Damn Yankees!: Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South by George C. Rable (review)

Writing in her diary in early 1865, a white Georgian named Eliza Frances Andrews unleashed a veritable tirade against the northern enemy. Yankees “thwart all my plans, murder my friends, and make my life miserable,” she wrote. “Yankee, Yankee, is the one detestable word always ringing in Southern ears. If all the words of hatred in every language under heaven were lumped together into one huge epithet of detestation, they could not tell how I hate Yankees” (95). Among the accomplishments of Damn Yankees! is almost exactly that: to gather together as many words of hatred as possible in order to reveal how Andrews and her fellow white southerners hated Yankees. If nothing else, readers are guaranteed to learn some new and highly creative ways to insult people.

Yet Damn Yankees! is so much more than a repository of execrations. It is a masterfully executed work by one of our field’s most accomplished historians, a slim volume with broad implications for how we understand Confederate thought. Rable persuasively shows that language and imagery mattered greatly to the prosecution of the Civil War. They matter in every war. Across the world and through the centuries, as weapons and strategies have evolved, using words to vilify the enemy has been a constant feature of warfare. “Language matters,” Rable explains, “because descriptions of the enemy carry serious and sometimes deadly consequences for all concerned” (3). The more harshly we portray our enemies, the more severely we want to hurt them—and the less we want to reconcile after the fighting is over. These issues are especially consequential in civil conflicts. When fighting against former compatriots, the line demarcating us from them, good from evil, becomes more critical than ever.

Confederates expended much ink detailing North-South differences. Sometimes they read those differences back into the past, back into the days of original settlement, when Cavaliers supposedly clustered in the South and Puritans in the North, and sometimes even further back, into the European past. Once one accepted that Yankees were historically a different race, it became easier to define them as subhuman—the type of people who would not only subscribe to dangerous “isms” such as feminism or abolitionism or socialism, but also resort to inhumane means of waging war in the effort to propagate those isms. The result was the frequent dehumanization of northerners in Confederate culture. One need only leaf through the pages of Damn Yankees! to find numerous examples that hover around a fine line between the quaintly amusing and the deeply disturbing. There is the civilian who states, “I rejoice when I hear of their slaughter by the thousands.” And there is the Confederate officer who reports that it was “doing my soul good” to see northerners’ “severed limbs, decapitated bodies, and mutilated remains” (102–4). Language is what justified, even generated, such callousness, and the results were nothing short of horrific. The power of antinorthern invective long outlived the war itself, going on to fuel southern resistance to Reconstruction. After defeat, one South Carolinian reported, the Yankees “left me one inestimable privilege—to hate ‘em. I git up at half-past four in the morning, and sit up till twelve at night, to hate ‘em” (133).

White women appear frequently in Damn Yankees! as key authors and disseminators of anti-Yankee insults. They were also the ultimate victims of Yankee perfidy. When Union soldiers invaded not just southern states but southern homes and bedrooms, they threatened the gender relations that white southerners had placed close to the center of their regional identity. Even the hint of sexual peril—let alone explicit allegations of rape—steeled southern hatred like little else.

Little else, that is, except the threat of emancipation. Some of the most enlightening sections of the book emphasize racial disorder as a particularly menacing aspect of the northern threat. Of course, differing attitudes toward racial slavery, in...