Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil War

5. To “Surpass All the Knighthood of Romance”: Soldiers as Paragons of Confederate Nationalism

5 To“SurpassAlltheKnighthoodofRomance” Soldiers as Paragons of Confederate Nationalism In the nature of things, . . . among a people begirt by enemies . . . there is a deeper pathos, a loftier poetry in the incidents of yesterday’s battle-field than belong to the most tuneful measures, while Jack Morgan and Jeb Stuart surpass all the knighthood of romance. Southern Illustrated News (1862) We have made the point repeatedly that, had the Confederacy in some way prevailed in the war, the foundation had been laid for the development of a mature Confederate nationalism. Although the nation it created had a longer timeframe with which to work than did the Confederacy , the United States that emerged out of the Revolutionary War, and particularly the figure of General George Washington, provides an earlier example of a similar phenomenon. Don Higginbotham argues that Washington self-consciously capitalized on his wartime emergence as “the most visible and meaningful sign of American cohesion throughout the independence struggle,” and that “nation-building had been his mission as early as 1776.” Higginbotham concludes, “In this case, a man who, like the hedgehog, knew one big thing, and that was national unity.”1 Unlike his later Confederate peers, Washington had the advantages of victory in his war for independence, time to establish a nation, and purpose. It is not unreasonable, however, to suppose that Robert E. Lee may have emerged in the aftermath of a Confederate victory to fulfill a somewhat analogous role. In a more expansive study, Sarah Purcell argues that “military memory, especially memory of the Revolutionary War, is really at the heart of American national identity.” She suggests that “by focusing confederate visions 116 on a few central heroic figures, martyrs like Joseph Warren, Americans looked beyond the immediate battlefield and created remarkable symbols of patriotism which they thought to be worthy of remembrance and commemoration.”2 As we shall see, if you switch the name Joseph Warren for that of Stonewall Jackson, you have a remarkably similar phenomenon occurring in the Confederacy. The living Washington and the dead Warren served to cement a particular vision of national unity and sacrifice in the imagination of Americans in the 1770s and 1780s. In like manner, the living Lee and the dead Jackson instilled ideas of a mythic present of a Confederate America in the minds of white Confederates during the war years. This latter instance occurred at a much accelerated pace, as the Revolutionary War lasted some six years to the Civil War’s four, and of course the insurgents won in the former case and thus had the postbellum time and space necessary to build a national polity, which the Confederates did not. As the ever ebullient Joseph Addison Turner put it from his plantation in rural Georgia, a few months from the end of the war, We love the south still, and are determined, if fate so ordains it, to die by her. . . . But die, the South will not. . . . The darkness which surrounds her, will break, and roll away: and . . . she will stand forth in her might, and the nations shall know, and feel her power. This will be so, if the sons of the south will be but true to her. Many of them must bite, as many have bitten the dust. . . . But by and by, peace will come with healing in her wings, and with earth’s immortal sons shall be written the names Lee, and Beauregard, and Jackson, and Johnston, and Forrest, and Hood, and thousands of others, as brave, though not as distinguished as they.3 For Turner, as for any who remained loyal to the Confederacy and its goals, those heroes of the battlefield were all that kept the blue-clad wolf from the door. Yet Turner’s words contain the implication of a divide between the project of nationalism and the project of nation. By January 1865, it seems rather unlikely that Turner believed the Confederacy would win the war, but he did believe that “the South . . . will stand forth in her might.” As we noted in the introduction, five months later, in May 1865, Turner remained convinced that Confederate nationalism could survive, even if the Confederate nation had not. Given the relative victory of the South during Reconstruction, it is hard to argue that it did to “surpass all the knighthood of romance” 117 not, albeit in a very different manner than that seen after the American Revolution. On...