Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty

INTRODUCTION

1 The seeds of this short book lie in my examination of Stephen Dodson Ramseur as a case study in the development of officers in the Army of Northern Virginia. I undertook that military biography more than thirty years ago, tracing the young North Carolinian’s rise from lieutenant to major general in just more than three years. In the course of reading Ramseur’s voluminous correspondence , I was impressed with the intensity of his commitment to the Confederacy. Following graduation from West Point and less than a year in the U.S. Army, he resigned well before his home state of North Carolina seceded, behavior that contrasted sharply with Robert E. Lee’s well-known struggle to chart a path during the secession crisis. Turning his back on the United States seemed an easy choice for Ramseur, and his willingness to do so despite uncertainty about North Carolina’s political course struck me as notable. His conception of loyalty permitted an easy transition from one national identity to another, which, I thought, must have been true of other southern officers as well. With Ramseur and Lee in mind, I thought it might be worth revisiting the subject of loyalty at some point.1 My work on Ramseur came at a time when scholars were debating fundamental questions relating to the Confederacy. The slaveholding republic lasted just four years but has cast a large shadow over a good part of U.S. history. Its stormy trajectory witnessed massive human and material loss, the end of the institution of slavery , and the development of a stream of historical memory that retained force for many decades after Lee’s soldiers stacked arms at Appomattox in April 1865. Yet many historians have questioned whether the Confederacy was really a nation at all, arguing that its white population never developed true feelings of national loyalty. 2 Introduction That model surely did not fit Ramseur, I knew, and probably not Lee either.2 Reading and research over the next two decades have persuaded me of four things that help frame the chapters of this book. First, I believe the Confederacy was a nation. I consider references to a war between the North and the South to be fundamentally flawed because four southern states—Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware—never left the Union, and a big section of the most important slaveholding state broke away to form West Virginia in the midst of war. It is most accurate to think of the conflict as a contest between two mid-nineteenth-century nation-states—the United States versus the Confederacy. One of the two nations, whose entire history unfolded against a background of all-encompassing warfare , simply did not last very long. My second belief is that a substantial majority of the Confederacy ’s white residents developed a strong national identity. Only these people should be called Confederates. I oppose the terms “northerner” and “southerner” to describe the opposing populations . The term “southerner” embraces all white and black residents of the fifteen slaveholding states in 1860, millions of whom, including the overwhelming majority of African Americans, would not have considered themselves Confederates. Among white residents of the eleven Confederate states, however, support for the nation ran deep, although establishing exact percentages of those who supported or opposed the Confederacy—or those who merely sought to remain aloof and unharmed until fighting ceased—is impossible. Despite undeniable evidence of substantial internal opposition to Jefferson Davis’s administration and the war, one fact stands out: only a citizenry determined to achieve independence would have waged a conflict lasting four years, killing one in four of their white military-age males, and inflicting widespread economic and social dislocation.3 My third framing observation is that mainline military forces represented the most important institutional expression of the Confederate nation. Composed of regiments with strong state identi- fications, the national armies—and, most important, Lee’s Army Introduction 3 of Northern Virginia—provided tangible and highly visible proof of a collective identity that both united and transcended region, state, and locality. Well before the war’s midpoint, Lee and his army functioned much as George Washington and the Continental Army had during the American Revolution. Lee became easily the most important Confederate leader, and hopes for success rested ever more heavily on the campaigns he and his soldiers waged. As a Confederate officer observed...