Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South by Yael A. Sternhell (review)

This is not the book I anticipated, but it is, nonetheless, an interesting one. The book I want, and have long hoped someone would write, is an updated version of Mary Elizabeth Massey’s pioneering work on refugee life in the Confederacy. Yael A. Sternhell dispenses with that topic in fewer than a dozen pages. She is more interested in the movement of soldiers and slaves and what their peregrinations tell us about the nature of war and Confederate society. Where and why people traveled, Sternhell believes, can provide “a new understanding of how war is lived, how it is experienced by the human body, and how the most mundane action of going from one place to the other translates into complex processes of political change, social revolution, and the evolution of wartime culture” (8).

Sternhell describes and explains this world of movement in four precisely defined and well-structured chapters. She begins with the mobilization of the Confederacy, most specifically the movement of soldiers through the southern countryside. More than anything else, these men awakened people to the reality of a Confederate nation, she insists, and created during the first year of the war “the physical realization of Southern nationalism” (20). Her second chapter focuses on the images and impressions conveyed by marching armies as the war progressed. Advancing, confident, victorious armies bolstered the morale of the citizenry, while sick, hungry, or vanquished armies, not to mention roaming bands of stragglers, had quite the opposite effect. Either way, Sternhell stresses, “the centrality of military motion seeped from the realm of the corporeal to the cultural and symbolic” (91). Chapter 3 offers an equally complex picture of fugitive slaves, deserting soldiers, and white refugees. Chapter 4, while describing the final retreat, surrender, and dissolution of rebel armies, maintains that the capture of Jefferson Davis, who was tracked down and cornered like a fugitive slave, best represents the death throes of the Confederacy.

This is all good stuff, but despite Sternhell’s innovative thesis, her book can also be frustratingly problematic. She is very good, for instance, at pointing to similarities between the movements of black and white southerners. Fugitive slaves and army deserters were both escaping a type of slavery, she says, and both were pursued by the same Confederate authorities. The loss of both groups also denied the Confederacy its “most precious commodity,” the “labor of men” (124). But did southerners see such similarities, as Sternhell suggests, as a social revolution, “the ascent of black freedom and the descent, if only temporary, of white freedom,” or were they simply ironic, paradoxical, even coincidental consequences of war (128)? It may also be a stretch to compare, as she does, the “bondage” and “slavery” of white southerners—soldiers in the army or civilians facing restrictions on their movement—with the circumstances of fugitive slaves.

Sometimes her evidence for momentous change is simply too thin. For example, in her opening chapter, Sternhell resolutely asserts rather than proves that marching columns of Confederate soldiers became “the makers of Confederate nationhood” for the communities through which they passed (43). Then, too, the vast majority of her evidence comes from the eastern theater of war, which she curiously defines as the “heartland of the Confederate war” (8). The bulk of even that evidence is restricted to Virginia, and much of the book is devoted not so much to the implications or consequences of movement as to related issues. For instance, in exploring Confederate desertion, Sternhell offers extended discussions of its causes, types of furloughs, forged documents, and the means used to apprehend deserters. The guerrilla war, which not only uprooted families and whole communities but was also an extraordinarily fluid and mobile type of warfare, plays no role at all in her narrative.

In the end, movement as a means of understanding any war—and Sternhell does suggest its universal implacability...