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

Paul Christopher Anderson's creatively fashioned and deeply researched Blood Image: Turner Ashby in the Civil War and the Southern Mind is a major addition to Confederate biography and Civil War iconography. It merges first-rate biography with an elegant, graceful, and highly nuanced analysis of Civil War cultural history, mythology, and memory.

Though many polemicists and historians have written of and about Ashby's chivalric, heroic, and knightly deeds, Anderson is the first to examine their origins and cultural meanings. He considers Ashby "a living symbol, a vivid and powerful representation of what Confederates in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia saw as the purpose and meaning of their Civil War" (xi). Ashby craved recognition, exuded ambition, and helped shape his multiple images—as ideal horseman, family defender, natural and romantic man, and Confederate warrior. This construction drew upon antebellum and wartime—not postbellum—elements of courage, chivalry, gallantry, and honor. Ashby's image took shape along Virginia's partisan border war of 1861 and the winter and early spring of 1862—when, Anderson writes, Ashby had a "mesmerizing aura that glowed around him" (142).

The son of a War of 1812 hero, Ashby was born in Fauquier County, Virginia, in 1828, to a comfortable slaveholding family. Young Ashby spent the antebellum years working on his family's farm, honing his skills as a horseman in ring tournaments, and running a mercantile business. While he lacked a formal military education, as early as 1853 Ashby commanded a neighborhood vigilante group, the Mountain Rangers, that protected his neighbors from rioting Irish workers of the Manassas Gap Railroad and against suspected abolitionists in their midst. In 1859 Ashby's men performed guard and picket duty in Charles Town, Virginia, during the execution of John Brown and his accomplices.

Once Virginia seceded from the Union, Ashby's unit became incorporated into the Seventh Virginia Cavalry, an "irregular," partisan band created to patrol the Shenandoah Valley border. "Ashby," according to Anderson, "was an independent fighter at heart and in practice. He cared little for the administration or the discipline of regular cavalry. He found the enemy and fought them, and he asked his men to do the same" (133). Though a fierce fighter, Anderson explains, Ashby "was not a psychopathic criminal; he was not a guerrilla who used war merely as an excuse to kill" (139). Unlike better-known Confederate irregulars like Col. John S. Mosby and Gen. John Hunt Morgan, Ashby "never developed a strategic understanding that might tie his defense of the [Shenandoah] Valley to the broader goal of Confederate independence." Defining his men as fighters, not soldiers, Ashby lacked a "visionary scheme" as how to employ them. Anderson concludes, "The absence of that purpose accounted for much of the indiscipline in his command and the scattershot way in which it was organized and fought" (140).

Though postwar Lost Cause partisans honored Ashby as their beau ideal of Confederate gallantry, Anderson correctly interprets him as a tragically flawed cavalier. Blinded by his narrow vision of warfare, circumscribed by his quest for personal valor, and rendered ineffective by his lack of control over his cavalrymen, Ashby failed to mobilize his men to pursue retreating Union forces at Winchester, Virginia, thereby incurring the wrath of his superior, Thomas J. Jackson. Twelve days later, while fighting near Harrisonburg, Ashby took a bullet in the chest and died instantly.

Anderson's significant accomplishment in this biography is his rooting of Ashby's image in the cultural values and ideals of his native Virginia. "Ashby's great failure," he writes, "was that he allowed his own magnetism to overpower himself" (172). In the end the chivalric horseman, the defender of hearth and home, proved himself an exemplary Virginia icon but an ineffective Confederate warrior.