopled with things that have pulses and souls?

Do ye dare from your source in the dust and the clods
To covet the robe and the thrones of the Gods?

Ye may look at the waves that go out on the sea,
And learn from the past, what your future will be;
...
But evening must come from the shadow at last
With a garment of gloom and a gathering blast.

Happy New Year from a still-defiant South!

Confederate Veteran on "How The Confederacy Armed its Soldiers"

Thanks to Kaelin for alerting me to this interesting article about Confederate industry from Confederate Veteran XXX, no. 1 (1922).

I was teaching my classes the other day about reading material culture as a primary source. For instance: a sun-faded, hand-sewn, jeans Confederate jacket can speak to raw material shortages and the labor of women behind the lines; an Atlanta arsenal cartridge box containing rounds from the Selma arsenal with powder from the Augusta works can tell us why Billy Sherman was so determined to stop the flow of supplies from the Confederate industrial heartland. Interesting, then, that we see in the pages of CV "How the Southern Confederacy developed a great industry in the manufacture of firearms and munitions while handicapped by the demands of active warfare is brought out in this article from the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, published while the World War was raging."

What's fascinating to me is that the CV would even publish such a thing. It smacks of the pride of the New South Men who sought capital and industry to restore the region to prominence while retaining the more conservative social structures of the Old South: racial, gender, and class hierarchy. I've always been of the opinion that if Gaines Foster is correct about the UCV being an town/urban professional phenomenon then we would see a significant amount of overlap in those professing the New South Creed and the shapers of Confederate memory.

" We began in April, 1861," wrote Gen. Josiah Gorgas, chief of ordnance of the Confederate army, in a monograph to President Jefferson Davis, "without arsenal or laboratory, or powder mill of any capacity, and with no foundry or rolling mill except in Richmond; and before the close of 1863, or within a little over two years we supplied them. During the harassments of the war, while holding our own in the field defiantly and successfully against a powerful enemy, crippled by a depreciated currency; throttled by a blockade that deprived us of nearly all the means of getting material or workmen; obliged to send every able-bodied man to the field; unable to use slave labor, with which we were abundantly supplied, except in the most unskilled departments of production; hampered by want of transportation of even the commonest supplies of food; with no stock on hand even of such articles as copper, leather, iron, which we must have to build up our establishments—against all these obstacles, in spite of all these deficiencies, we persevered at home as determinedly as our troops did in the field against a more tangible opposition. ... Steam was put in at the Charleston arsenal. The Mount Vernon institution was moved to Selma, nearer the district where the hardest cast iron in America was being turned into gun bores. Ancient field pieces of 1812 were replaced by new cannon from the Tredegar iron works in Richmond. ... Lead at the rate of nearly 80,000 pounds a month came in from the mines near Wytheville, Va., to be smelted in the new government plant at Petersburg. Battle fields were combed for gunstocks, bores, and bullets, with excellent results.

Notice how Gorgas downplays the potential contribution of slaves, pointing to their presumed inferiority and incapacity for skilled work, and without batting an eye can later point to Tredegar's contributions to the CS war effort while not acknowledging the slave labor that enabled that installation's success. But despite the racial assumptions which are largely inescapable from any source written in the 1920s, this remains a fairly sound introduction to Confederate industry. The conclusion is what I really enjoyed.

The Confederacy fell not so much because it had not been able to make arms, as because all the places where the arms were made fell before the Union armies.

Indeed, Harper's Ferry, Nashville, and eventually Atlanta would all suffer that same fate. But let us also keep in mind William Freehling's contention that the Confederacy had already lost the industrial war when it did not bring the manufacturing and transportation might of Baltimore, Louisville, and St. Louis into its ranks in 1861.

More 1870s Election Commentary: Voter Misinformation

From this article: "Some local Democrats spoke out Tuesday after a fake flier was circulated this week that looked like a notice from the state Board of Elections telling people 'emergency regulations' require Republicans to vote on Tuesday and Democrats to vote Wednesday."

From another one: "It's too hard to vote in Kentucky." "Kentuckians must vow today that before the presidential election in 2012, we'll make it easier to vote. With polls open in Kentucky only 12 hours on Election Day — 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. — too many voters get shut out.
For some historical perspective...

