To Live and Die in Dixie: Native Northerners Who Fought for the Confederacy by David Ross Zimring (review)

Can you name a Confederate general who was a native northerner? Try John Pemberton or Daniel Ruggles. What about former northerners in top civilian posts? John Slidell and Josiah Gorgas. Native northerners, it would seem, played a surprising role in the Confederate experiment, and David Ross Zimring’s To Live and Die in Dixie does a marvelous job of cataloging their exploits, attitudes, and adventures. But there is far more to this monograph than a few familiar names. Zimring also challenges long-held notions about sectional identity in the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras, offering new evidence in support of Confederate nationhood.

According to Zimring’s calculations, nearly 350,000 native northerners lived in the South in 1860. To understand what they were doing in Dixie and what their fates were, he examines 303 men and women who were born and raised in a free state and then moved to a slave state in young adulthood. Zimring himself acknowledges that such a small sample is problematic: “These individuals do not speak for all northern emigrants in the South and do not provide a definitive picture of all of their experiences.” Still, Zimring argues, “they provide valuable insight into cross-sectional experiences and . . . identity formation” (13). Indeed, it is “identity formation” that truly interests Zimring, and the study of native northerners in the Civil War South is a means for him to explore that issue.

In ten carefully crafted chapters, Zimring traces the path of “adoptive southerners” from their free-state origins in the antebellum era to their slave-state homes. In the prewar years, he explains, sectional identity was “malleable” and the Mason-Dixon Line was like a “sieve” (5, 47). White southerners welcomed northern emigrants with open arms as long as they embraced local culture and did not challenge slavery. Most emigrants relocated for business opportunities and thus had no interest in upsetting their new neighbors. In the lead-up to war, adoptive southerners defended the South against antislavery attacks, condemned abolitionism, and supported secession. During the war, most adoptive southerners became “Northern Confederates” and fought valiantly in defense of the infant Confederate nation. Never did their faith in the Confederacy waiver, not even when they found themselves near kith and kin in northern prisoner-of-war camps. In the postwar years, Northern Confederates championed the Lost Cause and rejected any reform of southern society.

Though the narrative is focused on the experiences of northern emigrants, each chapter is clearly connected to a larger argument about identity formation and Confederate nationalism. Northern Confederates’ loyalty to the South, Zimring asserts, proves that scholars have exaggerated sectionalism in the antebellum era and that Confederate nationhood was authentic and legitimate. “Their dedication to the cause,” he explains, “revealed the strength of the Confederate nation, since individuals who did not have native ties to the region still willingly gave their lives for its survival” (153). Moreover, the Civil War was a profound dividing line (a “Berlin Wall,” in Zimring’s words) between two distinct periods of identity formation (6). In the antebellum era, sectional identity was fluid and flexible. In Reconstruction, however, the North-South divide became an unbridgeable gulf. Northerners who moved south after the war were viewed as “alien trespassers and occupiers,” regardless of their intentions (268). “The Civil War thus represented the cut-off point for the kind of cross-sectional emigration enjoyed by previous generations,” Zimring concludes (269).

To support his claims, Zimring draws on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, everything from letter collections to memoirs to biographies. His mining of archival material for his chapter on southern reactions to Northern Confederates is particularly deft, as he uses letters to adoptive southerners to extract native southern opinions and sentiments. Moreover, he provides an appendix with easy-to-read graphs that break down his analysis of the 303 men and women.

Zimring’s...