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Introduction This book seeks to accomplish two main objectives. First, it serves to tell the story of North Carolinian David Schenck (1835–1902), whose extensive diaries have long been a wellspring of information for historians, yet whose biography has gone unwritten for far too long. Secondly, it uses Schenck’s diary, and a wide array of other sources, as a powerful new lens through which to examine and challenge widely held interpretations of broadly defined topics in Civil War and Southern history, such as who were the secessionists; what was the makeup of their Confederate identity; how did the secondary Confederate bureaucracy interact with the home front; and what were the connections between Confederate home front policies and the Ku Klux Klan. Schenck’s close involvement with the revolutionary States’ Rights Party of North Carolina, his service to the Confederacy as a receiver under the Act of Sequestration, and his involvement with the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction sheds new light on these and many other areas of Civil War, Reconstruction, and New South studies. His lifelong struggle to come to terms with his religion also raises important questions regarding the role of religion as a powerful component of that identity. Schenck’s story offers a fascinating glimpse at how powerful social and religious factors at work in antebellum North Carolina society enabled him to forge an enduring religio-political identity. Although often out of step with his fellow Tar Heels, Schenck relentlessly pursued his vision of an idealized Southern society even after the collapse of the Confederacy. In the end, Schenck fell well short of reaching his personal goals. His Confederate identity, which served him so well during the war and immediately after, fell out of vogue after Reconstruction and indeed would become a millstone around his neck, ruining his career politically. The story of David Schenck’s fall from grace is compelling and reveals much of the shifting currents in North Carolina society and politics in the years after Reconstruction. Scholarship on Confederate identity and religion in the Civil War South has emphasized the planter class and how evangelical Protestantism provided the metaphysical basis for its Confederate ideology. Much of Introduction x this work, however, does not adequately explain the convergence of religious manhood, class, and patriotism on the home front, particularly among the South’s small but emergent professional middle class.1 Those Southerners— often young lawyers, doctors, and merchants—were men whose social and economic interests developed alongside the plantation economy.2 Although members of the professional middle class were few in number, their strong religious convictions had a profound impact on the Confederate South. To be sure, many served in the Confederate armies and distinguished themselves on the battlefield. Others, however, stayed at home and served their country in other ways. Middle-class professionals who remained on the home front often served as secondary government officials, filling bureaucratic positions at the county, regional, and state levels. In their capacity as bureaucrats, they became the face of the Confederate government at the local level and were responsible for implementing the widely unpopular policies of the Davis administration. Middle-class professionals also constituted the bulk of respectable evangelical society in the antebellum South.3 Indeed, piety and irreproachable morals, they believed, were characteristics that helped distinguish them as a class. Donald G. Matthews has shown that “evangelical Protestantism in the Old South enabled a rising lower-middle / middle class to achieve identity and solidarity.”4 Strict adherence to evangelical ideals eventually distinguished middle-class whites from poor whites and, in terms of respectability , put them on an equal footing with the wealthy upper class. Schenck was a good example of this type of middle-class professional who served as a Confederate bureaucrat and whose Christian faith and zeal for the Confederate cause formed a single religio-political identity. The pages of his wartime diary reveal, however, that his patriotism and service in the Confederate bureaucracy represented more than simply his desire to contribute to Southern independence. They suggest that his devotion and service to the cause constitute the linchpin linking antebellum concepts of religion , manhood, class, and patriotism together into a single identity. His diary also suggests that he viewed Confederate nationalism as the key to social advancement and personal profit. Chapter 1 introduces Schenck, the environment in which he came of age, and the peculiar religio-political makeup of his Confederate identity. Born in 1835, David Schenck grew up in Lincoln County, North Carolina. In the...

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