Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South

“And Bid Him Bear a Patriot’s Part”: National and Local Perspectives on Confederate Nationalism

126 “And Bid Him Bear a Patriot’s Part” National and Local Perspectives on Confederate Nationalism orville vernon burton and ian binnington Hail, lone and lovely Star! thy rays Shall kindle in each Texan heart, Once more the old heroic blaze. And bid him bear a Patriot’s part —Edgefield Advertiser, February 19, 1862 Albert Padgett, sixteen years old in 1860, opposed secession. Padgett , a native of Edgefield District, South Carolina, was attending Dickinson College in Pennsylvania when South Carolina seceded. As a college student, he wrote of the men who advocated it that they, “as Milton expresses it—‘Had rather rule in Hell, Than serve in Heaven,’” and they “ought never to be favored by the true Southerner.” His attitude changed just a few months later, however, when war came. He returned to South Carolina and transferred to his denominational (Methodist) college , Wofford, in Spartanburg District. He joined many of his classmates in the “Spartan Rifles” and marched with them to Virginia. After his initial duty, Padgett re-enlisted. Yet, at the same time that his Confederate national sentiment was growing, he chose to move his enlistment closer to home. He joined an Edgefield company known as the Saluda Riflemen, of the Seventh South Carolina regiment, “to be with his neighbors.”1 Even National and Local Perspectives on Confederate Nationalism 127 though his home district of Edgefield was less than sixty miles from Spartanburg , his growing sense of Confederate nationalism did not diminish his preference to be with a company even more closely associated with his local identity. Both local affiliation and national vision worked within Albert Padgett, as they did with so many other Confederate southerners. On September 17, 1862, Corporal Padgett, fighting beside his friends, relatives, and neighbors at Sharpsburg, was shot while aiding a fallen comrade . As the Confederate army retreated into Virginia, Padgett was left behind with other wounded. Eighteen years old, he died on January 3, 1863, and was buried far from Edgefield and South Carolina in Mount Olivet Cemetery, Frederick City, Maryland. After news of his death reached them, the Saluda Riflemen published a “Tribute of Respect” to young Padgett in the Edgefield Advertiser. The student who had once opposed secession was now a martyr. Padgett “died like a Christian hero, worthy of the great cause in which he was engaged.” Padgett’s death, explained his comrades, “can have no other effect than to alienate our affections towards the invaders and sow deep in our bosoms an undying hatred.” His death invited others “to the banquet of blood prepared by Lincoln and his fiendish Cabinet for the brave defenders of our home to pour out, as a sort of panacea for all our heart-burning and desire for revenge in this our struggle for National Liberty.”2 For Edgefield, in death and memory Albert Padgett became a symbol of Confederate nationalism. While historians of the South and the Civil War have discussed the question of Confederate nationalism, many of their studies have concentrated on the role of nationalism in Confederate defeat. With exemplary scholarship historians have shown how states’ rights and pervasive localism sowed the seeds of defeat—seeds that could not sprout into the strong Confederate nationalism needed to win the Civil War. Historians have often jumped to the end of the story, though, using loss of popular will and military defeat as the lens through which to assess Confederate nationalism.3 In so doing, they have tended to underemphasize the extraordinarily rich theoretical literature on nationalism. Instead, Confederate nationalism and nationalism studies generally need to be reintegrated , so that we may fully realize Drew Faust’s suggestion that we take Confederate nationalism “on its own terms” and examine it as an attempt “to represent Southern culture to the world at large, to history, and perhaps most revealingly to its own people.”4 128 orville vernon burton and ian binnington Historians have debated when the South, in opposition to the nonSouth , was created; the words South, Southrons, and Southerners were meaningful and common terms long before the firing on Fort Sumter, before a Confederate state existed. Yet allegiance to the “South” over and above allegiance to a local community was not predominant.5 Before the Civil War, according to William Freehling, “if asked to describe his primary allegiance to others,” a southerner “would not likely have said that he was above all an American or a Southerner or a South...