The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (review)

Victoria E. Bynum’s The Long Shadow of the Civil War is the culmination of nearly three decades of research into the lives of southern dissidents in the Civil War era. In this work, she examines three regions rife with southern dissent and violent, internal conflict: the Mississippi Piney Woods, the North Carolina Piedmont, and the Big Thicket region of eastern Texas. Bynum, a leading authority on southern unionists, well known for her outstanding volumes Unruly Women and The Free State of Jones, presents us with a comparative Civil War work of depth and nuance and an exciting postwar story of what happened to political dissidents in each of these regions.

The nature of Civil War loyalty, the history of racial identity, and the legacy of both in the postwar South are the focus of Bynum’s illuminating study. The book examines the complex web of kinship, family, and community, piecing together the historical legacy of dissent in the Confederate South. She devotes important space to addressing how southern unionists in these regions came to hold their political loyalty and why they resisted and hated the Confederacy. Bynum rarely shies away from examining the difficult questions that limited source material, contradictory evidence, and unusual Civil War loyalty stories can frequently pose. According to Bynum, “The mere publication of family facts does not make them true, nor did enlistment in the Confederate Army prove that one supported the Confederacy” (x). This is precisely the war that Bynum investigates, one that forces readers to take “the other South” seriously.

The hallmark of Victoria Bynum’s work on the Civil War has been careful exploration of local county records and family histories. Her painstaking research has repeatedly revealed characters like Newt Knight, Jasper Collins, and Caroline Huline, whose loyalty stories are not easily synthesized into the traditional war narrative. Here, Bynum once again delivers the painful and difficult stories that historians have grown to expect from her important books. Her principal characters in Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas provide a window into the problems and difficulties faced by wartime dissidents and New South “radicals.”

This book will challenge many undergraduate students’ view of a neat war of blue versus gray. The idea of a divided South at war with itself is still something many students struggle with, and this work deserves a wide audience at that level. This excellent addition to the literature of political and militant dissent in the South will doubtless leave many students of the Civil War with a better understand of internal conflict within the South and a better understanding of how minority groups in a society are affected in a time of war.