The Enigmatic South: Toward Civil War and Its Legacies ed. by Adam Wesley Dean (review)

The declared purpose of the original essays collected in The Enigmatic South: Toward Civil War and Its Legacies is to honor the career of the eminent southern historian William J. Cooper Jr. Cooper’s scholarship spans subjects from the politics of slavery in the antebellum South to race, class, education, the South’s intellectual climate, the course of the Confederacy during the Civil War, and the development of the New South. This is a vast field to play on, and editor Samuel C. Hyde Jr. faces a considerable challenge in presenting a unifying theme across the collection. Nevertheless, each of the nine essayists manages to explore scholarly interests central to Cooper’s career and simultaneously challenge a number of preconceptions about the South in unique ways.

The first essay by Christopher Childers examines the hardening of old Republican proslavery politics in the aftermath of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Childers argues that the Missouri Compromise served both as a warning to the proslavery South and as a source of deep regret in subsequent decades. As Childers explains, the compromise did far more than simply postpone the sectional crisis; it motivated proslavery southerners to refine and articulate the legal, intellectual, and political foundations for the South’s defense of the peculiar institution even as it soured the relationship between the sections.

Sarah L. Hyde explores education in the antebellum Gulf South, exploding common misconceptions that the South disdained formal education for its young people. She refreshingly finds that Deep South states like Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida promoted schools with state funds and that home schooling and private education were robust and more widely accessible than historians are apt to admit. She also examines the success of public schools in New Orleans and their influence on the educational systems of other states. Continuing the collection’s focus on the Deep South, Julia Huston Nguyen’s essay evaluates the role of antebellum New Orleans clergy in preaching proslavery politics and secession. Nguyen finds that the public reaction to New Orleans preachers’ efforts to blur the lines between theology and politics drew a mixed reaction, even from advocates of secession. Nguyen emphasizes that clergy in New Orleans did not push the city into war, but they still played an important role in making secession seem morally palatable to their congregations.

George C. Rable evaluates the uneasiness that Confederates felt toward Ohio Democratic politician Clement L. Vallandigham. Rable finds that while white southerners appreciated the leader of the Copperhead faction’s efforts to undermine the Union war effort, they were divided about Vallandigham’s aim of ending the war with reunion rather than southern independence. Paul F. Paskoff tackles questions of class and military service in Civil War Mississippi through rigorous quantitative analysis, and he finds that nearly two-thirds of young, upper-class Mississippi men served in combat roles. Paskoff also finds that almost 93 percent of University of Mississippi graduates served in the Confederate armies, and he makes a convincing case that the war was not “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight” (p. 110). John M. Sacher defends Jefferson Davis’s wartime policies on a variety of issues, from states’ rights to conscription and mobilization. Sacher’s essay, like the others in the collection, systematically challenges conventional historical wisdom, and his portrait of Davis as an adept manager prone to occasional political malapropisms is compelling, if not altogether persuasive.

The essays in the final part begin with Richard Follett’s evaluation of Louisiana’s efforts to transition into the new realities of a postwar economy through the lens of the state’s sugar reports, which were written by businessman and publisher Pierre Champomier. Follett argues that Champomier’s efforts to evaluate and promote Louisiana’s business interests provide modern observers with insight into...