TO THE COLORED VOTERS

On Monday next, for the fourth time, you will have an opportunity to exercise a right under the highest privilege which a citizen has. Your right to vote as a man and citizen is guaranteed to you by the supreme law of the land. Your right to vote is protected by this law, and all who attempt to prevent, delay, or hinder you in the exercise of your right, can be punished UNDER THIS LAW, with very severe penalties. ... Your right to vote is as good as any one's. Your duty to vote is as imperative as any one's. Therefore, you should go to the polls and vote, letting no threats of any kind keep you from exercising your right. ... Go to the polls one and all of you, and STAY UNTIL YOU HAVE VOTED, then leave the polls that others may get to them. When you are at the polls no one has a right to drive or push you from them until you have voted. When you have voted it is your duty to give way that others may vote.
Follow our advice, and should any difficulty disturb the peace, no one, even your most bitter opponent, could not attach the least blame to you. We repeat: it is your duty to vote. ... It is your duty to do nothing that will interfere with the rights of others, nor to allow others to do anything that will in any compromise your rights. As good citizens you should do every thing in the interest of quiet and good order.

Lexington Kentucky Statesman, August 4, 1871.

Effigy 1870 & 2008

Yesterday morning an effigy of Barack Obama was found hanging by a noose from a tree on the University of Kentucky campus -- the campus where I study the history of racial violence and racism in Kentucky, the campus where I teach that same history to students. (link here) I presume that if/when the perpetrators of this are caught, they'll cry crocodile tears about being ignorant of the implications of their action, being ignorant of the history of racial inequality, violence, and lynching that has plagued this state since before emancipation. And I will be the first person to stand up and call "bullshit." Even for 18 year old freshmen, the weight that these images carry in American -- particularly Southern -- society is too great not to be noticed. Sure, there was the effigy of Sarah Palin hung recently, and we should too decry that as inappropriate. But the two acts ARE NOT equal. There is too much cultural baggage attached to the hanging of black men to not consider this an act of racial intimidation.

Strangely, though, I am not outraged; I am not livid. Perhaps I should be. Instead, I am disappointed; I am saddened. I am, frankly, embarassed. On Saturday I am going to Austin Peay University in Clarksville, Tenn. to deliver a paper on the state-sanctioned racial violence of the Kentucky National Legion during Reconstruction. I am honestly nervous about having to hold my head up in front of my audience and deliver this paper. Does this undermine my credibility as a historian representing the University of Kentucky? How does the horiffic act of a member (presumably) of my institution cast me? Was it one of my students? One of my classmates? My paper's title is drawn from a Republican newspaper editor's sighing acceptance of his inability to stem the tide of the state's campaign of violence and lynching, every bit the equal of states in the former Confederacy. "So Goes Democratic Law in a Democratic State." I can begin to understand that Republican editor, a voice crying out in the wilderness, pointing to the racism in American society, despite our best attempts to hide it, to call it something else, to justify it in some way.

I think I will give a short preface to my paper, acknowledging the effigy and asking the audience to think about what Kentucky's history of racial inequality and violence -- or of inequality and violence toward any group -- may have to bear on this incident, on this election. I claim that insecurity brought on by the social chaos of slavery's end motivated this response. That economically unstable, socially precarious, and politically threatened young white Kentuckians lashed out against African Americans attempting to claim political equality. They claimed that a "Black Peril" was upon them, threatening to overtake everything they held dear. I claim -- and they claimed at the time -- that a political contest was about more than the office at stake. It was a contest for the soul of the state. Hopefully, then, the audience at this panel might start a conversation through the lens of history that bears meaning for today. This is what history does. This is why historians matter. They clarify the murky memories of the past, and provide examples of when society achieved great things and when it didn't.

I'll close with a quote from an item in Frederick Douglass's New Era from Aug. 18, 1870 commenting on the first election in Kentucky when blacks could vote. In the face of racism, the Democratic Party machine, and the bayonets of the militia, Douglass remains hopeful for a brighter, more equal, future. Hopefully Kentckians, Americans, can do the same today.

[White Kentucky] built their shanty on the sand bank of slavery, but the rising tide of freedom and equality has flooded back into the wretched hovel, and the whole organization has set to work with a "White Man's Party" mop, to sweep back the wave of human progress. They are doing their best. There is a splash and a spattering, but the tide ever rolls inward, and the great ocean of liberty outside shows the utter feebleness and futility of the effort. While they are vigorously mopping, the sand bank is melting away, and the whole structure will speedily cave in, or be carried out to sea, and engulphed beyond the hope of recovery. That tide is resistless.

