Damn Yankees!: Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South by George C. Rable (review)

In a 1937 letter to the editor of the American Mercury, H.M. Morris praised Peveral H. Peake for his “fine” essay, “Why the South Hates Sherman,” applauding Peake’s article as a refreshing break from “sentimental slop like Gone With the Wind,” and Morris signed himself “A Damn Proud Damnyankee” (“Southern Inhospitality,” American Mercury, 167 [November 1937], 383).

In Damn Yankees!: Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South, historian George C. Rable seeks to understand the source, power, and longevity of this quintessential southern term that has fueled America’s great regional divide for generations. He has researched the letters of nearly two hundred soldiers and the private and public musings of about another two hundred politicians, ministers, newspaper editors, farmers and planters, women of different social classes and educational backgrounds, and African Americans. Grounded in this diverse source base, Rable concludes that the “pervasive...anti-Yankee invective” cut across “age, wealth, geography, and even ethnicity,” and its power “undoubtedly lengthened the war, shaped the course of Reconstruction, and left an enduring legacy” (pp. 5, 7).

Organized into six chapters, Damn Yankees!was inspired by Rable’s selection to deliver the 2014 Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History at Louisiana State University. Rable begins the book in early American history and carries the narrative through the early 1860s to show how white southerners came to see the North as a separate Yankee nation. Confederates insisted that northerners’ “money-grubbing” tendencies led them to become “rootless vagabonds in both an intellectual and geographical sense, men with little respect for tradition or place” (pp. 8, 9). Southern writers, Rable shows, insisted that Yankees, at their core, were a separate and inferior race of people over whom Confederates must rule to maintain American economic, political, and social stability.

That confidence allowed white southerners to enter the war assured of victory, and sustained that faith even in the face of defeats like at the battle of Gettysburg, after which staff officer Walter Taylor expressed his “contempt” for Yankees as a “miserable cowardly race” (p. 31). As northerners continued to fight, southerners’ definition of “damn Yankee” became more radicalized. Coupled with the increasing destructiveness of the war, southerners concluded that a northern victory required the extermination of white culture, of a white-dominant racial order, and of the white South as a whole. Rable argues that “[t]he combined effects of actual atrocities, official propaganda, and relentless rumors exacted a severe psychological toll” and buttressed white southerners’ determination to continue the fight (p. 74). Rable shows how this fear hardened Confederates to the point where North Carolina plantation mistress Catherine Edmondston admitted, “I rejoice when I hear of their [northerners’] slaughter by the thousands” (p. 102). In the end, Rable argues, the anti-Yankee tirades sustained white southerners’ resistance through Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century.

Rable’s decision to not “pay much attention to internal divisions among Confederates” leads to some tantalizingly unanswered questions (p. 4). Did Confederate bitterness and hatred of “damn Yankees” evolve as white southerners developed similar animosity toward their own government, which they blamed for inflation, food shortages, conscription, and martial law? Were internal divisions compounded by the reality that not all northern soldiers, when they arrived as an occupying force, were the barbarians of “damn Yankee” fame? Despite these critiques, Damn Yankees!is a masterful study of the complexity of Confederate perceptions of northerners that offers powerful insights into how white southerners viewed themselves and the culture they so desperately defended. Rable makes a powerful case that the concept of “damn Yankees” is essential to understanding the brutality of the Civil War and Confederates’ determination to rebuild and reclaim their antebellum power in postwar America.