The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (33 page)

Public rhetoric and national symbols continually played upon the theme of the Confederacy as lineal descendant of the American revolutionary process. Some of this national self-image was propaganda and self-delusion designed to identify the new Southern nation with a sacred heritage and establish innocence by association. Yet, for the most part, Southerners genuinely believed that the two revolutions were comparable. Both sought separation and home rule; in each, the aim was liberation, not conquest.

Significantly, however, as the Confederacy acquired a history, Southerners began to depend less upon historical precedents and experience shared with their enemies and more upon a past which was exclusively Southern. The transition was subtle and essentially unconscious. After two years, the Confederacy had little history in terms of time, but the events of those two years were many and cataclysmic. The cause had come alive and survived; Confederate Southerners began thinking of their revolution as
sui generis
instead of a repetition of the experience of 1776.
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The pressure of time and the pace of events did not permit extended contemplation and sage debate by learned men about the nature of the Confederate experience. And, as might be expected, there was no universal agreement about the essence of the Confederate revolution.

George Fitzhugh, for example, believed the Confederacy to be a counterrevolution, a correction of the liberal and democratic excesses of the American Revolution. In 1776, Fitzhugh argued, the American colonials “weaned” themselves from “Mother England,” a simple and necessary biological process. “The Revolution of ‘76 was, in its action, an exceedingly natural and conservative affair,” wrote Fitzhugh; “it was only the false and unnecessary theories invoked to justify it, that were radical, agrarian, and anarchical…. We now come to the Southern Revolution of 1861, which we maintain was reactionary and conservative—a rolling back of the excesses of the Reformation—of Reformation run mad—a solemn protest against the doctrines of natural liberty, human equality and the social contract, as taught by Locke and the American sages of 1776, and an equally solemn protest against the doctrines of Adam Smith, Franklin, Say, Tom Paine and the rest of the infidel political economists who maintain that the world is too much governed.”
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Among those who perceived the Confederacy as a liberal expression and an extension of the original American Revolution, perhaps Jefferson Davis was most representative. Particularly in his speeches and messages of 1863, 1864, and 1865, Davis represented the Confederacy as an expression of national self-determination. Liberty and independence were his most often-used themes; his precedents were more often “the long and bloody war in which your country is engaged,” “the history of our young Confederacy,” or “a review of our history during the two years of our national existence” than any reference to the American Revolution.
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In stressing liberty and independence as war aims in the Confederate revolution, Davis never clearly answered the questions “Liberty for whom?” and “Independence for what?” The fact that neither he nor any other Confederate, for that matter, could or did define very precisely the nature of the Confederate revolution was some index of the fluidity which characterized the experience. Most Confederate Southerners had neither the time nor the inclination to pursue philosophical speculations as did Fitzhugh. Most, like Davis, perceived their struggle as simply involving Southern self-determination. In this struggle they acted out, worked out in deeds, their new national character. Significantly, though, that national character grew to become more Confederate than Southern, and the process of forming and refining their nation and fighting their war for national survival created a Confederate identity. In 1861 the cause was status quo and its embodiment George Washington; by 1863 the cause had become self-determination and its hero Stonewall Jackson.

Perhaps it was no more than natural that Confederate Southerners during wartime altered their aspirations from the passive conservation of the ante-bellum status quo to the active assertion of independence. And perhaps it was also natural that during the course of the bloodiest war ever fought in the Western hemisphere, the Southern status quo underwent a metamorphosis. But that metamorphosis was important because in the process of striving for independence, the Confederates acquired a new corporate identity. No better indication of the alteration of Southerners’ personal self-concept existed than the apotheosis of Stonewall Jackson.