Recollections of Slave Life in Murray County, Georgia

Thought I'd put out a link to the memoir of Levi Branham. An interesting view of Northwest Georgia life from the African American perspective. His story of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Caps provides a foil to my earlier post regarding racial violence in Northwest Georiga and Southeast Tennessee. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/branham/branham.html

"A True Story of the Ku Klux, White Caps and Happenings in the South"

I thought I'd share with you all some excerpts from a typescript from the collection of the Chattanooga History Center. Written by E. G. Carroll, a Rossville, Georgia attorney between 1920 and 1930, this record of extra-legal violence provides a fascinating insight into the postwar environment of Northwest Georgia and Southeast Tennessee and the ongoing act of memory making that made Klansmen and White Caps into heroes who upheld morality, racial order, and law.

Today's excerpts:

"This is a true story of the activites of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Caps in North Georgia, and teh incident that led to the destruction of the White Caps. I have gotten my information in regard to the Ku Klux Klan from men who belonged to the organization and women who lived through those terrible Carpetbag days. Most of the information that I have gathered in regard to the White Caps was given to me by the late Steve Shackleford of Gordon County Georgia, who lived in a community where most of the men belonged to the organization.

I find that most people think that the Ku Klux Klan and the White Caps were the same organization but they were not. The Ku Klux Klan was a secret organization that operated in the South during the Carpetbag days immediately after the Civil War. The White Caps were the outgrowth from the original Ku Klux Klan and operated in North Georgia until sometime in the nineties. They wore the same disguise and probably started out under the same laws and regulations as the Ku Klux Klan, but they were not the same organization."

..... "Of course we have no written records of what happened in those days, this is the Klan kept no records of what they did. I have gathered what little information I have of Klansmen and conditions in those days, from talking with men and women who were there. Those old Klansmn were very stingy with their information. My father T. B. Carroll of Marion County, Tennessee, was a Confederate soldier and a Klansman, but he would tell me very little about the organization. He did tell me about some of the things Uncle Bill Smith did over in Marion County. I don't suppose there is anyon in Marion County Tennessee, who remembers one arm Bill Smith. Uncle Bill and his company used to come over and do the hanging for the Chattanooga Boys. They hung some carpetbaggers down on the river one night to the beams of an old building. There was no chance to charge that hanging to the Chattanooga Boys, for they made it convenient to be seen on the streets at the time of the hanging. It seem[ed] to be a rule of the Klan to never make a raid in their own community."

Copyright, Chattanooga History Center, 2008

The Emasculated Postwar South

April 1865, the end of the Civil War, must have been an unfathomable blow for many Confederates. I think we may underestimate the psychological impact of defeat on the Confederate soldier (particularly Jason Phillips' young "diehards"). Not only had they lost the war that they had been fighting and dying in for four years, but their society was in ruins. Sure, there was physical destruction, but their social worlds were turned upside down as well. Slavery, which had brought with it both economic success and social stability, was torn out from under the white South. White Southern soldiers had been whipped on the battlefield, their efforts to protect home and fireside had come to naught, and they had failed to defend their way of life. Bertram Wyatt-Brown notes the shame and dishonor that this failure brought down on the heads of Confederates. What's more, slavery's end meant that citizenship, and the manhood that came with it in the 19th c., was open to African Americans. As Confederate soldiers returned home, found themselves no longer in control of their local political (and racial) structures, unable to make a decent living for their families, and insulted by their former slaves' assertions of citizenship and the rights of men, 1865 was a psychological crisis for Southern males.

All of this came flooding back when I was in Nashville on a research trip earlier this week. In the War Memorial Plaza near the capital sits a 1926 monument to the women of the Confederacy. The monument depicts "Fame supporting the wounded and exhausted Confederate soldier with her left arm while with her right hand she is placing a wreath upon the head of the Southern Woman, whose every nerve is vibrating with love and sympathy for the soldier and his cause, as expressed by the palm she is trying to place upon his breast, thoroughly unconscious that as her reward a crown is being placed upon her own head."(1) Alright, but aside from the fama gloriaque patriae, I was most struck by the unusual tip of the flag being drug down by the defeated soldier. Good God, it's limp!

