A Consummation Devoutly to Be Wished For

Anne Sarah Rubin. A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 352 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95.

Here is a book likely to be set upon by the slings and arrows of modern historiography. "[C]ontrary to what we have thought," Anne Sarah Rubin writes in introducing A Shattered Nation, "the construction or creation of Confederate nationalism was not a difficult problem. The speed with which white Southerners, many of them staunch Unionists through the election of 1860, shed their American identity and picked up a sense of themselves as Confederates was startling" (p. 1). With that Rubin enters a debate studded with redoubts and entrenchments. A modern survey of the field might begin with Emory M. Thomas: "For four brief years Southerners took charge of their own destiny. In doing so they tested their institutions and sacred cows, found them wanting, and redefined them." Not so, comes the retort from Drew Gilpin Faust: Southern women tired of the war and eventually "undermined both objective and ideological foundations for the Confederate war effort; they directly subverted the South's military and economic effectiveness as well as civilian morale." Exactly right, say the authors of Why the Confederacy Lost the Civil War: "In basic terms, the Confederates lacked a feeling of oneness, that almost mystical sense of nationalism. They lacked a consensus on why they fought or what they stood for. The Confederate nation was created on paper, not in the hearts and minds of its would-be citizens." Wrong, says Gary W. Gallagher: "The Confederate populace waged a determined struggle for independence. No other segment of white American society has persisted in any endeavor so destructive of human and physical resources."¹

Such has been the way with Confederate nationalism. The argument has long since lost subtlety and nuance: to the blunting of professional categorization; to the infighting between social historians and military ones; to—if we are to be honest—ideological positioning on the memory, legacy, and importance of the Confederate experience. None are more aware of the latter than those who have been speaking daggers. "Any historian who argues that the Confederate people demonstrated robust devotion to their slave-based republic, possessed feelings of national community, and sacrificed more than any other segment of white society in United States history," Gallagher has written, "runs the risk of being labeled a neo-Confederate."²

A Shattered Nation is first and foremost an exploration of Confederate identity, not primarily an argument for the wartime strength of Confederate nationalism. Unfortunately, given the nature of the current debate, more than a few readers will invert or confuse those priorities for their own—without, one hopes, accusing Rubin of a neo-Confederate sensibility. There is none of that here, even as Rubin attempts to go beyond the traditional argument to explore the contours of what it meant to be Confederate: what forces shaped identity, challenged it, and were redefined in the crucible of the war and its aftermath. Rubin is not the first modern historian to take Confederate identity on its own terms—years ago Thomas attempted to develop a useable Confederate past—but she is the first one to offer a deepening of what heretofore have been exploratory or piecemeal explanations of it. Indeed A Shattered Nation is in some ways a synthesis of concepts and arguments and forces that to this point have been loosely or even tangentially applied to Confederate nationalism. David Potter and other theorists of nationalism and identity—Alon Confino, Richard Handler, and Benedict Anderson among others—provide her framework; through diligent and often imaginative research in primary sources, Rubin herself broadens our awareness of the various ways that identity was disseminated. Songs, newspapers, sermons, pamphlets, and schoolbooks created a public culture that was reflected and reinforced in more intimate, personal sources such as diaries and letters. "Confederates sustained their nationalism in...