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  • Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas
  • Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas. Edited by Lesley J. Gordon and John C. Inscoe. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 381.)

This collection of essays honoring Civil War historian Emory Thomas reflects the topical range of his scholarship and social impact of his career. The book includes essays by former students, departmental colleagues, and fellow Civil War historians, an unusually broad assembly for a Festschrift. The themes that unite the essays–nationalism, gender, race, and memory–demonstrate the capaciousness with which Thomas approached his study of the war, and that he imparted to students and friends alike. Because of the brevity of these essays (most around twenty pages with notes), they are not all persuasive, but the strongest pieces in the collection build upon the central issues of Thomas's most important works on the Confederacy: the relationship between the state and nation and the proper way to characterize the Confederate experience and its legacy.

As the volume's editors make clear, Thomas's writings put him firmly on the side of those who argue for change instead of continuity in southern history. For Thomas, the Civil War represented a fundamental disruption in southern life, evinced principally in the changes wrought upon state structure and policies. The essays here reinforce that interpretation, stressing the novel and unpredictable changes that war-making wrought upon southern life. David McGee and Brian Wills convey the early character of those changes in evaluations of North Carolina and Virginia respectively. Their essays, like Keith Bohannon's on reenlistments in the Army of Tennessee, stress the effectiveness of the Confederate and state governments at reorganizing their societies to wage war. Phillip Dillard's study of responses to the effort to enlist slaves in Confederate armies demonstrates that decisive policy shifts could produce divisions within the South, as Virginians endorsed and Texans rejected the policy of arming bondsmen. Essays by Frank Byrne, [End Page 114] Rod Andrew, and Christopher Phillips offer finer-grained studies of exactly what constituted the new Confederate identity. Byrne's exploration of the writings of D. R. Hundley and John B. Jones reveals the centrality of race and religion. Andrew's insightful analysis of the 1863 congressional elections in Georgia reveals the depth of pro-nationalistic thinking alongside a vigorous anti-Jefferson Davis movement. Phillips's essay chronicles the postwar repudiation of Unionist identity in Kentucky and Missouri where white citizens, angry over wartime emancipation, reattached themselves to a southern identity that was itself born from the Confederate experience.

A quartet of essays by Jean Friedman, Lesley Gordon, Jennifer Gross, and John Inscoe demonstrate the profitability of investigating nationalism from the ground up. In particular, these essays reveal that men and women formed their associations to the Confederacy through their relationships with one another. Friedman's and Gordon's essays show how individuals worked out their attitudes toward the war, their region, and their government through give-and-take within their families. Gross and Inscoe uncover the tensions within the Confederacy, exploring the problem of state aid for widows and orphans and public reactions to Stoneman's 1865 raid in western North Carolina. Class concerns intersected with gender in unusual ways during the war, and both scholars demonstrate that poorer southern women pushed back against the efforts of social elites to define the policies and memories of the postwar South.

A final series of essays, including pieces by Joseph Glatthaar, Clarence Mohr, Thomas Dyer, and Nina Silber show the difficulty of characterizing the Confederacy in the postwar period. Glatthaar and Mohr both focus on the ambivalence of Union efforts to use black men during the war. Dyer shows the unpredictable landscape that greeted African Americans in the South after the war. Silber's essay explores how Charles Francis Adams glorified the image of Robert E. Lee after the war as a way to argue against the greed, violence, and rapaciousness that characterized late-nineteenth-century America. The prospect of a New Englander using the memory of a "southern gentleman" to challenge the vigorous nationalism of the rising American...

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