Indeed, cutting through all the neo-classicism here, there is indeed a powerful statement on how the white South saw the end of the war. As Anne Sarah Rubin points out, the white South was a poltically, economically, and socially shattered nation The Confederacy's fall was an irrecoverable blow to the honor, pride, and manhood of some who slid into alcoholism, fled to Brazil or Egypt, or sank into deep depressions for the rest of their lives. The language of Reconstruction and Redemption is couched in terms of manhood lost, manhood asserted, and manhood reclaimed. Former Confederates lost that claim to masculinity when they were shut out of the political process, blacks claimed a share of that manhood themselves when they first began serving in the Union Army during the war and began to vote after it. Whites lashed out against this assertion of masculinity, too. Kuklux night riders at times castrated lynching victims, and often used accusations of rape (a decidedly masculine crime) as pretext for racial violence. In my own work on post-Fifteenth Amendment racial violence in Kentucky, we see organized anti-black militia activity in the state began as blacks began to vote, amid exaggerated rumors of a "Negro Kuklux" that was to fight back against the white Klan's own excesses, essentially challenging white men's role of "defenders" of the community. In reasserting control of their own communities during the era of Redemption, southern white males successfully reclaimed their shattered -- even limp -- manhood as well.

The UCV, who approved the design, apparently remembered that stinging shame of emasculation well, even in the 20th century. Yet again, beneath the veneer of Lost Cause glorification lurks some nuggets of the raw reality of the war years.

Memoirs and the Adventure of War pt. 2

A bit ago I started musing on why Confederate veterans in their postwar memoirs always seemed to go seeking adventures in '61, as John Jackman of the 9th KY put it, like so many Romantic Don Quixotes. Part One explored some of the instances when the "fun and adventure" motivation could have motivated soldiers, but here I want to show why I think this is a postwar creation as part of the glossing over of the war's causes.

What’s the point of understanding who the postwar memoirist was in 1861? It is to say that the postwar memoirist came from the set of men who had the most on the line in 1861. He was the one who was completing his studies, apprenticeship, or clerkship and was looking to start a business for himself soon. He was the one looking to get married in the next few years and start a family. He was the one who wanted to take advantage of the cheap land and need for professional men in the western territories. He was the one who wanted slavery extended into those territories so that he could make a profitable living there. He was the one whom Lincoln’s election (with its promise to corral slavery in the states where it already existed) most threatened. The memoirist was from a set of men that were fire-eating secessionists, who held secession rallies in towns and on college campuses, who joined militia units in the wake of John Brown’s raid, and who enlisted to fight for the Confederacy in the hopes that they might be able to extend their property rights into the Southwestern territories. The memoirist and his comrades fought for slavery, no two ways around it. Slavery’s prosperous expansion was both an Enlistment Motivation for the memoirist as well as a Sustaining one. If the Confederacy failed, his world would be turned upside down. His father’s economic security would crumble, their own plans to expand West, be fruitful, and plantation-ize the territories would go up in smoke. The memoirist can write about the entire war from wire to wire because he fought the entire war, wire to wire. The memoirist was a diehard because his old life was over if the war was lost. Memoirists like Marcus Toney didn’t give up the fight in 1865 either...he became a Kukluxer.

So, in the late 19^th century, the memoirist found that having fought for slavery (and implicitly personal economic and social stability in their future lives) was politically inexpedient. It did not harmonize with the tone of sectional reconciliation that was currently being pushed by the UCV, the Southern Historical Society, et al. Hence, one of his underlying Enlistment motivations and one of his Sustaining Motivations, the expansion and preservation of slavery, was swept under the rug. The substance of the war, the pretext for the adventure, and the motivation that sustained them long after their thirst for martial glory was slaked, was quenched.

What has this done to our understanding of the Confederate soldier? Just like the rest of the Lost Cause interpretation that has whitewashed the war’s causes in favor of highlighting the military events. We understand the young Confederate enlistee not as a forward-thinking, big man on the make but as youthful innocents, too besotted with starry-eyed dreams of heroism to know what they were getting into. We forget the two years of military training that many of them had had in the wake of the Brown raid, we forget the filibustering experience of their older brothers and their officers, we forget the decade of growing conflict brewing as these men came of age. They become hollow allegories, representing lost youth. It’s a tearjerker and a tragedy, we are to feel sympathy for the South’s “Lost Generation” who willingly sacrificed themselves. An understanding like this flattens the Confederate soldier. He is no longer a complex human being with plans for the future, fighting to make a place for himself in a competitive world, but instead a fatalistically Romantic child-hero, free from sin and reproach.

