Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas

Introduction

IN JANUARY 86, AS THE UNION CRUMBLED AROUND HIM, PRES. James Buchanan turned in exasperation to Sen. Robert Toombs of Georgia. “Good God, Mr.Toombs,”the president exclaimed,“do you mean that I am in the midst of a revolution?”“Yes, sir,” the senator replied. “More than that, you have been there for a year and have not yet found it out.” If indeed this “revolution” had been a long time in coming, it was only in early 86 that it took tangible—and for many others, like the hapless Buchanan , recognizable—form. In February representatives from seven southern states created the Confederate States of America.They elected their own president , drafted a constitution, and formed a provisional government. Although the United States of America refused to recognize the legitimacy of this new government, for all intents and purposes, the South had created a nation. Of course,the CSA’s existence soon proved to be an embattled and short-lived one. Since its demise,many have tried to understand why the Confederacy failed and why the South lost the war; others have wondered how the CSA lasted as long as it did. Historians have pondered whether an identifiable “nationalism ” or unique sense of corporeal identity existed among white southerners. Still others have argued that there was no real nationalism; instead localism, states’ rights, and political dissent displaced, indeed subverted, any enduring loyalty to the South’s central government. By the same token scholars have debated whether and in what ways the transformations brought on by secession and the formation of a nation were indeed “revolutionary”either in intent or in practice.2 Introduction JOHN C. INSCOE AND LESLEY J. GORDON  Emory M. Thomas was one of the first to enter this important debate in 97 with his book The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, followed by a more complete study in 979, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865.3 While both works recognize Confederate nationalism as a shared worldview held by a majority of white southerners, Thomas argues that southern secession, nation building, and armed conflict entirely transformed “the very way of life they had seceded to defend.”4 Formed to preserve the “status quo,”the warring Confederacy found itself revolutionizing many basic aspects of southern culture. The result was a more centralized, more industrialized, more socialized, and even less patriarchal society than had ever existed before 86. War proved revolutionary , though when faced with the most radical change of all, abolishing slavery, Confederates balked. In the end, though, much of the dramatic change wrought by the war proved temporary. More than a quarter century after the publication of Thomas’s seminal books, the debate about Confederate nationalism has not subsided. There continues to be a great fascination with the southern experiment of nation building. Scholars continue to contest the very definition of southern nationalism .5 Over the past twenty years, we have learned far more about ordinary people’s wartime experience—soldiers and civilians, blacks and whites, men and women, loyal and disloyal—and about how those experiences, individually and collectively, shaped both the perceptions of and allegiances toward the new nation under whose jurisdiction southerners found themselves living and for whose survival they were forced to sacrifice.6 Yet there is still a good deal to discover about what the southern nation meant—or failed to mean—to familial relationships, political affiliations, and individual identities. This collection of essays by Emory Thomas’s students, friends, and colleagues is an attempt to further explore the place of southerners within the Confederacy and how they came to see themselves and others differently because of the new nation within which they suddenly found themselves. With much of the focus here on individuals, on households, on communities, and on particular regions of the South, we can begin to appreciate the sheer variety of circumstances southerners faced over the course of the sectional crisis and the war and how they chose to respond to—or merely to cope with—the difficult realities of life in the Confederacy. These variables influenced public as well as private matters, so diplomats, policymakers, journalists , and soldiers—high and low—also figure prominently in these essays. From secession through defeat, self- and local interests often collided with 2 JOHN C. INSCOE AND LESLEY J. GORDON the larger objectives of that nation, and many of the essays that follow reveal...