Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

pursue no Utopias that promise to change man’s nature, his social habitudes, and his inequalities of condition, because we believe in nature and in nature’s God.” Societies could never be built from the sort of grasping, advantage-calculating individuals who populated the North. “The world has seen many instances of governments devised on theoretical principles, mainly with a view to the security of equal rights,” wrote Nathaniel Beverly Tucker of the College of William & Mary, but “how these have succeeded, history and the present abject condition of those countries which were the subjects of those experiments, show but too plainly.” The true basis of society was the community, not the individual and the individual’s rights. “One of the principal ends of the establishment of government is to provide, in the collective responsibility of the whole, a substitute for the responsibility of the individual. …”77

Still, Southern intellectuals stalled on the same fundamental issue that had dogged Southern society from the start: slavery. Was slavery of the essence of the South, woven into the warp and woof of its cultural fabric so completely that any description of the South must also be a description of the slave system? Or was slavery merely an economic accident, a superficial aspect of a more profound, underlying organism of Southern culture? The intellectuals’ answer, surprisingly, was the latter. “The differences between the Northern and Southern portions of the former American Union never involved a moral question,” declared DeBow’s Review in that same midsummer issue of 1861; “these and all former issues are now dead.” James Henley Thornwell, the prince among Southern Presbyterian theologians, stood among slavery’s most ardent defenders right up to the point of secession, but in 1861, he began to express doubts about slavery that he would never have permitted to see daylight in earlier times. Thornwell told his friend and biographer, Benjamin Palmer, that “he had made up his mind to move… for the gradual emancipation of the negro, as the only measure that would give peace to the country.”78

If slavery was not the South’s cultural trademark, what was? Was there really such a thing as Southernness? Oddly, no one seemed more convinced that there was than the soldiers of the Union armies. Much as they had enlisted to preserve a common America, the deeper they marched into the South, the more it really did seem to resemble a foreign country. “It is vain to deny that the slave system of labor is giving shape to the government of the society where it exists, and that that government is not republican either in form or spirit,” exclaimed the abolitionist general John W. Phelps. “It was through this system that the leading conspirators sought to fasten upon the people an aristocracy or a despotism; and it is not sufficient that they should be merely defeated in their object and the country be rid of their rebellion.” The rank and file felt much the same way. “The papers used to talk a great deal about Union people in Virginia, and their love for their country,” wrote one soldier in the 5th Maine, but “it never happened to be our fortune to see any of those exceptions to Southern character. … Possibly this may seem a hard statement, but it is not so hard as was the reality.” So at just the moment when Southerners wanted to claim culture rather than slavery as the basis of Confederate identity, Northerners were moving in precisely the opposite direction and holding Southerners to their prewar word that the protection of slavery was its guiding star.79

In pursuit of a Southern national culture, Confederates invented new national emblems (the Confederate great seal featured an image of George Washington’s statue in Richmond and the pious motto Deo vindice, “God will vindicate”), a new grammar (through defiantly Confederate school textbooks such as the Confederate Primer [1861], the First and Second Confederate Speller [1861], Boys and Girls Stories of the War [1863], and the Dixie Primer for the Little Folks [1863]), new popular music (“God Save the South,” “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” “The Southrons’ Chaunt of Defiance,” “Stonewall Jackson’s Way,” “General Lee’s Grand March”), art (William D. Washington’s The Burial of Latané), anthologies of poetry (William Shepperson’s War Songs of the South), histories (Edward Pollard’s The First Year of the War and its successive “years” through 1864), and novels (Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria; or Altars of Sacrifice).80

This represents a remarkable volume of effort, even if Southerners themselves were dubious of its quality. “In this Titanic struggle which is going on, the genial pursuit of letters is at an end, and for nearly three years little has appeared which is worthy either of the genius or attainments of our people,” J. D. B. DeBow sighed. “The glorious struggle has scarcely inspired one song which will live beyond the generation that now burns with martial ardor and rushes to the deadly field.” But as in the failure of Confederate political nationhood, it was the war that proved the principal block to Confederate cultural nationhood. The grinding demands of the war and the blockade, Northern occupation of the Southern heartland, and the disruptions in supplies of paper, ink, type, pens, and books had all hampered the exercise of a Confederate imagination, and the looming shadow of defeat meant that any hope of delineating a Southern national character in its literature or culture would need to rely on time and experimentation.81

Military failure intruded in a more direct way on Southerners’ religious confidence. If the Confederate nation really, at its core, was built around the determination to “accept as true the faith of our fathers” and “believe in the authority of the Bible, attested by the voice of the civilized world for almost two thousand years,” then it was certainly entitled to expect the protection of Almighty God, especially over against the godless Yankee nation. “Those who defend free society must, for this reason alone, if consistent, reject the Bible… because the institution of slavery accords with the injunctions