Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas

Shades of Nation: Confederate Loyalties in Southeastern Virginia

IN The Confederate Nation, HISTORIAN EMORY M. THOMAS CREATES A powerful image of Confederate officials in their nation’s capital awaiting news of the outcome of combat on the plains of Manassas in the summer of 86: Back in Richmond it had been an anxious day for a lot of people. The capital was empty of soldiers, and the fact that July 2 was a Sunday accentuated the ominous quiet. All day in the sultry heat little knots of people gathered and dispersed; every horseman entering the city from the north attracted requests for war news. Across the street from the capitol in Mechanics Hall were the makeshift offices of the War Department. There Confederate officialdom assembled to wait out the suspense. The telegraph yielded nothing reliable. Secretary of War [Leroy] Walker damned his job and longed for action. The entire cabinet came and went, pacing and nervous. Howell Cobb, after sifting the fragmentary dispatches, announced that the battle at Manassas was a draw. Hot words followed, as men debated in complete ignorance. Night closed, and still the watch went on. Then Judah Benjamin burst into the hall with real news. . . . A telegram from the President had arrived [announcing a victory]. Thomas concludes, as did those Confederates in the wake of that significant first major battlefield success, “The Confederacy had committed its fate to battle and won. The Southern nation was at last a reality; the cause was triumphant .” Shades of Nation: Confederate Loyalties in Southeastern Virginia BRIAN S. WILLS 59 Of course, the battle of First Manassas, or Bull Run, was yet to be a “first,” either in the sense of a combat action taking place in the same relative geographical location or as evidence of the consummation of a national birth. Nevertheless the outcome of the fight seemed to confirm the revolutionary heritage of a people that proudly claimed ancestral rights to the Revolution of 776. Again Thomas captures the mood. “On the night of July 2, 86, the Confederate States of America was just about everything its founders had envisioned the Southern nation to be. In the minds of its citizens at least the Confederacy was the confirmed expression of Southern nationalism.”2 Advocates of the Confederacy may have been assured of its national existence , but over time some historians have been less so. Paul Escott has argued that even southern slaveholding planters, the very ones who had the most at stake in their new government, failed to sustain it.“This failure of Confederate nationalism,”he writes,“was inseparably linked to the class system of the Old South.”3 Others have argued that self-interest outweighed national interest among many Confederate southerners.4 But historians William Blair and Gary Gallagher have underscored Thomas ’s views on the emergence and importance of nationalism for supporters of the Confederacy. Blair explains the influence of Vietnam and independence movements upon historical thinking by noting, “A generation that treated nationalism more skeptically, if not cynically, found Confederate patriotism wanting.”5 More recently Gallagher devoted a chapter of The Confederate War to the topic.6 A growing body of work has dealt with the subject in one fashion or another, usually in an attempt to determine why women and men supported their “Cause” or, in the case of soldiers, risked their lives in combat for it. Clearly the existence and endurance of any meaningful sense of Confederate nationalism remains an open question. Were the matter left to the Confederate fathers, they could assert that they had performed every task that a people could require in order to claim nationhood legitimately. They established a constitution and a governmental structure , provisionally elected its leaders, created forces for its defense to which thousands of their countrymen responded by enrolling in them, opened diplomatic contacts with at least a portion of the outside world, and now risked their fates and that of their new nation on the battlefield. There is no way to prove or disprove whether white southerners as a general rule would have discarded their efforts at nation building and voluntarily rejoined the Union had there been no war. Certainly their historical willingness to sustain that effort 60 BRIAN S. WILLS in battle suggests that many of them took the idea of Confederate nationalism seriously enough to stake their lives upon it. In light of the ultimate failure of that experience...