Invisible Southerners: Ethnicity in the Civil War (review)

A P R I L 2 0 0 7 143 Touted by David H. Fischer and James M. McPherson as “the first fullscale book on the Freedom Riders by a professional historian” and as “truly a definitive work” (p. xi), it brings together virtually every facet of the activities undertaken or encountered by these self-sacrificing demonstrators . Arsenault traces the liberating power of nonviolence from the original “Journey of Reconciliation” in 1947 to the proclamation of “Freedom Riders’ Day” in Mississippi on November 10, 2001. This is a meticulous, all-encompassing study of the 1961 Freedom Riders and their subsequent efforts. It is a must-read for all students of America’s freedom movement. LEE E. WILLIAMS II University of Alabama in Huntsville Invisible Southerners: Ethnicity in the Civil War. By Anne J. Bailey. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. xvi, 95 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-8203-2757-3. Anne J. Bailey continues the tradition of the Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Lectures at Georgia Southern University and makes an excellent addition to the books in this series. Her subject is the much-neglected one of southern ethnicity in the Civil War. The three topics she focuses on in this volume are the roles of Germans, Native Americans, and African Americans in the war. She unfortunately decided to omit what she admits to be “the largest ethnic group” (pp. xv–xvi), the Irish, to focus instead on what she calls the “nontraditional [her emphasis] . . . soldiers who were not white males with roots stretching back to the British Isles” (p. xi). Despite the omission of the “largest” group, Bailey does give us a broader picture of participation in the war. She begins by looking at the Germans and counters some of the typical views held about them and the Civil War. Most Germans who lived in the United States in 1860 had opinions similar to their native-born neighbors. Those who lived in the North supported the Union; those in the South, the Confederacy. Very few German immigrants were refugees of the liberal 1848 revolutions in Europe, a group typically characterized as Union sympathizers. Rather, Bailey believes, pro-Union Germans in the South saw secession as “a threat to political stability and much too close to what had happened in their own country in 1848” (p. 11). Thus it was for conservative rather than radical reasons that they supported the federal government. T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 144 In Texas, however, the German response was more complicated. In this Confederate state, Germans were more likely to be neutral or support the Union “based on the very real need to keep the federal army in place rather than any concern over the institution of slavery” (p. 7). This ambiguity toward the Confederacy caused many problems for Texas Germans, including harassment, executions, and a long-lasting reputation for disloyalty . Nonetheless, Bailey highlights that the Civil War experience did nothing to deter the German presence in Texas and indeed, “between 1865 and the early 1890s, more German-speaking people immigrated to Texas than in the three decades prior to the war” (p. 22). Bailey’s chapter on Native Americans also refines the common notions about their Civil War experience. She notes that tribes on the frontier took advantage of the distraction of the war to increase their power there. This strategy, rather than any Confederate sympathy, explains their poor relationship with the federal government between 1861 and 1865. Bailey next concentrates on the stances of the “civilized” tribes in the Indian Territories, later the state of Oklahoma. The Confederacy made the greatest efforts at alliances here and achieved some success. But there were many divisions among the Native Americans within the territories. Chief John Ross, for example, allied the Cherokees with the Confederate states. He was a reluctant ally, however, more disappointed with the federal government than enthused with the Confederacy. Ultimately, the lack of Confederate nationalism did nothing to mitigate federal interference after the war. The last chapter, “In the Cause of Freedom: Southern Blacks in a Northern Army,” is the weakest of the three. To be...