Disaffection, persistence, and nation: Some directions in recent scholarship on the confederacy

Civil War History

Volumn 55, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 329-353

  Gallagher, Gary W ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

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EID: 77949581537     PISSN: 00098078     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (132)

1. The Confederate Nation were published in 1979 (New York: Harper and Row)
2. and The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience and 1971 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall) respectively. The Confederate Nation was part of the New American Nation series.
3. Thomas, Confederate Nation, 298-99, 306. Thomas was indebted to other scholars who considered the Confederacy a nation that inspired obvious devotion among many of its citizens.
4. See, for example, Charles P. Roland, The Confederacy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960),
5. and Frank E. Vandiver (Thomas's mentor at Rice Univ.), Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy (New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1970). "Elaboration upon the Confederacy's weaknesses has often obscured her formidable strength," writes Roland, adding: "The Confederacy was born of an authentic Southern urge for independence . . . lived briefly and in bitter tribulation . . . [and] was destroyed by an authentic Northern urge to retain the Union" (194-95).
6. David Williams, Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War (New York: New Press, 2008), 1-2, 5, 241.
7. Review of David Williams's Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War, Publisher's Weekly 255 (June 23, 2008): 47. Blurbs on the jacket typically claim much for the book. Howard Zinn predictably applauds the class-based analysis, claiming that it "demolishes, with powerful documentation, the myth of a united Confederacy"; Lee W. Formwalt finds Williams's "evidence from nearly every corner of the South" decisive in proving "the Lost Cause was lost before it ever began."
8. Bitterly Divided draws very heavily on its author's previous work, citing it more than 200 times in 567 endnotes. Williams's other titles include Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1999);
9. Johnny Reb's War: Battlefield and Homefront (Abilene, Tex.: McWhiney Foundation Press, 2000);
10. Plain Folk in a Rich Man's War: Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia, ed. with Teresa C. Williams and R. David Carlson (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2002);
11. and A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom (New York: New Press, 2005).
12. Williams, Bitterly Divided, 6;
13. Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (New York: E. B. Treat, 1867), 728-29 (emphasis in original).
14. Charles H. Wesley, The Collapse of the Confederacy (Washington: Associated Publishers, 1937), 167, 83-84. Wesley's book, with an introduction by John David Smith, was reprinted in 2001 by the University of South Carolina Press.
15. Carleton Beals, War within a War: The Confederacy against Itself (New York: Chilton, 1965), v-viii. Page 2 of the book offers a map of the Confederacy, delineating vast areas of "armed resistance before the end of 1863." Williams includes neither Wesley's nor Beals's book in his bibliography.
16. Among the most important titles are Albert Burton Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York: Macmillan, 1924);
17. Frank L. Owsley, State Rights in the Confederacy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1925);
18. Bessie Martin, Desertion of Alabama Troops from the Confederate Army: A Study in Sectionalism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1932);
19. Georgia Lee Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1934);
20. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935);
21. Roger W. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana: A Social History of White Farmers and Laborers during Slavery and After, 1840-1875 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1939);
22. Bell I. Wiley, The Plain People of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1943);
23. Charles W. Ramsdell, Behind the Lines in the Southern Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1944). Williams cites the titles in this note more than sixty times.
24. Several of these books find contradictory forces at work in the Confederacy. Moore, for example, details "friction, confusion, and dereliction" in the operation of conscription and describes the Confederacy in 1865 as "a house divided against itself." Yet his concluding paragraph alludes to "the heroic devotion of the masses" and what he terms "unsurpassed sacrifice and heroism of the Southern armies and civilian population" (Moore, Conscription and Conflict, 353, 361).
25. The essays in Harry P. Owens and James J. Cooke, eds., The Old South in the Crucible of War (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1983), present a lively debate between Thomas and several other scholars on the topic of Confederate nationalism.
26. For example, Lawrence N. Powell and Michael S. Wayne's "Self Interest and the Decline of Confederate Nationalism," which looks at planters along the lower Mississippi River, charges: "Selfishness appears to have been their dominant trait, self-interest their only creed" (30).
27. In addition to Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986),
28. important titles from the 1970s and 1980s include Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1978);
29. Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984);
30. John Cimprich, Slavery's End in Tennessee, 1861-1865 (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1985);
31. Malcolm C. McMillan, The Disintegration of a Confederate State: Three Governors and Alabama's Home Front, 1861-1865 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer Univ. Press, 1986);
32. Clarence L. Mohr, On The Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986);
33. Fred Arthur Bailey, Class and Tennessee's Confederate Generation (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987);
34. Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860-1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1988);
35. George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Champaign: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1989). Williams cites the titles in this note several dozen times.