In 1861 Southerners believed that they were heirs of the cavalier tradition. However much reality denied the cavalier myth, the fact that it was believed in made the chivalric model important.
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Stonewall Jackson was the antithesis of much that Southerners believed about themselves. Among a people who aspired individually to the role of landed aristocrats, Jackson had been a poor boy and an eccentric college professor. Among a romantic people who prized their individualism and venerated the chivalric code, Jackson had been a grim Calvinist drillmaster who subscribed to the laws of Jehovah and Mars.
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Yet in 1863, “Tom Fool,” “Old Blue Light,” “Old Jack,” “Stonewall” Jackson was a war hero in the supposed struggle for cavalier values.

Some of the modifications of the Southern self-concept were obvious. The organization necessary to armies and the war government necessarily circumscribed Southerners’ vaunted individualism. Confederate soldiers and bureaucrats were still individuals and still prized their assertion of self, to the exasperation of their officers and government, but the discipline inherent in the organization of mass armies and the regimentation involved in governmental functions such as conscription, taxation, martial law, and impressment set some limits on the sphere within which Southerners could exercise their individuality.

Wartime dispelled some of the Southerners’ provincialism as well. Farm boys who visited barber shops for the first time and Texans who fought in Virginia might not have qualified as cosmopolites, but surely the war experience broadened the horizons of many Southerners, and the reality of battle quickly disposed of naïve notions like “one Southerner can lick ten Yankees” and “Yankees are pasty-faced clerks.”

Obviously the war experience confirmed Southerners’ traditional hedonism. Away from the restraints of family and community, soldiers in Southern armies acted like soldiers, and because the war effort had the side effect of enlarging Southern cities, Confederate urbanités took advantage of urban anonymity and opportunities for self-indulgence. No less obviously the violent strain in Southern character fed upon the corporate violence of war.
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The most profound change in the Southern self-image though, involved the romantic role hitherto prescribed for Southern women. The belle had ever been more ideal than reality in Southern life, but like its male counterpart, the cavalier, popular acceptance had given substance to myth.
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Even in 1863 and after, Confederate press and periodicals honored the ideal Southern belle on her pedestal, but Confederate reality denied both the validity and the value of woman as object and ornament.

In the beginning Southern women and girls served the cause in traditional ways. They were civilian recruiting officers for the army, shaming and inspiring men into military service by withholding or offering their affections. Once their men were off to war, Southern women vied with each other in knitting and sewing for the troops.
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As the government matured and the war continued beyond the parade and picnic state, a few women played exceptional roles. In the place-mongering of the new government, women were significant parlor and dinner party politicians. Women disguised as men served as soldiers, and disguised as women served as spies for Southern commanders. None of these activities were extraordinary, although some of the women involved certainly were. Women had sent men into battle before and knitted socks and gloves before, and there were precedents for women being influential in politics and spying in wartime, and precendents for women fighting in wars. Confederate press and society did, however, pay attention and homage to some of these extraordinary women. Belle Boyd, for example, was in 1861 a plain-looking young woman of modest means and social station; in recognition of her daring success as a spy, however, she was “belle of the ball” in Richmond during 1862.
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Clearly the Confederate experience offered women traditional wartime roles and afforded a few women opportunity to win fame and deference by successfully usurping male roles. Such circumstances are interesting but not too unusual.

What was unusual and significant in Confederate womanhood occurred so quietly and gradually as to escape much attention at the time. Attended by little drama and less fanfare, Confederate women climbed down from their romantic pedestals and began making or extending inroads into activities traditionally dominated by males. By default on the part of absent males and by initiative on the part of the females involved, Confederate women became among other things farmers, planters, nurses, and industrial workers; and in many circumstances they became heads of households.
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The vast majority of Confederate soldiers came from among the “plain-folk” farmer class of the South. When these men volunteered or submitted to conscription, many of them left women at home to tend their farms, and by necessity these women became farmers. Most did not enjoy their additional responsibilities; managing crops and livestock in addition to managing the household was not exactly a liberating experience. For example, Georgian Mary Brooks wrote her husband that she was “so tired for I never get any rest night or day, and I don’t think I will last much longer, but I will try to write to you as long as you stay there, if I can raise a pen.”
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Tired or not, however, Mary Brooks and women in similar circumstances expanded their experience and maintained their families on the home front.

