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248 A Distinctively Southern Magazine  17  ALMOST CONTEMPORANEOUS WITH the beginning of Duke’s new career with the railroad was the beginning of his involvement with a new magazine called the Southern Bivouac. The Southern Bivouac’s antecedents can be traced back to the evening of February 7, 1879, when Duke and forty-seven other ex-Confederates formed the Kentucky chapter of the Southern Historical Society.The chapter elected Duke its first president and began to hold regular meetings on the third Tuesday of each month. It soon became customary to solicit guest speakers for the monthly meetings, but, by 1882, so many people wanted to present a paper or a speech to the chapter that it was impossible for all to be heard at the monthly meetings.This abundance of material prompted the idea that the chapter publish a journal in order to accommodate all proffered papers.The magazine was launched in August 1882, with the first issue scheduled for the following month.The Southern Bivouac soon expanded its range to include all kinds of articles of interest to the Confederate veteran. During the first year of the magazine’s existence, almost 80 percent of its articles concerned the western theater of the Civil War, with an emphasis on the common soldier.1 The magazine saw subscriptions start to increase with regularity soon after its inaugural issue. Its initial success may be attributable to its ability to attract readers north of the Ohio River, which the editors did by purposefully presenting a more conciliatory tone and engaging in less Yankee bashing than did other Southern publications .This did not mean that the magazine intended to abandon its Southern and Confederate roots. The editors continuously supported the Confederate soldier in his attempts to maintain the Southern tradition and even urged their readers not to sacrifice their regional identity for Yankee dollars. By the 1880s, Southern historians had embraced the notion of the Lost Cause with an almost religious fervor, and the Southern Bivouac, much like the Southern Historical Society Papers, contributed to this molding of the Confederate image.The notion of the Lost Cause resonates throughout the very first issue of the SouthernBivouac, where we find articles about Vicksburg A Distinctively Southern Magazine 249 and Appomattox stressing the overwhelming and growing strength of the federal army against which the hopelessly outmatched Confederates nonetheless continued to fight until there was no recourse but surrender.2 During the first thirty-four months of the magazine’s existence, Duke limited his involvement, serving only as a contributing writer. His debut in the Southern Bivouac came with “The Battle of Hartsville,” which appeared in the October 1883 second issue. The article is written in the same style as A History of Morgan’s Cavalry and grants Morgan similar accolades. However, in the form of a preamble to his depiction of the battle, Duke wrote of the Confederate retreat from Kentucky in the fall of 1862 in the best tradition of the Lost Cause, identifying it as the real turning point in the war: The war then became simply a comparison of national resources.The Northern people then learned their real strength. They found that bounties and the draft, and the black freedman, and importations from all the recruiting markets of the world would keep their armies full; and finding that success was but a matter of time, nothing could have made them again dependent. I have always believed that from this retreat,and not from Gettysburg, dates our death-stroke. All subsequent effort was but the dying agony of a grand cause and gallant people.3 It was not until over a year later that Duke followed the Hartsville article with a two-part series on the Battle of Shiloh. Measured by contemporary historiographic standards, “The Battle of Shiloh” can be easily criticized for its lack of detail. It must be remembered, however, that Duke was writing just as The War of the Rebellion, a compilation of the official records of both sides, had begun to appear . Duke’s sketch of the battle had originally been published, as Duke wrote, some time before in the Cincinnati Gazette and had also been sent to Confederate General Marcus Wright, who was collecting information to be used in compiling the official records. Included with Duke’s transmittal letter to Wright was a handdrawn map of the battle. The two parts of the article appeared in December 1883 and January 1884 and, consistent with Duke’s 1878 article...

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