Did the memoirists need to remember their fallen comrades as such? It likely helped ease the burden of their own survivors’ guilt. But in a larger sense, removing the political and racial issues of 1861 from the table promoted national (white) reconciliation, goodwill and amiable respect between North and South. It was this respect and removal of Republican oversight that allowed those same memoirists and their comrades free reign to rewrite state constitutions and pass legislation in the state houses and deny justice in the courts. The memoirist and his youthful, adventurous literary character helped usher in the era of Jim Crow. It took the country another half-century to reverse the legal segregationist course that the aging Civil War generation set us on in the 1890s as these memoirs were at the height of their popularity.

Unfortunately, it has taken historiography even longer. In recent years, historians have begun to cut through the mythology and see the carefully constructed memoir’s hero for what he was: a postwar creation of Jubal Early, Marcus Toney, and Sam Watkins that served the contemporary political and social ends of the white South. Today, those who continue to promote the “fun and adventure” thesis live in a past as false as Gone With the Wind. In one respect, by consuming, digesting, and promoting that image of the antebellum South, they participate vicariously in and implicitly support the post-Reconstruction campaign to reestablish the antebellum Southern power structure and disenfranchise blacks. Can we look past the “fun and adventure” now?

Toombs and the Resurrected Confederacy

Just how defeated and cowed was the Confederacy after the war? Did all Confederates go peacefully to their homes and begin to rebuild, or was there still animosity and a desire for independence in their hearts? We certainly know that the rash of racially motivated riots in cities throughout the South, the December 1865 insurrection scare, and the rise of groups like the Ku Klux Klan caused many loyal citizens (black and white, North and South) to be wary of former Confederates’ claims that they had accepted the results of the war and moved on. The South was still a tumultuous, dangerous, and violent place.

Some digging in the 1870 and ’71 issues of Fredrick Douglass’ Washington D.C. New Era (and later the New National Era) may have some evidence of some lingering plans for the South to rise again. The first comes in a July 28, 1870 article, “Rebels Ready for Another Struggle,” and quoted the editor of the Griffin (Georgia) Star:

Then, again, there is another and a much greater hope looming up in the distance, and that is Southern Independence! ...we can not, unaided, achieve our own independence. Should Europe, however, engage in universal war, European possessions in America must become involved and through these complications the United States must inevitably be drawn into the contest. Then it will be seen and known that the South will join fortunes with any European power that will guarantee us freedom from the thralldom of the North.

That threat to rise with European help, of course, was made all the more real to Douglass' readership by the news of the Franco-Prussian War that flooded the columns that summer. The same unreconstructed thinking was present the next year as well. On July 20, 1871, the New National Era printed an interview with former Confederate politico Bob Toombs originally from the New York Herald.

“You have given up, however, all hope of making armed resistance to the United States Government?”

“Not at all. I don’t know but that it is about time for us to fight again. Our only hope is in ourselves; every party in the North abandons us. I never expected much from Northern Democrats since they deserted us at the beginning of the war, so I am not greatly disappointed. I know the men who are their leaders and they are just as unscrupulous as the Radicals [Republicans]....

“But you surely do not seriously mean that the war ought to begin again?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And you remember the bloodshed and misery which that must involve?”

“Yes; but what of it? I am not a peace man. There are many worse occupations for a gentleman than fighting. Besides, everything nearly in the way of political freedom has been won in battle....”

“When are you going to raise the standard of revolt?”

“Whenever a favorable opportunity occurs. We will wait until your people at the North are divided among themselves or are at war with some foreign power. The time will come, sooner or later. And these men” (here Mr. Toombs pointed to some farmers standing near by) “would fight again, to-day, if need be. You cannot conquer us except by killing us all off, and that would be an impossibility.”

