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Book Reviews These are some reviews from a recent issue of
The Civil War News:
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A Shattered Nation: The Rise & Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868
by Anne Sarah Rubin
llustrated, notes, bibliography, index, 319 pp., 2005. The University of North Carolina Press, P.O. Box 2288, Chapel Hill, NC 27515-2288, $34.95 plus shipping.
Very quickly in 1860-1861 pro-secessionist Southerners shed their old identity as “Americans” and came to see themselves as “Confederates.” “What,” Anne Sarah Rubin asks, “did it mean to be a Confederate in the 1860s?” To answer the question, Rubin undertakes an exploration of “the myriad stands of ideology and identify that made up the Confederacy ... as an ideal, a state, and a memory.” [Wisely, Rubin differentiates between “Confederates” (whites who supported the Confederacy) and “Southerners” (those who lived in the South including Unionists and blacks).] The “elements of Confederate identity” included a sense of history, especially in connection with the earlier separation from Britain; loyalty to the Constitution of 1787, which — the Rebels believed — the North had violated; female virtue; male honor; and a sense that God sided with the Secessionists. Confederates spread their sense of what and who they and their new nation were through conversation, correspondence, music, and the press. They created new rituals and wrote new histories “to legitimate their national existence.” Once the war and the Confederacy ended, the former Rebels sought ways to remain true to their past and their nation — the Confederacy. Their belief in the Confederate nation thus persisted into Reconstruction. Even after they regained their place in the United States and came to believe themselves, once again, loyal Americans, they held onto the “Confederate ideal,” especially its symbols and racial ideas. By this feat they could “cede their political independence while continuing to preserve a distinctive social and cultural identity, becoming a quasi-ethnic minority.” The result was to echo down through the post-Reconstruction decades and into the 21st century. Indeed, at present, it seems quite strong in certain quarters, and some people even call themselves “Confederate-Americans.” Rubin also explores the way in which wartime events challenged and upset the traditional roles of men and women in the South. Former Confederates had to work through this “crisis in gender” even as they sought to resolve the other problems created by their military defeat. By 1868 they had accomplished this goal, redefining Southern gender roles in a way that left women free to memorialize the Confederate dead but carefully limiting their other activities. This part of the book is the weakest — indeed it seems something of a digression in keeping with current fads and not tied in very well with the main thesis. The subject, to be sure, is important, but perhaps it should have been left for a separate study. Civil War News readers who desire to understand the mind of the men and women (for much of Rubin’s evidence comes from the pens of Southern ladies) who supported the Confederacy can learn much from this book. Those whose interest is limited to the battlefield can safely bypass it
Richard McMurry
Richard McMurry is the au-thor of John Bell Hood And The War For Southern Independence and Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay In Confederate Military History. His latest book is The Fourth Battle of Winchester: Toward a New Civil War Paradigm.
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