Becoming Confederates by Gary W. Gallagher

Author:Gary W. Gallagher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2013-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

For His Country and His Duty

Confederate National Sentiment beyond Appomattox

Robert E. Lee and Jubal A. Early occupied critical positions in the story of how Confederate national sentiment persisted in the postwar decades. Stephen Dodson Ramseur, mortally wounded almost six months before Appomattox, was relegated to a secondary though still noteworthy place in the narrative. All had been committed nationalists, demanding collective sacrifice to establish a republic that promised long-term social and economic stability within a slave-based structure. Although scrupulous in his public call for acceptance of reunion, Lee became the centerpiece of a Lost Cause interpretation of the mid-nineteenth century that glorified the Confederacy and its white populace. Early did as much as any other individual—perhaps more—to refine and spread the message that Confederates had struggled admirably against fearsome odds, always with Lee and his army in the forefront of their national effort. Ramseur’s impeccable credentials as a brave young commander and martyr resonated most strongly in North Carolina but also in other parts of the South.

How the three men, as actors and symbols, stoked feelings of postwar Confederate community brings us back to David Potter’s observation about reluctance to ascribe genuine national sentiment to people or causes historians find distasteful. Undeniable evidence demonstrates that loyalty to the Confederacy, so widely apparent during the war, did not disappear with the surrenders of April and May 1865. Brief consideration of that salient fact is necessary before turning to some final thoughts about Lee, Ramseur, and Early.

The people who had struggled for southern independence entered the postwar era as losers on an epic scale, yet many remained devoted to their failed cause. Well more than 250,000 of their men died in uniform,1 emancipation seemingly ended their control over black people, and no one knew what political and economic penalties the triumphant North might impose. At a distance of almost 150 years, it is extremely difficult to recapture the degree to which Confederates imagined themselves in a world turned ominously upside down. Amid enormous uncertainty and with the Confederacy’s formal institutions dismantled, the defeated population found ways to maintain public and private ties to their short-lived republic while reentering the United States during the era of Reconstruction.

Two accommodations to postwar reality stood paramount for ex-Confederates. The Union would be restored—that always had been the sine qua non of victory for the loyal citizenry of the United States—and slavery’s end was assured. The mass of white northerners never embraced emancipation as a stand-alone moral goal during the conflict, but they had come to regard it as a necessary tool to defeat the Confederacy, punish the slaveholding class that had pushed for secession, and, within a postbellum context, protect the restored Union from future internal threat. Ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 settled the issue of black freedom definitively. Some historians have suggested the nation was restored with relative ease, thus underscoring the absence of meaningful national sentiment among Confederates. Reunion and reconciliation, goes a common argument, predominated by the late nineteenth century.

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