The question that remains, in my mind is not whether the thing would have worked or not, Toombs himself admitted that it “would be a desperate undertaking, of course.” But I want to know, would “the farmers,” as Toombs designated the yeomen standing nearby, have fought? The “farmers” abandoned the Cause the first time around when crop production fell, promised salt failed to materialize, and families began to starve. Their need to provide for the folks at home and willingness to desert to do so drained the Confederacy just as the heat was really being applied by Union armies in late 1863 and 1864. But in the wake of the first five years of Reconstruction, would the nonslaveowning farmer have fought? Now that he could see African Americans socially and politically equal to and competing economically with himself, would he have been willing to fight again, and this time to see success? Many have argued the South was more united after Reconstruction than it was in 1861 or 1865; would that have told out in some hypothetical “Civil War, pt. II?” Would Missouri, Kentucky, or Maryland, with many slaveowners stinging from the Emancipation Proclamation and XIII, XIV, and XV Amendments have joined in on the fun, as well? Would the perceived indignity of racial equality have brought “the farmers” back into the fight?

Memoirs and the Adventure of War pt. 1

Was the “just for fun and adventure” justification for joining the army a postwar concoction? Did the memoirists writing in the 1880s and 1890s use this excuse as a way to get around discussing the real reasons they went to war in 1861? When we accept “adventure” as a valid reason for men to go to war in 1861, do we also accept the program of Lost Causeism and sectional reconciliation that helped obscure the underlying issues of race and slavery that drove the nation to war?

John Jackman of the 9^th Kentucky told of his instant decision to seek the romantic life of a man-at-arms, and his narrative is similar to many veterans’ accounts.

I walked down to the Depot...to get the daily papers, and as I was passing in, W[illiam] S[toner] said to me, “Let us go to Bloomfield to-night, and join the party going through to Dixie!” or something to that effect. I had scarcely thought of such a thing before; but in an instant my mind was made up, and I answered, “All right.” ... Taking nothing but a traveling shawl, I mounted and joined W.S. at his home. We were soon on the road, two modern Don Quixotes starting out to seek adventures.

My concern for the “fun and adventure” thesis is that – as many veterans today and yesterday will know – war stops being fun very, very quickly. To couch that in McPherson’s terms, adventure can be a fine Initial or Enlistment Motivation that gets men into the ranks but is far from a Sustaining Motivation that keeps them there. When the novelty wears off, the soldier had to have something to keep him in the service. Now, usually that something is “small group cohesion,” the loyalty to comrades built over time by combat veterans. But Civil War memoirists will universally note that they were not in combat before the rosy shine wore right off military life. There has to be something else, some bigger picture they were fighting for, that kept these men in the ranks.

We must note that when soldiers talk about yearning for the glories of the soldiering life, they couple those sentiments with discussion of public pressure. The small communities from which the Civil War soldier was drawn leaned heavily on its young men to serve in the military to prove themselves men. Military service was a natural rite of passage for a new generation of townies. So, Marcus Toney of the 1^st Tennessee wrote that “The young ladies were as enthusiastic as the young men; and if they found a fellow lukewarm, he was threatened with a petticoat and was not allowed to hang up his had in their father’s hall.” Young men were supposed to crave the adventure of military service because proving themselves in that adventure would secure their place as marriageable men in the community. The “fun adventure” of military becomes much more meaningful and important to a man’s future when seen through this light.

But concern about your own marriageability and welcoming military rites of passage speak to a larger picture of the Confederate volunteer of 1861. Generally speaking, the postwar memoirist hailed from a very narrow antebellum demographic. He was in his early twenties in 1861, was well educated, was solidly middle- or planter-class, had great exposure to slavery (i.e. lived in a slaveowning household if not owning slaves himself), and enlisted early in the war. The older, married small farmer of the late 1861 and 1862 regiments did not usually write after the war, nor did he participate in memory-constructing groups like the United Confederate Veterans, which Gaines Foster has shown to be an urban, professional-class organization that included many memoirists and contributors to veterans’ magazines in its ranks. In many ways, that older man -- who, if anyone, can claim to have enlisted for protection of farm and family from invading Union armies -- has had his voice drowned out by the younger set who wrote more prolifically during and after the war. (This is not surprising, as Glatthaar has recently shown us that the 1862 volunteer was poorer and less educated than his 1861 counterpart)

So, what did the memoirist and his relatively affluent 1861 cohort have on the line that caused them to be the first in to the army and the last out? What is he obscuring when he talks only about desiring the grand adventure of war in his writings? How have these memoirs tainted our understanding of the 1861 Confederate volunteer?

Leave your answers in the comments, and see my own in in Part 2...