To Live and Die in Dixie: Native Northerners Who Fought for the Confederacy by David Ross Zimring (review)

According to David Ross Zimring, at least 350,000 native northerners lived in the South in 1860. His book examines a sample of 303 of these “adoptive southerners”—those who came of age in the north and moved south as adults—in order to understand how many of them came to support secession and the Confederacy. Using statistical data and manuscript materials pertaining to this sample, Zimring makes a convincing case for the importance of studying this portion of the southern population. Adoptive southerners, he argues, reveal the “malleability of sectional identities” (4) in the antebellum United States. In this way, the book supports other studies that have proven the difficulty of imposing a rigid regional binary on American identity. These northern transplants contributed to civic life, championed secession, and held important leadership roles in the Confederacy. Adoptive southerners’ “cross-sectional experiences,” Zimring argues, uniquely influenced secession and “subsequent Confederate nationalism” (13).

In ten chapters, Zimring contextualizes the journeys of adoptive southerners as they moved South, assimilated (or not) into southern society, reacted to slavery, chose sides in the sectional crisis, fought in the Civil War, and navigated hardening postwar regional and political boundaries. The decision of native northerners to move south, he argues, mirrored the journeys of “restless Americans determined to spread across the continent” in pursuit of economic improvement. For these emigrants, the Mason-Dixon line did not pose a cultural barrier preventing assimilation. Many single northerners married into rich and well-connected southern families and became civic leaders such as college presidents and elected officials. In evaluating these northerners’ acculturation, Zimring highlights the “language of transitioned identity” in both private and public writings, where authors used personal pronouns (e.g., “our own fellow citizens”) to demonstrate allegiance to their “adopted states” and southerner identity (53).

Significantly, Zimring demonstrates that historians have wrongly characterized northern emigrants as antislavery. Many emigrants adopted a proslavery ideology as part of their search for economic stability and community acceptance. Those who ultimately supported secession did so for many of the same reasons as southern secessionists: to protect their marriages, property, financial interests, honor, and reputation. Thus, Zimring argues, “Reasons stemming from conviction, including ideology and identification with the South and the Confederacy, meant that adoptive southerners supported the Confederacy voluntarily and with passion, rather than under compulsion” (101). Of Zimring’s sample of northern confederates, 10 percent ranked high in the military; four northerners served in the Confederate Congress. In a strong chapter on Civil War prisons, Zimring shows that many of these northern Confederates refused to relinquish their adoptive identities, even when family members tried to bring captured northern Confederates back to the Union. Northern Confederates who survived the war often “rededicated themselves” to the South and “thrived” (268).

The book’s originality rests on its demographic analysis rather than its arguments about sectional identity and Confederate nationalism. It comes as no surprise, for instance, that adoptive southerners viewed themselves in terms of their local, state, and national identities; this was typical for both northerners and southerners. Nevertheless, Zimring largely ignores diversity among white southerners, including their varying opinions about slavery, secession, and nationalism. White southerners lurk in the narrative’s background, approvingly evaluating newcomers based on rigid slaveholding ideals and customs. Consequently, Zimring does not probe deeper questions about why and how Confederate nationalism developed out of antebellum sectionalism.

The demographic focus limits Zimring’s ability to investigate with greater rigor the nuances of the social, cultural, and intellectual world emigrants entered and presumably transformed. Imprecise language often detracts from the strength of his analyses of sources, as well. For instance, the terms “and/or” and “etc.” appear excessively, such as when Zimring writes, “these northern-born men and women would have referred to the South with a tone of distance, curiosity, awe, and/or contempt.” As a result...