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  • The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion
  • James Marten
The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion. By Peter S. Carmichael. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. 343. Cloth $39.95.)

Not many historians of the Civil War era open their books by quoting Mick Jagger, but Peter Carmichael begins The Last Generation with a passage from "Mother's Little Helper": "Kids are different today, I hear every mother say." The title refers to the supposed reliance of 1960s housewives' on tranquilizers, but the song is a metaphor for that decade's generational struggles.

A different but equally deep philosophical divide developed between the male Virginians growing up in the late 1840s and 1850s and the current generation of state leaders. As college and university students and young men on the eve of the Civil War, they challenged the cautious nature of their elders and combined a form of muscular Christianity with a faith in the beneficial effects of sturdy ambition and a confidence in the market economy to form a progressive vision of a future in which Virginia would regain its former glory. This "eclectic outfit" of ideologies, as Carmichael calls it, led them by the winter of 1860–61 to become the most ardent secessionists in the Old Dominion (9). They did so, Carmichael argues, not because they were radicals or because they were obsessed with protecting the institution of slavery but because they believed the previous generation had squandered Virginia's vast natural resources and frittered away the state's political and moral leadership within the United States. The war, they believed, would awaken Virginia from its doldrums and provide an opportunity for their generation to take their rightful places as leaders in their state and communities. [End Page 323]

This fascinating book creatively tackles a number of old chestnuts in the historiography of the Civil War era: the late-blooming Southern nationalism in the Upper South, the role of slavery in Southern ideology and morale, and the postwar reunion between the North and the South. Carmichael provides valuable reinterpretations of Southern religion and honor, and suggests at least a partial answer to the old question as to why common soldiers in the Confederate army stuck it out for so long: their lieutenants and captains—members of Carmichael's "last generation"—shared their sacrifices, inspired them with their piety and apparently sincere concern for the men in their commands, and negotiated compromises that maintained both the men's pride and military discipline.

This is generally a very effective and solidly written book. Carmichael deploys the words of the last generation—artfully gleaned from school essays and speeches, lecture notes, and university literary magazines, as well as more traditional sources—to wonderful effect. But there are a few problems. Carmichael does not adequately explain why Virginia youth and young men should be singled out. What makes them a cohort worth studying? Many of their attitudes, it seems, could have been prominent among young bucks in Tennessee, North Carolina, or any other long-settled region in the South where the generation in charge had grown complacent. Moreover, the notion of intergenerational conflict that underlies the book did not, Carmichael claims, translate into direct conflict between fathers and sons, but that fails to ring true. The testy but respectful exchange between Richard Hobson Bagby and his father, briefly described early in the book, shows how close to the surface such disputes must have been.

The last generation eventually did, of course, come to power in their state, although Carmichael was unable to trace the thoughts and actions of the men in his sample much past the end of the war. That is perhaps the most serious problem in this very good book: the failure to explore, beyond a few references to the last generation's responses to reconstruction immediately after the war and one or two veterans' comments on reunion, how they dealt with defeat, peace, and their own inevitable decline. We learn much about what this generation hated about the Virginia of their youth; we know very little about the Virginia they shaped as adults. Carmichael focuses almost exclusively...

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