Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty by Gary W. Gallagher (review)

As no doubt every reader of this journal knows, in 1997 Gary W. Gallagher published The Confederate War, a finely crafted, rigorously argued, and convincing case for the existence of a true, powerful Confederate nationalism that sustained the South through four long years of war. Becoming Confederates builds upon the earlier book through studies of how individuals came to embrace that nationalism—their “paths to a new national loyalty,” as the subtitle puts it. Originally delivered as the 2011 Lamar Lectures at Mercer University, the book explores the process in three main chapters, each of which discusses a Confederate military leader about whom Gallagher has written before: Robert E. Lee, Stephen D. Ramseur, and Jubal A. Early. With each, Gallagher follows David M. Potter’s admonition in his famous essay on southern identity and examines their competing loyalties by exploring their identification with their home states, the United States, the slaveholding South, and the Confederacy.

The essay on Lee is probably the most important of the three because of Lee’s importance at the time and the ways in which the interpretation of his views has been used or, perhaps more accurately, misused since. Gallagher carefully and convincingly shows that in the 1850s Lee identified with his native state and the United States but, most important and often overlooked, also very strongly supported the slaveholding South. With considerable insight, Gallagher adds that Lee’s decision to fight for the Confederacy resulted from his decision to stand with “blood, class, and section” (20). Lee’s loyalty, in other words, had little to do with American ideals or constitutional theories but rather resulted from a more familiar, racial, almost tribal sense of loyalty. As the war progressed, Lee both became an ardent Confederate nationalist, his anger at the Yankees deepening his commitment to the cause, and an advocate for central authority within the Confederacy. After the war, Gallagher adds, Lee’s resentment of his former foes persisted, heightened by his fierce opposition to the Republican Party’s agenda for racial change.

Gallagher’s discussions of Ramseur and Early prove as good as that of Lee. Ramseur, unlike Lee or Early, came of age in the divisive decade of the 1850s, and he always identified more closely with the South, an affinity rooted in his support of slavery, than with the United States. He therefore made an easier transition to Confederate nationalism. Like Lee, he also accepted national intrusion into the states and citizens’ lives in the wartime South. When Gallagher turns his attention to an older Early, he provides perhaps the most complex portrait of the three men. John Brown’s raid “brought to the fore” Early’s commitment to a society based on white slave-holding, but, even after that, Early, a Whiggish conservative, had a genuine devotion to the Union, in part because he thought it preserved the ownership of slaves (70). He voted against secession. “Only his sense of honor and the ‘dignity of Virginia’ persuaded him” to abandon his Unionism and join the Confederate war effort. Even then, he did not stop chiding the secessionists. He nevertheless supported the creation of a powerful government in Richmond and became an ardent Confederate nationalist. Union military operations and “forced emancipation” increased his hatred of the Yankees, and after the war he remained “an ardent Confederate nationalist without a country” (78, 80). Gallagher sees Early as someone “whose loyalties changed although his opinions about political and social questions remained largely static. He never deviated from his belief in the Constitution as it had been, the correctness of slavery, rule by a propertied elite, and the need for white supremacy in a biracial society” (82).

After his portraits of the three Confederate leaders, Gallagher adds a brief chapter on what happened after the war and observes that all three accepted reunion but never embraced reconciliation. Gallagher also draws, in the introduction rather than the conclusion...