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

In this provocative new book, James Broomall argues that the emotional lives of Confederates mattered to the history of the Civil War era. The book's framing cuts across historical periodization and follows a group of Southern men from the antebellum period through the Civil War and into the period of Reconstruction. As such, the narrative tracks a group of slave-holding, highly literate, and largely elite Southerners, mostly from the Upper South and coastal South. The focus permits a history of "the external expression of emotion and an examination of thoughts and feelings that reveal Confederates' inner experiences" (3).

The book begins in the antebellum period. Broomall considers diaries and hunting as a way to understand the limited range of options for interiority, juxtaposed with a more traditionally masculine demonstration. The author notes that "Southern culture demanded self-control and emotional moderation" in men's public expression of emotions (18). Once they became soldiers, however, these same Southerners created new kinds of domestic intimacy through encampments and in the smaller messes of four to six soldiers. These close quarters yielded men whose fellow soldiers became their primary emotional attachments. Subsequently, the experience of battle challenged Confederate soldiers to process emotions using the antebellum tools available to them, which proved insufficient. Emotional suppression, exhibited in a "flexible masculinity," emerges as the typical means for the Confederate soldier to handle the physical perils of battle (7).

The author traces the "emotional depletion" among Confederates during military demobilization after Lee's surrender at Appomattox (99). The confusion and violence that resulted that spring laid the emotional groundwork for white reprisal in the years ahead. The initial years of Reconstruction further dysregulated the emotional lives of Confederates, but, as Broomall notes, as they transitioned from soldiers to veterans, they also created "both formal and informal veterans' communities [that] marked a legacy of civil war and a reshaping of Southern masculinity" (129). Some antebellum values, such as paternalism, persisted, while new kinds of emotional expression now flourished in letters, rather than exclusively in the confessional diaries of earlier times. Throughout the period, the reconstruction of Southern manhood, or, more properly, of their interior lives, was taking place. In addition, Broomall's rendering of the postwar period counters Gerald F. Linderman's chronology of a "hibernation" (1865–1880) and "revival" (post-1880) in "martial matters" (189).

Perhaps the most intriguing case study concerns the Ku Klux Klan—a "white brotherhood" dedicated to "paramilitary violence" (131). Broomall places emotions at the heart of the Klan, noting the "fear, anxiety, confusion, and anger" that animated its members (137). Here race more fully enters the story of white male interiority. Broomall provides an emotional history of Klansmen, not so much privileging their private thoughts as reading their actions within a context of masculine and racial hierarchies emerging in the Reconstruction South. As before, the emphasis on the emotional helps to round out a fuller picture of white Southerners as they reacted to the difficulties imposed by military occupation.

Given the book's relatively narrow geographic lens and focus on a small group of actors, the question of representativeness inevitably follows. At the outset, Broomall notes that the "sources underpinning this study and the men and women examined herein limit the book's claims," yet he also argues for the "exceptional importance of slaveholding Confederates as vital to the understanding of war and peace in the American South" (6). Of course, selection of evidence is a longstanding methodological problem within studies of soldiers on both sides of the conflict. While this approach aims to split the middle, at times the evidence may not quite meet the full breadth of the claims presented.

On the whole, James Broomall has written an erudite work of scholarship, equally versed in a range of extant sources and the historiographic debates that continue...