Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South (review)

Since Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, it has become commonplace among scholars and students to understand nationalism not as a static phenomenon rooted in the biology of a regional group but as a dynamically creative and discursive process. It can be strong or weak, last a lifetime or, in the case of the Confederate States of America, collapse within a few years. Michael Bernath’s Confederate Minds offers a look inside the inner workings of nationalism through the short-lived Confederacy.

The Confederacy would not be sustained without the guidance of its cultural architects. Even though most Confederate intellectuals believed that a successful and healthy nation stemmed from the character of a distinct people, a typical view in the nineteenth-century mind, the nation could not survive without considerable nurturing. Although lacking the “cultural prerequisites for true nationhood,” Southern nationalists were, nonetheless, “determined to write and publish their own books, periodicals, and textbooks, train their own teachers, and educate their own children” (1).

An “intellectual call to arms,” writes Bernath, followed on the heels of the martial call to arms in 1861. Confederate nationalists began their work by severing all dependency on northern culture producers. To do this, they needed to concentrate on the “cornerstone,” to borrow from Vice-President Alexander Stephens, of their civilization: slavery. Popular literary magazines like De Bow’s Review, Southern Literary Messenger, and the Southern Presbyterian focused on how the “entire Confederate nationalist project was fundamentally and unapologetically rooted in the preservation of slavery and the white racial order it upheld” (103). Interestingly, discussions of states’ rights were “scaled back dramatically” (104). This, of course, makes sense since, as historians like Eric Foner point out, the South believed in slavery, not in the sovereignty of the individual states. Slavery, southerners believed, was the source of a God-ordained social order. Opposition to the sanctions of scripture vis-à-vis slavery inevitably led to immorality, infidelity, and, worse, atheism. This was, Bernath writes, “the most serious charge leveled against northern periodical literature” (63).

To establish an independent culture of their own, Confederate nationalists moved into a variety of areas. They extolled the greatest of southern “literary lights” such as Augusta Evans, August Baldwin Longstreet, and James Thornwell, to name a few. They likewise relied on the direction of educators like Calvin Henderson Wiley and the “heroic” historical works of Edward A. Pollard and Robert Howison. The high point of the South’s cultural independence came in the years between 1862 and 1864—a period that evidenced the “crystallization of Confederate nationality” (153). Literary journals and magazines including the Southern Illustrated News, the first illustrated newspaper, and Joseph Addison Turner’s The Countryman, led the way.

Much to the dismay of committed Confederate intellectuals, such cultural nation building came to a swift end in the closing years of the war. But nationalists did not give up. Instead, they changed their strategy. The Confederate revolution “would be left to future Confederates” who would complete the work started by the war generation. This is one of the most indispensible aspects of the Bernath’s study. Readers must not confuse the Lost Cause as a seamless continuation of Confederate cultural nationalism. The Lost Cause, while maintaining “clear carryovers,” was something different: a romantic call back to a white-dominated South.

Bernath’s study is a must read for those interested in southern culture-making during the Civil War era, but questions are left unanswered. For instance, much of the book deals with elite or upper-level culture producers. How did this relate to the cultural activity of those from the bottom? How did the collapse of slavery undermine or restructure the cultural process? Such questions in no way lessen the importance of Bernath’s history, especially how seriously it takes the sheer determination of Confederate idealists.