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E MORY T HOM AS H AR B OR S A C ON F E DE RAT E I M AG I N AT ION . Locating the past in the present, his sensibility is rooted in his birthplace—an a priori understanding that combines with his lifelong academic inquiry into the southern way of life.This is not to invoke any such miasma of geographical determinism as advanced by U. B. Phillips and others; instead we offer it as a complement to Thomas’s credentials, as understood by William Faulkner. In Absalom, Absalom! Quentin Compson answers his northern roommate’s question about living “among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves.” Compson’s explanation that to understand the South “you would have to be born there” reflects the interplay of nature and nurture that informs human knowledge.2 Emory Morton Thomas was born “there” in Richmond, Virginia, on November 3, 939, at a time when the numbers of defeated grandfathers and freed slaves had been notably reduced, though they still existed. Too young to remember the World War II years but certainly aware that the United States dominated the global order in the 950s, Thomas tried to understand the signi ficance of the memorials to the Confederate dead along the avenues and around the White House of the Confederacy in downtown Richmond. His patriotic allegiance to the United States confronted the fact of his being a white Virginian. Trying to define himself, Thomas got hooked on the newspaper editorials and radio broadcasts of Douglas Southall Freeman, who had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 935 for his four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee.Thomas clearly recalled Freeman’s “5-minute radio program at 8:00 Emory M.Thomas and the Confederate Imagination RUSSELL DUNCAN AND JENNIFER LUND SMITH I first saw the photograph during a visit to the Library of Congress. . . . Because the army to which the young man belonged surrendered only one week after his death, no one can convince me that his death was anything but meaningless. . . . [T]his particular picture affected me immediately and has haunted me since. Recently I visited the place where the young Confederate soldier died. Maybe it was morbid curiosity; I hope it was more than that. I would like to think it was respect for the young man’s life and life itself that made me want to see where he died. Whatever the reason I went to the Petersburg National Battlefield Park. EMORY M. THOMAS, Travels to Hallowed Ground  in the morning, sort of a commentary on the day’s events, and as far as I knew, everybody in Richmond . . . listened to Dr. Freeman at 8:00 in the morning. And only when Dr. Freeman was through . . . did I pack up my little books and trundle on off to Ginter Park Elementary School or Chandler Junior High School.”3 In a way Freeman symbolized an undefeated grandfather who wrote about Marse Robert, Superstar.Thomas readily admitted that, though he could not know it at the time, Freeman became “a constant in my life.”4 In 958 Thomas enrolled at the University of Virginia and pragmatically, if unimaginatively, decided on his major for the completely understandable reason of having made “an A in history.”5 He confessed to going to UVA not only “to get an undergraduate education, but also to play football. . . . I really wanted to be a football coach for a good portion of my adolescent and post-adolescent years.”6 Playing both offensive guard and linebacker for the Cavaliers, who lost twenty-eight straight games during Thomas’s four-year tenure on the team—a school record—invited comparisons to military marches, flank attacks, defeat, the good fight, manhood, loss despite home-field advantages, and of being overrun by superior strength and numbers. Even the team mascot, the Cavalier, brought the myth of southern gallants to the gridiron. Reflecting later on the battle of First Manassas,Thomas wrote of the folly of such comparisons: “But this was no game and all analogies that link war to athletic contests are dangerous . Men died here. And those who survived did not shuffle off to locker rooms, take showers, and then meet wives or girl friends.”7 One month before the October 962 Cuban Missile Crisis,Thomas moved with his new bride, Fran, to Houston, where he entered the Ph.D. program in history at Rice University. Finally outgrowing his desire to coach football, he...

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