Diehard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility (review)

This fine work will be of interest to Civil War historians, although it speaks most directly to broader issues of nineteenth-century Southern culture. Jason Phillips details what he terms the “culture of invincibility” among Confederate soldiers who stayed committed to the cause and fought to the bitter end. He does not enter the ongoing debate over why the Confederacy was defeated, however, and instead focuses on the reasons why so many Southern men fought with such determination against increasingly long odds. “Diehard Rebels,” he writes, “can tell us more about southern culture and warfare in general than about Confederate defeat” (p. 4). The sources of this resolve stretched back to antebellum Southern culture, and the consequences of diehard values extended into the twentieth century. Relying on diaries and letters, the study concentrates on the last two years of the war, when many lukewarm Confederates had already deserted or found other ways to stay out of combat. Certainly the first question for most readers will be how widespread were these sentiments among southern men by late 1863 or 1864. Phillips’s culture of invincibility applies only to a portion–albeit a large portion, he argues–of remaining Confederate troops; its impact on civilians is even less clear, particularly considering the defeatism on the home front that so many historians have emphasized.

In four thematic chapters, Phillips explains the elements of the diehards’ culture of invincibility. First, he notes that most Confederates believed their cause was blessed by God, a conviction so strong that many southern troops felt victory was inevitable. Evangelical Christianity also “sanctified hunger and want in the cause of patriotism” (p. 36), and periodic revivals re-energized the troops. Second, Confederate troops viewed Yankees as alternately “inept, inferior adversaries or evil, barbaric ones” (p. 41). In either case, Phillips notes, these images reinforced Southerners’ will to fight and belief in their own invincibility: Union numerical superiority would be countered by their incompetence, or God simply would not allow such vile people to win.

More groundbreaking are Phillips’s other chapters, which consider how soldiers’ perceptions of the war colored their reality and helped reinforce their belief in eventual victory. In their day-to-day lives, men’s spirits were lifted by thousands of dead Union soldiers they saw on the battlefields (evidence that multiplied grimly in the 1864 Virginia campaign), and the tens of thousands of their comrades who remained in the ranks. Even Generals Lee and Johnston, Phillips notes, did not believe just how big the Union armies were by the end of the war. Finally, Phillips makes an interesting case for studying rumor as a potent historical force. He follows the trail of gossip through the armies, relating how men repeated wild stories of Union collapse and European intervention. In short, Confederate diehards were unintentionally misled by their surroundings and their comrades into believing that victory was still inevitable; their faith in God’s blessing and Yankee ineptitude and venality, of course, made the rumors easier to believe.

In the final chapter and conclusion, Phillips follows his diehard rebels to the end of the war and into Reconstruction. They were convinced to the end, he argues, that they simply could not be defeated. Even more, the forces that sustained this myth endured to the surrender, and well beyond. “The central elements of the culture of invincibility–southern righteousness and northern barbarity–evolved into the Lost Cause” (p. 182). Rather than in postwar conditions, Phillips contends that this great Southern obsession had its roots in the diehards’ ideology and their postwar disappointments. Every diehard rebel came home un-humbled and “with a loaded pistol. He came home an unconquered loser, armed with wartime convictions that shaped his postwar identity, ideology, and actions” (p. 179). Phillips’s bold case for cultural continuity should contribute insightfully to that seemingly endless debate. And, like most good studies, Diehard Rebels will prompt as many questions...