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  • “We Are a Band of Brothers”Manhood and Community in Confederate Camps and Beyond
  • James J. Broomall (bio)

Years after the conclusion of the American Civil War, former Confederate artillerist Carlton McCarthy fondly recalled “the cheerful, happy scenes of the camp-fire.” The military encampment, he continued, served as the soldier’s “home, his place of rest, where he met with good companionship.” These vignettes of soldier life formed the substance of McCarthy’s 1882 work, Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861–1865. At first blush, it is tempting to dismiss such claims as postwar propaganda or reified memories. His portrait of camp life offers scant mention of the monotony and dangers soldiers experienced, and his book often reads like a Lost Cause editorial deifying Confederate soldiers and vilifying African Americans.1 His description of fraternity, however, deserves further scrutiny, for it undermines a prevailing notion of white southern men’s fierce independence and also reflects a common, albeit neglected, thread woven throughout Confederate soldiers’ wartime correspondence and diaries. Although time and political agenda distorted both McCarthy’s memory and his portrait of Confederate service, his focus on soldiers’ fraternity aligns with the broader tenor of many veterans’ private wartime and postwar writings, reflecting men’s continued engagement with the Civil War’s transformative power.2 [End Page 270]

This essay seeks to explore the nature of personal relationships among Confederates, as witnessed especially in the intimate setting of military encampments. By so doing, it illuminates links between gender and emotion and reveals how military service during the Civil War altered men’s interactions with and perceptions of one another, forming bonds that endured into the postwar era. War caused men to feel levels of emotionality and vulnerability previously deemed the exclusive domain of women.3 Soldiering thus promoted a shift in attitudes, perceptions, and emotional dispositions among men. Mustered into regiments, drilled in formations, and encamped in small communities, Confederates gradually related to and interacted with each other in new ways. Many soldiers came to believe they had shared a unique life in service to their unsuccessful country, forever binding them to other veterans. They became a band of brothers.4 [End Page 271]

Yet, were soldiers’ reactions grounded more in distant respect than deep devotion? An earlier generation of historians characterized southern white men as individualistic and self-determined. Men defined their public personas through an aggressive defense of reputation or shaped their personal identities through the subordination of slaves and family.5 As Confederate soldiers, men who were independent and competitive felt little kinship with their fellows. Elements of this argument continue into the present; indeed, even an otherwise sensitive portrait of southern manhood recently contended that Confederates “kept each other at a distance; that was the point.”6 Alone and strong-willed, the Confederate soldier truly embodied the image of the rebel. Such characterizations become even more striking if Johnny Reb is juxtaposed with Billy Yank. Historian David Blight observes that Union soldiers, like generations of men before and after them, found “love and respect for each other more readily in warlike activities than in civilian pursuits.” Transformed by the routines [End Page 272] of army life and embedded in a temporary community of men, these soldiers developed their own rituals and domestic relations.7

Building on a rich body of scholarship that has explored the emotions and imaginations of southern men, this essay argues that military camaraderie and the camp’s social space encouraged intimacy among Confederate soldiers, thereby fostering emotional connections born of the crisis of war.8 These affinities were built around soldier communities, intimately entwined male groups that experienced the trials of combat and campaign. Yet, camp life also created contradictions in their military lives as men were forced together for protracted periods under great duress. These tensions tested the limits of soldiers’ bonds. Rather than adhering to a rigid type of masculinity, Confederate soldiers came to embrace a flexible, pliable model that encouraged mutual dependence but also retained elements of antebellum independence.9 Confederates’ varied manifestations of manhood aligned with broader nineteenth-century norms in which men embraced and exhibited a wide sweep of masculine...

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