On larger farms and plantations, women left at home while male members of the family were away at war were spared some of the physical labor of their less well-to-do neighbors. Yet many planters’ wives had to assume the responsibility for managing their plantations and the slaves. Some had the assistance of overseers or male members of the family too old or too young for military service. Nevertheless plantation women, as well as farm women, often bore the ultimate responsibility for their households. And they bore this responsibility under wartime conditions in which scarcities and the threat of military occupation or raiding added to the normal burdens of management.
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More burdened still were those women who undertook the life of refugees. For example, when her home fell behind enemy lines, Mrs. Roger A. Pryor lived in a hovel near Petersburg, Virginia, while her husband was in the army.
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Mrs. Judith McGuire, whose husband was a doctor, studied to pass an arithmetic examination in order to work as a clerk in the commissary general’s office in Richmond. Before she found regular employment, Mrs. McGuire and other transient women made soap to sell at a dollar per pound.
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In these and hundreds of instances, women had to bear more responsibility and expand their skills to cope with the hardships which the war imposed upon them and their families.

Wartime also afforded Confederate women opportunities for employment in tasks which heretofore had been open only to males. The Treasury Department, for example, hired women as clerks, and when the department transferred part of its activities from Richmond to Columbia, South Carolina, the women migrated too.
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Confederate war industries employed women as factory workers whenever possible in order to release men for military service,
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and women served the cause by nursing the wounded.

In traditional roles as wives and mothers, Southern women had always cared for sick and wounded men. Confederate women made the transition to caring for strangers and contributed with their sisters from the North to making nursing a profession. At first Southern physicians were extremely reluctant to expose women to the indelicacies of suffering and dying. The experience of several mass bloodlettings, however, demonstrated the need for female assistance, and by 1862 military regulations called for hospital matrons to take charge of each ward in government hospitals. In addition women administered and operated many of the private and state hospitals as well as taking wounded soldiers into their homes under emergency circumstances.
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The Southern women who plowed the fields and bore the responsibilities for absent men did not much enjoy their wartime roles, and probably few refugees, government employees, or nurses perceived their daily activities to be especially liberating; yet in terms of roles and models, Confederate women took a giant step away from the romantic ideal of the Southern belle. If the ante-bellum ideal of woman was only a mild corruption of the ideal of courtly love—woman as virtuous ornament and unapproachable object—the Confederate ideal was considerably more earthy. Perhaps the model Confederate female was a red-eyed nurse with unkempt hair or a war widow who succeeded as head of her household by force of will. The ante-bellum ideal of woman was one to which many aspired but few approached; significant numbers of women did attain the Confederate ideal. At least, most women in the South responded in previously un-Southern ways to the challenges of war on the home front.
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Elsewhere on the home front the Confederate period did not seem to have inspired much in the way of culture and creativity. The great romantic flood of “lost-cause” literature had to wait for the cause to be lost; the war period itself seems to have been too brief, frenzied, and violent for much depth or innovation in Southern cultural life.

This is not to suggest that Confederate Southerners became wartime drones; they did not. Those who read books continued to do so during the war, and theaters and concert halls did a brisk business among the soliders and those who felt obliged to entertain their defenders. In the main, however, public taste was banal, and Confederates sought release and reinforcement rather than challenge from the arts. Theater companies performed Shakespeare, but minstrel shows were more popular. Patriotic airs such as “Beauregard’s March” and romantic ballads such as “Lorena” were imensely popular at the time but have survived only because of their association with a people at war.
Les Misérables
was probably the Confederate best seller, but native Southern literati were conspicuously unproductive during the war years. Confederate poetry and painting, too, were excessively romantic and include no masterpieces. And, as might be expected, schools and colleges during the war either closed or counted only a few young boys among the student bodies.
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