Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers by James J. Broomall (review)

In Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers, James J. Broomall takes readers into the emotional worlds of white southern men who were raised in the antebellum South, fought and lived through the Civil War, and confronted its consequences. Broomall “seeks to understand how the American Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction affected the personal lives, emotional expressions, and gender identities of white Southern men” (p. 2). In the process, he identifies “models of expression white Southerners employed to understand and convey personal change, civil war, and social reconstruction” (p. 154).

Confederate men, Broomall argues, were raised in an antebellum society with strict expectations for white male public personas; men simultaneously suppressed their emotions publicly and conveyed them privately. When these men became soldiers, their sense of independent, self-directed manhood conflicted with the authoritarian nature of military service; they were confounded by the altered material culture of camp life; and their expectations of glorious battlefield sacrifices were destroyed by battle’s deadly realities. Struggling to comprehend war, these men formed “emotional communities composed of fellow soldiers” upon whom they relied for support (p. 2). War’s end brought an array of raw emotions, ranging from relief to rage to depression, and returning soldiers embraced different models of manhood as they reentered civilian society. Some men returned to their prewar occupations and “practiced a restrained manliness” centered on the household (p. 107). Other veterans transformed “the martial manhood and soldier communities forged in civil war . . . into tools to suppress freed peoples through paramilitary organizations and the Ku Klux Klan” (p. 7). Civil war, Broomall argues, “changed Southern men, altered their familial and personal relationships, and widened their means of self-expression” (p. 154).

In keeping with recent trends in periodization, Private Confederacies traces cultural change from the 1840s through the 1870s. It joins a growing literature that reexamines ordinary soldiers’ experiences, such as Peter S. Carmichael’s recent book The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies (Chapel Hill, 2018), and is part of a historiographical move to understand the emotional underpinnings and experiences of the sectional crisis, seen in, for example, Stephen W. Berry’s All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (New York, 2003) and Michael E. Woods’s Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (New York, 2014). Private Confederacies is organized both chronologically and thematically, tracing men’s transitions from antebellum civilians to soldiers to veteran civilians. It begins with a chapter that describes the antebellum emotional landscapes of white southern men before turning to chapters that consider men’s experiences of becoming soldiers, battle, demobilization, reconstruction, and the extralegal violence of the Reconstruction era.

Private Confederacies focuses on the Army of Northern Virginia, drawing primarily on diaries, letters, and memoirs written by members of slaveholding families who documented their experiences and emotions. Broomall acknowledges that this study does not portray a representative sample of “typical” soldiers but rather embraces “the exceptional importance of slaveholding Confederates as vital to the understanding of war and peace in the American South” (p. 6). Although Private Confederacies privileges individuals’ stories, Broomall illustrates broader patterns in white southern culture by exploring the dialectic between men’s public and private experiences. His identification of models of emotional expression and use of history of emotions methodologies help open future lines of historical inquiry that transcend this particular study’s class and geographic limits.

One of the book’s most important contributions is its consideration of emotions’ role after defeat and during Reconstruction on both public and private scales. For example, Private Confederacies makes a compelling case for considering gender and emotions in efforts to understand the Ku Klux Klan, showing...