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

Inside the Confederate Nation contains a wide variety of essays recognizing the tremendous impact of the two works for which historian Emory Thomas is best known: The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (1970) and The Confederate Nation (1979). The contributors include some of the most respected names in the field and many of the authors taught with, studied under, or collaborated with Thomas during his almost four-decade career at the University of Georgia before his retirement in 2002. Editors Lesley Gordon and John Inscoe (who also contribute essays to the work) gathered pieces that simultaneously embrace and update Thomas's argument that in the process of fighting their revolution, Confederates witnessed an upheaval of the cultural traditions they hoped to defend. It resulted in, as editors Gordon and Inscoe aptly explain, "a more centralized, more industrialized, more socialized, and even less patriarchal society than had ever existed before 1861" (p. 2).

The greatest strength of this book is the editors' decision to embrace the textures within the Confederate nation, its citizens' disparate and changing understanding of nationalism, how it affected them, and their evolving responses to it. The chapters, in turn, reflect this broad, complex experience. Some contributions offer a sweeping analysis, such as Rod Andrew's examination of Georgia during the congressional elections of 1863, while other chapters focus on individuals, small communities, or groups like the Confederate medical officers Glenna Schroeder-Lein studies in the postwar period. Many of the pieces blend a variety of fields, such as Joe Glatthaar's outstanding analysis of the medical care (or lack thereof) received by African-American troops in the Union Army. Similarly, Lesley Gordon's combination of gender and military history reveal the impact of the war on a southern couple's understanding of and faith in the Confederacy. James McPherson addresses the Clausewitzian link between politics and war by examining the impact of the Antietam Campaign on the efforts of Union and Confederate diplomats in Britain and France. Keith Bohannon offers a brilliantly researched piece that explains how, even as late as 1864, Confederate volunteers in the Army of Tennessee maintained their faith in the Confederate cause. John Inscoe examines similar motivations and responses, in this case those of elite North Carolina women responding to Union General George Stoneman's cavalry raids in 1865. These are only a few examples of the broad range of issues addressed in the nineteen essays contained in this collection.

The editors do a superb job of organizing the essays so that every chapter comes back to the issue of how southerners understood the Confederacy as a nation, how they adapted to the evolving demands that nation made on them, and how the war changed them and the traditions they so desperately fought to preserve. Professors teaching courses that relate to the U.S. Civil War, Southern history, U.S. military history, and nineteenth-century America will find this work an excellent addition to their syllabi. Inside the Confederate Nation has joined Emory Thomas's own classic works as an essential starting point for any study of the Confederacy.