Blood Image: Turner Ashby in the Civil War and the Southern Mind (review)

Paul Anderson has written an ambitious book. As there have been a number of biographical treatments of Confederate General Turner Ashby, Anderson aims, instead, to discuss Ashby's image among Virginians both during and after the war. The resulting effort is a fascinating, if sometimes puzzling, journey through the history of the southern mind.

Although Anderson covers the basics of Ashby's life and military career, he is far more interested in this cavalryman as a cultural symbol. Ashby's exploits in the Shenandoah Valley, Anderson concludes, helped Valley Virginians to find the meaning of the Civil War and the place of their culture in it. Central to that sense of culture was the code of chivalry. Anderson argues persuasively that Ashby's home territory, Fauquier County, was filled with citizens who had been brought up and nurtured on the code. It was only logical, then, that the people of Fauquier County eventually grafted their romanticized notions of chivalry upon their most famous military son, Turner Ashby. By his death in June 1862, Ashby had acquired a multifaceted symbolism, or image, representing all things prized by Valley Virginians: horsemanship, defense of family and home, natural ability, and warrior status. Turner Ashby had therefore become the perfect embodiment of the chivalrous knight of old.

Paul Anderson is generally convincing, but one is sometimes left with the feeling that he simply reads more into his evidence than is really there. For example, does chivalry actually explain Valley Virginians' attachment to home and Anderson's attendant argument that this caused crippling episodes of troops leaving the ranks in battle? An alternative reading of the evidence would simply conclude that fighting in the home county would tempt any soldier, but especially a mobile cavalryman, to go AWOL should the chance arise. In a similar fashion, Anderson at times seeks deep meaning where a more simple explanation might suffice. Such is the case when he discovers "a subtle expression of a value system under pressure" in Valley Virginians' misidentification of Ashby's Mountain Rangers with more ominously named units such as the Black Horse Troop or the Black Horsemen (p. 161). To Anderson, the citizenry had thus ascribed barbaric imagery to their greatest warrior in order to intimidate the Yankees. A less abstract reading of the case might just conclude that Valley Virginians were understandably confused about unit identities, given the chaos of the war and the multiplicity of exotically named companies, troops, and battalions.

These criticisms aside, Paul Anderson has dared to think big in his first book. He has asked questions of his subject that most historians of the Civil War have failed to consider. While the answers may sometimes miss the mark, Anderson's book is well researched and uniformly interesting. In the crowded reading lists of Civil War and Southern historians, this book certainly deserves attention.