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1A Religious Patriotism The Culture of Confederate Identity The Confederate nation appeared to be born fully formed, going from vague idea to reality over a matter of weeks. South Carolina seceded on 20 December 1860, followed rapidly by the six other lower South states. The Montgomery Convention met in February, drafted its permanent Constitution quickly, and by the summer of 1861 the provisional government was ensconced in Richmond. The Confederacy, for all of its shortcomings, did possess all of the necessary apparatus of government—an executive, a legislature , a judiciary, a treasury, a postal service, a state department. Most important, for the Confederacy had no real existence apart from war, it raised and kept an army in the field. These institutions may not have always functioned well, or efficiently—indeed in many cases they barely functioned at all—but they did exist.1 A state apparatus is important but does not a nation make: it alone does not ensure feelings of allegiance. But the new Confederacy did just that: almost from the moment of its creation, it inspired loyalty and commitment from its citizens. While there were Unionist minorities in every state, most Southern whites seemed willing, if not eager, to turn their back on the Union in favor of this new nation, and to do so with nary a backward glance. This was true not only of the fire-eaters who had been working for years to draw the South out of the Union but of conditional Unionists as well, of people who had done everything possible to avert secession.2 These new Confederates created a national culture in large part by drawing on the usable American past. But they also added a potent mix of fear and rage to it. The fear was of the end of slavery, couched often in the language of so-called black rule or race-mixing; the rage was against invading Yankees, demonized to the point of dehumanization. Confederates disseminated this culture largely through print—in particular through newspapers and journals—but also broadsides, songs, poems, and, of course, personal correspondence. Published words show the process of nation-building at work. Indeed, as Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Communities, it was precisely the emergence of newspapers that provided the unifying means to allow nationalism to flourish. By transmitting a uniform version of events and ideology, newspapers give readers the sense of belonging to a larger imagined community, be it regional or national.3 Nineteenth-century Americans were voracious consumers of news, and even people who did not themselves subscribe to a newspaper would borrow someone else’s copy, or perhaps have the news read to them. Thus newspapers reached and influenced even the illiterate. Depending on their individual editors’ proclivities, newspapers served as civics instructors, fostered party competition, provided household hints, and furnished readers with the latest poetry and serial fiction . A shared culture of print brought Americans together as a nation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; it would do the same for Confederates during the Civil War.4 Antebellum and Civil War–era Southern newspapers were largely creatures of their editors. The tradition of ‘‘personal journalism’’ that was fading away with the rise of the Northern penny press held firm below the MasonDixon line. Southern and Confederate newspapers tended to have smaller staffs and older presses and technology and to be more sectional and partisan in orientation than their Northern counterparts. They also suffered greatly during the war, from a lack of supplies and labor, as well as from occupation and destruction at the hands of the Union army.5 Prior to the war, Southern editors gathered much of their news through a process of exchanges with Northern papers. After the war began, that was no longer a viable option, although Confederate papers continued to exchange news and anecdotes with one another. Confederate editors began casting about for other sources of military news and attempted to form news-gathering consortiums—one in Richmond and one in Atlanta. Neither was particularly successful, and eventually the editors of the Confederacy’s forty-three daily papers met in Augusta, Georgia, in February 1863. This time they founded the Confederate Press Association and hired J. S. Thrasher to be the service’s superintendent. Thrasher worked tirelessly on behalf of the PA, as it was known, negotiating telegraph contracts, challenging military censorship, and trying to instill objectivity and nonpartisanship in his reporters . The PA proved quite successful at news-gathering...

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