36. The "Publisher's Note" for Robinson's book explains that the manuscript "was made up of three parts, completed in 1982, 1984, and 1991, respectively." The University Press of Virginia received the manuscript in 1996, the year after the author's death (Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage, xvii, 283).
37. Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1988), 6-7, 22, 42, 60, 84. The book offers Faust's revised Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University.
38. LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1995);
39. Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996);
40. Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1992), quotation 149-50.
41. James Marten, Texas Divided: Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State, 1856-1874 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1990);
42. Richard B. McCaslin, Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas 1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1994);
43. Wayne K. Durrill, War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990 ), quotation 241. McCaslin places a notorious vigilante action against unionists within the context of contentious politics in North Texas between 1860 and the immediate postwar period.
44. See, for example, James G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, 2d ed. (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1961), chap. 14. The most widely adopted textbook for many years, this volume draws on literature from the 1920s-1940s; points to problems for the Confederacy in the uplands of Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas; and claims that across "the great Appalachian mountain region opponents of the Confederacy were probably in the majority throughout the war" (264).
45. Examples of the literature on Appalachia include Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson, eds., The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1997);
46. Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860-1869 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997);
47. W. Todd Groce, Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee and the Civil War, 1860-1870 (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1999);
48. John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000), quotation 8;
49. Martin Crawford, Ashe County's Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian South (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2001);
50. Brian D. McKnight, Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2006);
51. Jonathan Dean Sarris, A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2006).
52. In addition to Secret Yankees (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999),
53. important titles include Baum's The Shattering of Texas Unionism: Politics in the Lone Star State during the Civil War Era (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1998), quotation 233-34;
54. Daniel E. Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front (Fayetteville: Univ. of Arkansas Press, 1999);
55. William W. Freehling, The South versus the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001);
56. John C. Inscoe and Robert C. Kenzer, eds., Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2001);
57. James Alex Baggett, The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2003);
58. Elizabeth R. Varon, Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003);
59. Victoria E. Bynum, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003);
60. Margaret M. Storey, Loyalty and Loss: Alabama's Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2004).
61. Bruce Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006);
62. Michael D. Pierson, Mutiny at Fort Jackson: The Untold Story of the Fall of New Orleans (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008).
63. Mark A. Weitz, More Damning than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate Army (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2005), ix, xvi-xviii.
64. David M. Potter's essay on nationalism in The South and the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1968), which describes hierarchies of shifting loyalties, can be read as a persuasive counter to Weitz's nationalism/localism formulation.
65. Weitz focused solely on Georgia in his earlier A Higher Duty: Desertion among Georgia Troops during the Civil War (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2000).
66. Other titles devoted to social, political, and military turbulence in the Confederacy include Jon L. Wakelyn, Confederates against the Confederacy: Essays on Leadership and Loyalty (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), which uses a biographical approach;
67. and David J. Eicher, Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown, 2006), which echoes Frank L. Owsley's pioneering book in claiming state rights "destroyed the Confederacy." (Owsley's book does not appear in Eicher's notes or bibliography.)
68. See also Steven Elliott Tripp, Yankee Town, Southern City: Race and Class Relations in Civil War Lynchburg (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997);
69. William Warren Rogers Jr., Confederate Home Front: Montgomery during the Civil War (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1999);
70. Robert R. Mackey, The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861-1865 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2004);
71. and Jacqueline Jones, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008). Jones focuses on evidence of anti-Confederate thought and action in the territory surrounding Savannah. The index includes subheadings under "Confederate States of America" for conscription, desertion, and mutinies among Confederate soldiers - but none for any category relating to white support for the Confederacy.
72. For examples of this literature that deal with the Confederacy as a whole, see Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997);
73. Robert E. Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2002);
74. Anne Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005);
75. Jason Phillips, Diehard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2007). Bonner states that "Confederate flags helped to focus patriotic emotions from the early days of the secession crisis in 1860 past the moment of military defeat in 1865." Because the Confederates lost, he believes, "it has been harder to see how patriotic symbols were powerful sources of cohesion within the wartime South" (3).
76. For the postwar role of women as Confederate nationalists see Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008), esp. chaps. 1-3.
77. In a misguided effort to get the Confederacy right on slavery, a marginal literature avers that many African Americans willingly supported the Rebel war effort - including as soldiers. For examples of this mutation of Lost Cause-era "loyal slave" arguments, see Charles Kelly Barrow, J. H. Segars, and R. B. Rosenburg, eds., Forgotten Confederates: An Anthology about Black Southerners ([Atlanta, Ga.]: Southern Heritage Press, 1995);
78. Richard Rollins, ed., Black Southerners in Gray: Essays on Afro-Americans in Confederate Armies (Murfreesboro, Tenn.: Southern Heritage Press, 1994);
79. J. H. Segars and Charles Kelly Barrow, comps., Black Southerners in Confederate Armies: A Collection of Historical Accounts (Atlanta: Southern Lion Books, 2001).
