Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South (review)

Recent years have seen a flourishing of renewed scholarship on the Confederate nation. Partly stimulated by older, innovative works such as Drew Faust’s The Creation of Confederate Nationalism (1988), these new studies have attempted to better understand the different dimensions of nationalism in the Confederacy and the reasons why it ultimately failed. In A Shattered Nation (2005), Anne Sarah Rubin analyses how white southerners “imagined” their Confederate nation and held on to their Confederate identity through the Civil War and Reconstruction, while in Modernizing a Slave Economy (2009), John Majewski looks at the way southern political economists “imagined” the future outlook of a “modern” Confederate nation in economic terms. More recently, in Confederate Reckoning (2010), Stephanie McCurry has shown how the Confederate nationalist project failed as a result of its exclusion of white women and slaves—both of whom played crucial roles in the demise of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Michael Bernath’s Confederate Minds is clearly part of this new scholarship that analyzes the complexities of Confederate nationalism, but it also owes major debts to recent and older studies of antebellum southern culture, such as Michael O’Brien’s Conjectures of Order (2004), Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese’s The Mind of the Master Class (2005), Robert Bonner’s Mastering America (2009), and particularly John McCardell’s pioneering The Idea of a Southern Nation (1979). In an extremely well-crafted study, McCardell gathered together all the arguments advanced by antebellum southern thinkers, intellectuals, and artists in favor of the idea of an autonomous southern nation in cultural, economic, and political terms. In many ways, Confederate Minds continues what McCardell started, by dealing with the subsequent Civil War years, but focusing specifically on the southern intellectuals’ effort to create an autonomous southern culture as part of the Confederate nationalist project.

In Confederate Minds, Bernath studies a group of individuals whom he labels “Confederate cultural nationalists” and who included “Confederate writers, editors, publishers, teachers, and ministers” who sought recognition for an autonomous southern culture, completely distinct from the one in the North (4, 1). To do so, Bernath painstakingly has identified articles published in seventy cultural periodicals and magazines and read treatises, pamphlets, and sermons published both by prominent intellectuals, from William Gilmore Simms to James Henry Thornwell, and by more obscure, but equally staunch, Confederate cultural nationalists. Although Bernath acknowledges that his focus on print culture and educated white men gives his study a unilateral view of Confederate nationalism, his claim that “Confederate cultural nationalists were enthusiastically inclusive when it came to gender” needs to be seen in the context of the highly artificial world constructed by these men of letters who were fighting a war for the intellectual independence of a nation that denied the existence of an intellect and the right to independence to most women and to all the slaves (9).

The book is divided into four sections that follow chronologically the rise and fall of the Confederate nation. The first section effectively connects antebellum southern cultural nationalism and its critique of northern culture with the Confederate cultural nationalists’ project in the aftermath of secession and with the latter’s “call to arms” in a cultural war to be fought side by side with the war on the battlefield. The theme of the two parallel wars—one for the Confederate nation and the other for southern intellectual and cultural independence—unifies the subsequent three sections. Two central sections detail the high hopes and expectations for the creation of a distinctive Confederate literature and education—with suggestive openings for “the beginning of a nobler, loftier career for women,” as one DeBow’s Review columnist put it—and the explosion of cultural periodicals, pamphlets, fiction, drama, and poetry, dedicated to creating a southern literary renaissance through what A. B. Stark termed a “literature of power,” or, in Bernath’s words, “those works of true merit...