The Confederate Cultural Nationalist Crusade

“The great moral triumph of recent times,” South Carolinian William Gilmore Simms proclaimed in 1850, “is the recognition of the race as well as the individual.”¹ By race, he meant a people or ethnicity, as promoted and celebrated by the nationalists who had just led revolutions across Europe. American abolitionists, however, at the same time were calling attention to race in different terms. These two “-isms” of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—abolitionism and nationalism—both fed the charged and divisive sentiments that came to dominate public discourse in the decade leading to the American Civil War. Indeed, the two developed more-or-less simultaneously between the American Revolution and the creation of the Confederate States of America. In the process, nationalism went from being an ideological assertion about America’s founding principles to also being a cultural one about the character of Americans. Divisions that once had been seen in largely ideological terms—for instance, over states’ rights and slavery—came increasingly to be read in cultural terms: Yankees and Southerners were different from each other in how they thought, lived, and acted. They were, in sum, separate peoples. Various pseudo-histories explained why.

Their belief in themselves as a people led white Southerners to pursue not only political but also intellectual independence. This is the judgment and the determination with which Michael Bernath begins the story in his Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South. The launch of the Confederacy, Bernath contends, was as much an intellectual as it was a political or military call to arms. In the first of four parts, he examines this intellectual call as well as “The Confederate Critique of Northern Culture” in two chapters. Though Bernath does not make the point explicitly, it is clear from his account that Southerners suffered from a neocolonial mindset. They felt themselves dependent on the North for much of their cultural fare. Making this all the more galling was Northern antagonism toward Southern interests and values.

In the circumstances, “intellectual independence” was “a nationalistic imperative” (p. 27). This was because “a nation was defined not by territory, military might, politics, or economics, but rather by the unique and recognizable ‘character’ of its people . . . exhibited through its cultural and literary productions” (p. 31). Where Northerners were defined by their “fanaticism” and their devotion to other “-isms” (pp. 37 ff.), Southerners were “a different race, speaking the same language in a different manner” (p. 39). Invoking the faith of their fathers “as clear indicators of southern conservatism and continuity” (p. 40), they were, unlike Yankees, “homogeneous and united,” or so J. D. B. De Bow and others argued (p. 56).

Part two, also in two chapters, examines “The Birth of Confederate Literature” and “The Campaign for Confederate Educational Independence” in 1861–62. The two following chapters of part three then consider, first, the remarkable growth of Confederate publishing at “The High-Water Mark” of 1862–64 and, during those same years, the “Searching for a Confederate ‘Literature of Power’” to articulate and elevate the nation’s cultural claims and status. The single chapter of the final part considers Confederates’ critique of the attainments of their literature and educational establishments. The conclusion that follows traces the shift from the cultural nationalism of the war years to the Lost Cause era’s turn from the South’s future to the South’s past.

Begun as a doctoral dissertation directed by Drew Faust at Harvard, Confederate Minds draws on extensive analysis of some seventy wartime periodicals, five times as many Confederate imprints (including over a hundred textbooks), and dozens of both antebellum and postbellum journals, memoirs, letters, and articles. Informing the reading and analysis, too, are approximately five hundred secondary works on the history of education, intellectual history, Civil War history and bibliography, the history of religion, book history, and the...