80. For a more scholarly, though still controversial, treatment, see Ervin L. Jordan Jr., Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1995), esp. chaps. 10-11.
81. For amusement (unintended by the author) see Richard G. Williams Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Black Man's Friend (Nashville, Tenn.: Cumberland House, 2006).
82. Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995), 192-93. Ash also demonstrates that nonslaveholding unionists often disliked Yankees and black people even more than they disliked slaveholders.
83. William Blair, Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), quotation 7;
84. Peter S. Carmichael, The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005);
85. Brian Steel Wills, The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2001), quotation 256;
86. Richard R. Duncan, Beleaguered Winchester: A Virginia Community at War, 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2007);
87. Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2007), quotation 195.
88. See also William G. Thomas, "Nothing Ought to Astonish Us: Confederate Civilians in the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign," in The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, ed. by Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2006), 222-56. Analyzing the impact of Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan's crushing victories, Thomas describes the Valley's population as chastened but resolute: "Despite this reversal and their astonishment at it, Confederate civilians in the Shenandoah Valley held fast to their desperate, losing cause, hoping, praying, and believing that they would not be forsaken" (250).
89. J. Tracy Power, Lee's Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1998);
90. Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York: Free Press, 2008), quotation 471-72. Glatthaar's six-hundred-man sample allows him to move beyond the time-honored practice of reading as many letters and diaries as possible and then drawing inevitably impressionistic conclusions. A companion volume to General Lee's Army will present Glatthaar's data in the form of charts and graphs.
91. Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2007). Unlike Power and Glatthaar (and following a well-established tradition), Manning finds little evidence of nationalism among Confederate soldiers, emphasizing instead localism, family, and slavery/race (she sees U.S. soldiers as more likely to embrace Union/nation and to commit unselfishly to emancipation).
92. On Lee's army and civilian morale, see also Lisa Laskin, "'The Army Is Not Near So Much Demoralized as the Country Is': Soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederate Home Front," in The View from the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers, ed. by Aaron Sheehan-Dean (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2007), 91-120;
93. Gary W. Gallagher, Lee and His Army in Confederate History (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2001), chaps. 1-4.
94. Jacqueline Glass Campbell, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003);
95. G. Ward Hubbs, Guarding Greensboro: A Confederate Company in the Making of a Southern Community (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2003);
96. Mark V. Wetherington, Plain Folk's Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005);
97. Keith S. Bohannon, "'Witness the Redemption of the Army': Reenlistments in the Confederate Army of Tennessee, January-March 1864," Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas, 2005, 111-27
98. and Rod Andrew Jr., "The Essential Nationalism of the People: Georgia's Confederate Congressional Election of 1863," both in Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas, ed. by Lesley J. Gordon and John C. Inscoe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana Univ. Press, 2005), 111-27, 128-46, quotation 143.
99. For a treatment of Sherman's campaigns that suggests it crushed Confederate civilian will, see Russell F. Weigley, A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2000), 390-96.
100. Excellent testimony from the ranks of Hubbs's Alabama company is in Hubbs, ed., Voices from Company D: Diaries by the Greensboro Guards, Fifth Alabama Infantry Regiment, Army of Northern Virginia (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2003).
101. Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson, introduction, and Jean V. Berlin, "Did Confederate Women Lose the War? Deprivation, Destruction, and Despair on the Home Front," both in The Collapse of the Confederacy, ed. by Grimsley and Simpson (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001), 11, 188. Other contributors to this collection include William B. Feis, George C. Rable, and Steven E. Woodworth.
102. For Faust's quotation, see her "Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War," Journal of American History 76 (Mar. 1990): 1228.
103. Pollard quoted in U. B. Phillips, The Course of the South to Secession, ed. by E. Merton Coulter (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1939), 163.
104. See Phillips's "The Central Theme of Southern History" in the same volume, 152-65,
105. and George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 60-70. Phillips first offered his thoughts about a "central theme" in 1928 at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Indianapolis.
106. Chandra Manning, "The Order of Nature Would Be Reversed: Soldiers, Slavery, and the North Carolina Gubernatorial Election of 1864," in North Carolinians in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, ed. by Paul D. Escott (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008), 118-19;
107. William C. Harris, William Woods Holden: Firebrand of North Carolina Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1987), 150-53. Holden alleged that the soldier vote had been manipulated, but Harris believes an honest tally undoubtedly would have given Vance a majority.
108. Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, argue that the peace movement regained momentum shortly after the election (161-63).
