The Fortunate Heirs of Freedom: Abolition and Republican Thought (review)

88CIVIL WAR HISTORY able to describe the Confederacy's defense of white men's prerogatives of race and gender as ifonly a defense of"freedom" and "honor," as though such ideals existed apart from white men's domination of women and blacks. Although Augusta's white women experienced the war differently than men, most initially supported the Confederacy. As the war dragged on, however, Whites finds that gender united white women in criticism of the war, while class interests divided them. Rich and poor alike deplored "unmanly" merchants and speculators whose behavior impoverished women and children. Whereas lower-class women increasingly criticized the Confederacy itself, however, elite women hesitated to do so. Their class interests were too closely allied with those of Confederate leaders. Whites emphasizes that Northern defeat of the Confederacy destroyed a key component of Southern white manhood—the right to own black people. In the aftermath of the Confederacy's crushing defeat, Augusta's elite women struggled to redeem their fallen men. On April 26, 1875, in the middle of the city, amid parades and crowds of people, a monument to the Confederate dead was erected under the auspices of the Ladies' Memorial Association. In towns and cities throughout the South, similar organizations commemorated Confederate soldiers. The Myth of the Lost Cause was soon to flourish. Organizations such as the Confederate Survivors Association and the Daughters of the Confederacy "redeemed" Southern (and ultimately national) Civil War lore. In Augusta and throughout the New South, schoolchildren learned that noble white men fought for the honor and safety of their families, not to preserve slavery. They learned that all-suffering white mothers martyred their sons in defense of a "golden age" in which free white people lived in harmony with one another and with enslaved African Americans. The Myth of the Lost Cause enshrined white Southerners' grief as an eternal state of being. Its continual trumpeting by patriotic organizations revitalized white manhood by romanticizing life in the Old South, distorting the true causes of the Civil War, and sanctioning racial segregation in the New South. Lee Ann Whites's groundbreaking study demonstrates that applying a gendered analysis to the behavior of both men and women sheds new light on even the most familiar stories of history. Her book is a superb addition to the growing number of works that present the Civil War within the South as a struggle over power, one intimately linked to Southerners' gender, class, and racial identities. Victoria E. Bynum Southwest Texas State University The Fortunate Heirs ofFreedom: Abolition and Republican Thought. By Daniel J. Mclnerney. (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1994. Pp. x, 232. $37.50.) In recent years, republicanism has provided many historians with a common conceptual theme. This has been especially true for studies dealing with the book reviews89 revolutionary era, while the approach has not been employed as much for the Civil War period. Despite the rise in the 1 850s of a "Republican" party—the party of Abraham Lincoln—and the effort to restore "republican" governments in the defeated states after the war, comparatively less attention has beendevoted to republican themes. Ironically, the predominant studies have examined republican ideas in the context of the slaveholding society in the South. Daniel J. Mclnerney partially redresses this imbalance by examining republican thought in the antislavery movement. The author correctly concedes that republicanism hardly "caused" abolitionism, but he nonetheless demonstrates how the republican legacy provided slavery's critics a "coherent habit of mind" (1). For those resisting the Slave Power, republicanism provided a common vocabulary and the benefits of historical memory; abolitionists were convinced they were the rightful heirs of the revolutionary past. Of course, slavery's arbitrary and unrestrained power was viewed as a gross violation ofrepublican ideals. Most ominous, slavery's temptations threatened to undermine republican values among all Americans. Indeed, American abolitionists confronted a dangerous and unique challenge —that of republican slavery. To counter this, abolitionists called upon a valuable historical heritage (which included the Whig tradition) but evidently sidestepped the issue of slaveholding among the nation's most prominent founders. Admittedly, abolitionists could recall the antislavery views of earlier slaveholders whose toleration of slavery did not culminate in efforts to...