Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-1865 by Paul Quigley (review)

In the years since the collapse of the Confederacy, students of southern nationalism have faced a seemingly intractable problem. The Confederate nation did not last, a fact that has caused many to question whether a true southern nationalism ever existed at all. Paul Quigley effectively confronts this dilemma—not by seeking to quantify the strength and extent of southern nationalist sentiment, as some have done, but by examining the ideas that allowed so many white southerners to respond to the sectional crisis by imagining an independent Confederacy. The result is a thorough, original, and revealing study that situates southern nationalism in an intellectual environment shaped by the shifting currents of nineteenth-century world thought.

Quigley's book is organized around five roughly chronological chapters that trace the ways white southerners understood and conceived of nationalism during the era of sectional conflict and civil war. The first chapter examines southern citizens' "active" participation in the construction and celebration of a vigorous American nationalism in the years before the war (17). Quigley argues that most southerners saw themselves not as sectionalists but as American nationalists who championed the legacy of the American Revolution and embraced the United States' God-given role to serve as a model of representative government for the entire world. Still, Quigley notes that "antebellum American nationalism, like all nationalisms, was unfinished, tentative, and fractured," especially given that the principle of federalism encouraged southerners to understand national loyalty in terms of loyalty to place or region (17).

Quigley's second chapter, which describes the nationalist thought of the fire-eater minority, demonstrates the degree to which nationalism was a "shifting, unstable concept" in the South before the war (50). While most southerners continued to develop their nationalist understandings within the context of the American Union, radical southern secessionists, inspired by European ideas of romantic and cultural nationalism, began to view the institution of slavery as a distinguishing trait that might form the basis for a new and independent nationality. The growing antislavery sentiment in the North convinced these radicals that white southerners constituted an aggrieved, victimized, and oppressed minority, which had been subjugated within the confines of the federal Union.

In chapters three and four, Quigley explores the ways southern whites reexamined their loyalties during the secession crisis. As northerners increasingly attacked the institution of slavery, the "affective bonds" of shared citizenship between the sections frayed (95). Increasing numbers came to share the fire-eaters' sense of oppression and victimhood (126). Once the Confederacy was established, Quigley argues, its supporters wholly embraced it as a fully fledged new nation-state. Confederate citizens and officials drew on their understanding of antebellum American nationalism and the expectations of European thinkers in justifying the Confederacy's existence. In the process, Confederates claimed to have created a new nation "according to the precepts of nineteenth-century nationalism," precepts which supposed that "a people with its own cultural and intellectual identity . . . warranted political independence" (139).

Quigley concludes by exploring the ways Confederate citizens navigated their loyalties through the storms of war. He argues that, for some, shared suffering fostered southern unity, and for others, resentment of the northern foe helped cement loyalty to the Confederate state. Still, he points out that for many this shift in allegiance was not always easily accomplished. Confederate citizens often reluctantly abandoned ties to the old Union while at the same time expressing loyalty to the new Confederacy.

One of Paul Quigley's greatest strengths is his capacity to tolerate and explicate these ambiguities. For Quigley, nationalism "is not just one thing"; instead, nationalist sentiment rests on a highly contingent and sometimes conflicting set of ideas and allegiances (13). Nationalism, he argues, is felt, experienced, and imagined, not self-consciously "created" with policies, symbols, and songs, as some have suggested. Quigley treats nationalism as an intellectual problem, not as a tangible quality. As a result, he does not feel compelled to...