109. George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1994), 2-3;
110. Mark E. Neely Jr., Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1999), 2-6, quotation 6;
111. Philip D. Dillard, "'What Price Must We Pay for Victory?' Views on Arming Slaves from Lynchburg, Virginia, and Galveston, Texas," in Gordon and Inscoe, Inside the Confederate Nation, 316-31, quotation 328.
112. See also Jaime A. Martinez, "The Slave Market in Civil War Virginia," in Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration, ed. by Edward L. Ayers, Gary W. Gallagher, and Andrew J. Torget (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2006), 106-35, which makes this observation about the wartime market in slaves: "Until the very end of the Civil War, white Virginians continued to believe in the economic and social vitality of the institution of slavery, and whenever possible they participated in a sales and hiring market fully dependent on their level of confidence in Confederate independence" (131).
113. Paul D. Escott, Military Necessity: Civil-Military Relations in the Confederacy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2006), xiv, 176.
114. The closing sentence in chapter 1 sets a typical tone: "It was clear even in the early days that the disunited Confederacy was in for a two-front war: one against the North, the other against its own people." The first sentence in chapter 2 reinforces the idea that Williams is writing about the eleven states that left the Union: "As the excitement of summer faded into fall, home-front opposition continued to undermine the Confederate war effort." The final chapter offers this: "By the winter of 1864-65, most common folk were too busy fighting off Confederates to worry about the Yankees" (Williams, Bitterly Divided, 7, 52-53, 236).
115. Richard Nelson Current, Lincoln's Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1992), 217-18;
116. Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (Des Moines, Iowa: Dyer Publishing, 1908), 11.
117. Freehling, South Versus the South, xii-xiii.
118. Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought, 13;
119. Blair, Virginia's Private War, 125;
120. Thomas L. Livermore, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America, 1861-1865 (1900; repr., Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1957), 20-22. Sheehan-Dean estimates the average enlistment rate in northern states to be 35 percent. Edward L. Ayers's comparative study of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia, reveals the disparity in rates of enlistment: "Augusta, like the South as a whole, sent a higher proportion of its men into the service at each step of the war."
121. By the end of 1862, Augusta had mobilized "almost double the rate relative to population" (Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 [New York: Norton, 2003], 291-92).
122. Joseph T. Glatthaar estimates that desertions totaled just more than 14 percent in the Army of Northern Virginia: "In Lee's army, desertion was a problem, but it became critical after Lincoln's re-election, and it was reflective of all sorts of other problems" (Glatthaar, General Lee's Army, 532nn1,5).
123. See also Gallagher, Confederate War, 31-32, 181n21.
124. Weitz, More Damning than Slaughter, ix-xi;
125. These men do not figure in Williams's calculations. (The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols.[Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1880-1901], ser. 3, vol. 5:711; hereafter cited as OR).
126. OR, ser. 4, vol. 3:989. U.S. returns for the same period are: Present for Duty, 495,899; Aggregate Present, 605,360; Aggregate Present & Absent, 936,996. (ser. 3, vol. 1:1034.) An alternate way to deploy statistics would be this: on June 30, 1864, after the massive casualties of the Overland campaign, the Army of Northern Virginia reported approximately 65,000 men present for duty - far more than were present in the wake of the Pennsylvania campaign a year earlier (ser. 4, vol. 3:520). I am indebted to Keith S. Bohannon, Joseph T. Glatthaar, Robert K. Krick, James H. Ogden III, and Carol Reardon for sharing their expertise regarding the complexity of returns.
127. David Brown, "North Carolinian Ambivalence: Rethinking Loyalty and Disaffection in the Civil War Piedmont," in Escott, North Carolinians in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, 8.
128. For a comparative look at nationalism in revolutionary America and the Confederacy, see Benjamin L. Carp, "Nations of American Rebels: Understanding Nationalism in Revolutionary North America and the Civil War South," Civil War History 48 (Mar. 2002): 5-33.
129. See Daniel E. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2009)
130. and John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2009).
131. For a preview of themes in McCurry's book, see her essay titled "Gender and the Politics of Subsistence in the Civil War South," in Wars within a War: Controversy and Conflict over the American Civil War, ed. by Joan Waugh and Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2009). Majewski argues that southern opposition to a strong central government in the prewar years was closely linked to struggles against northern legislative dominance and that state rights sentiment weakened rapidly as Confederates sought to build their own nation. Noe's book will challenge many conventional views, including that post-1861 enlistees were more likely to desert or refuse to fight than comrades who joined earlier. Like many other scholars, Noe finds agreement across class lines regarding slavery and race.
132. For a tribute to Thomas and his scholarship, see Gordon and Inscoe, Inside the Confederate Nation.