Confederates against the Confederacy: Essays on Leadership and Loyalty (review)

Jon L. Wakelyn clearly stands as an authority on Southern opponents of the Confederacy having previously published numerous books on that government's supporters as well as detractors. This book represents Wakelyn's compilation of seven essays that investigate why some initial Confederate leaders later turned against their government. It should be noted that the author previously published three of these essays, though they appear here in either updated or revised forms.

Three of the book's seven chapters take a single-figure approach. In Chapter 1, Wakelyn terms the "lifelong secessionist" James Henry Hammond of South Carolina as being part of "the group of planter leaders who claimed out of duty to be part of the Confederacy, but who never really had faith in it. He was one of the wealthy conservative planters who opposed the Confederacy" having become "obsessed with its inefficiency and oppressive behavior" (11). Henry Stuart Foote of Mississippi, the subject of Chapter 4, is portrayed as turning against the Confederacy once the Federal government took control of Tennessee and the Mississippi River. Having "joined the Confederacy to protect this western slave society," Foote no longer was willing to support it (75). Finally, in Chapter 6, Wakelyn uses the example of the famous diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut of South Carolina to explain the role that gossip and rumor played in dividing the Confederate leadership.

Four other chapters of this book use groups rather than individuals to explain why Confederates turned against the Confederacy. Chapter 2 highlights the role of "Reluctant Confederates," those individuals in both the Lower and Upper South who, Wakelyn contends, "insisted on their loyalty but actually harmed the Confederacy" (14).

Chapter 3, which features a most insightful collective biography of the speakers of the Confederate state legislatures, asks why such leaders were unable "both to prescribe adequate legislation to sustain military defense and to persuade the citizenry to sacrifice for the homeland" (38). Wakelyn finds that these men's "localist worldview" caused them to be concerned with "protection of community interests against national encroachment" rather than committed supporters of the national government. The leadership of the Southern Episcopal Church, the focus of Chapter 5, reveals why "All these church leaders supported the Confederacy, but in different ways and for different reason during the war, some of them became less than whole-heartedly loyal to the Confederacy" (78). Wakelyn identifies how three branches of this church differed over "hierarchical authority, diocesan autonomy, and sermon-centered versus communion-centered liturgy" (81) and how these divisions influenced the degree of support each faction continued to give to the Confederacy. In Chapter 7 Wakelyn concludes his study by discussing the role played by Lower and Upper South Unionists and Secessionists who joined the Confederacy. This group was not only composed of such residents of the Upper South as William C. Rives of Virginia and William A. Graham of North Carolina, but also, according to Wakelyn, such Lower South leaders as John A. Campbell and William R. Smith of Alabama, Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, and Louis T. Wigfall of Texas.

Wakelyn's offers convincing evidence that the Confederates who turned against the Confederacy were not radicals, but rather "conservative at their core" (151). He finds that they were strong supporters of a slave society. Indeed, it was their concern that the Confederacy was not successfully protecting that society that turned most of them against their national government: "Those Confederates opposed the Confederacy because of the political contradictions in slavery itself and the Confederate States of America's inability to protect slave society" (151).

Wakelyn's broad strokes may cause some readers to find a lack of clarity as to what actually defined Confederate's disloyalty to the Confederacy. Is "loyalty" an absolute "term" or is Wakelyn correct in noting that some of these men's "loyalty ebbed and flowed over time and from place to place" (xiii)? Since only a few of these leaders ever reached the...