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  • Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia
  • Larry M. Logue
Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia. By Aaron Sheehan-Dean (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2007) 291 pp. $34.95

Sheehan-Dean’s road may be the heavily traveled highway of Confederate nationalism, but his vehicle is distinctive. Most treatments of the subject take a nationwide perspective, but Sheehan-Dean has chosen to focus on wartime Virginia. The choice is eminently justifiable, not because Virginia typified the Confederacy but because on any number of measures, the state was the Confederates’ linchpin. The approach is also appealing because it allows detailed exploration of soldiers’ motivations and experiences in the context of military and political developments.

Studies of Confederate nationhood have developed their own consensus and conflict schools. Sheehan-Dean comes down squarely in the [End Page 453] former: class hostility and resentment of government policies notwithstanding, he finds an enduring commitment to the Confederacy, rooted in soldiers’ desire to defend their autonomy, their families, and slavery. He has little new to offer in his overall conclusion, but his intention is to contribute breadth and depth to other studies’ appreciation of Confederate nationalism.

To add breadth, Sheehan-Dean draws extensively on letters and diaries to illustrate the interlocking facets of soldiers’ motivation, particularly the devotion to protecting their families. A study that rests so heavily on testimony and limits its scope to one state would seem especially likely to address the methodological challenges inherent in such evidence. Guidance for this purpose exists: McPherson’s recent analysis of Confederates’ testimony acknowledges that extant letters and diaries overrepresent ideologically committed soldiers, and Murphey has proposed a test for idiosyncratic bias in written sources.1 Yet, Why Confederates Fought offers no discussion of these issues.

To add depth to his findings, Sheehan-Dean compiled quantitative data about enlistments and soldiers’ characteristics, the results of which run afoul of the concept of population at risk. First, using company-level enlistments to construct a numerator, Sheehan-Dean estimates that 89 percent of available men of military age joined Virginia’s units, a figure that constitutes an “important index of the willingness of Virginians to support the Confederacy” (3). The denominator for this calculation, however, is incompatible with the numerator. Adopting Confederate officials’ estimate of Union-occupied areas, the author used 80 percent of the state’s military-age population as his denominator, yet he included enlistments from counties comprising 94 percent of the population in the numerator. Using the same counties in numerator and denominator produces an enlistment rate of 75 percent, an impressive but less overwhelming level of Confederate support.

Sheehan-Dean’s finding about desertion is equally important to his argument. The author created a sample of nearly 1,000 Virginian soldiers, whose military records indicate that the number of desertions from the army peaked in 1862. On this basis, Sheehan-Dean asserts that “the longer the conflict extended in time, the less likely Virginia men were to leave the Confederate army” (3). Yet raw numbers say nothing about likelihood; again, we need the population at risk. As a rough guide, applying the ebb and flow of men present for duty in the Army of Northern Virginia to Sheehan-Dean’s sample results in an annualized desertion rate that remains essentially flat from 1861 to 1865. The author’s contention that “most” soldiers stood by their commitment may well be true, but desertion (and going awol) must be analyzed in light of an army [End Page 454] that continually changed through reorganization, death, disease, imprisonment, and absenteeism.

Sheehan-Dean’s intended project of illuminating a question of war and society is commendable. The outcome, however, is marred by missed opportunities to master the full range of demands imposed by evidence from the Civil War.

Larry M. Logue
Mississippi College

Footnotes

1. James M. McPherson, What They Fought For, 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1994), 14–18; Murray G. Murphey, “Nonresponse in Samples from Historical Populations: Observations on the Problem,” Social Science History, VIII (1984), 455–467.

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