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Confederate Soldiers and Southern Society, 18611880 View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository “What A Fall Was There—My Country Ruined!”: Confederate Soldiers and Southern Society, 1861­1880 David Christopher Williard A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2012 Approved by: William L. Barney W. Fitzhugh Brundage Laura Edwards Joseph T. Glatthaar Heather Andrea Williams © 2012 David Christopher Williard ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT DAVID WILLIARD: “What A Fall Was There—My Country Ruined!”: Confederate Soldiers and Southern Society, 1861‐1880 (Under the direction of William L. Barney) This dissertation traces the paths that former Confederate soldiers took in attempting to reclaim control over their personal lives and reconstitute their relationship to southern society at large in the aftermath of the Civil War. Participation in the war gave men status, purpose, a sense of worth in the eyes of their families and white southern society at large, and investment in a collective endeavor. Defeat shattered Confederate soldiers’ self‐image and led soldiers to doubt the purpose of their sacrifices, to believe that hardships came unequally, and to question whether their society had any right to determine the status of men whose experiences it did not understand. At the war’s conclusion, the links of ideology and experience that had bound Confederate soldiers and civilians together stood largely broken. The consequences of this division became evident in the postwar South. While white southerners still agreed on certain widely held beliefs, they no longer possessed a collective entity through which to mobilize their disparate individual goals in pursuit of social action. Fighting in a prolonged, destructive war had given Confederate soldiers experience with living outside the bounds of peacetime civil society and inured them to many of its conventions. Civilians asked soldiers to iii submit to both legal and social mores that initially failed to account for their wartime experiences. Moreover, the process of Confederate defeat had brought new material and political power to women and African Americans. For young men raised to dominate their surroundings as well as their racial and sexual subordinates, defeat had destabilized the core foundations of selfhood. Because their understanding of what it meant to be a white man required them to wield power within their homes, communities, and society at large, former Confederates had to either regain control of radically changed worlds or find alternate ways to structure their identities. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Cataloguing those people and institutions who have contributed to the conception and execution of this dissertation raises a conundrum similar to the challenge of dissertation writing itself. How to set about a task when one knows that the end product can never fully capture the nuances of the reality it claims to describe? Nevertheless, I have cause to render thanks to many people and institutions and will attempt to do so, asking the forbearance of those mentioned and those who by terrible eventuality I omit. This dissertation would have remained merely a concept without the financial and institutional support needed to research and write it. Many generous organizations have invested in this project as it took me to archives in half a dozen states. The United States Department of Education changed the trajectory of my graduate school career in an instant when it awarded me a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, which comprised my primary means of support for the entire course of this project’s evolution from idea to question to product. In my hometown of Richmond, the archive in which I first conducted research as a high school student remained good to me a decade later, and I thank the Virginia Historical Society for both its summer Mellon Research Fellowship and for prompting me to make some sense of my diffuse thoughts in conversation with the Society’s excellent curatorial v staff and other scholars‐in‐residence. Closer to home, the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina‐Chapel Hill funded summer research both in UNC’s own Wilson Library and at the University of South Carolina in the South Caroliniana Collections. Both are truly wonderful archives in which to work, made so by their encouraging, professional, and friendly staffs. Closer still, the Department of History at the University of North Carolina awarded me a George W. Mowry Dissertation Fellowship to initiate the transition from abstract question to substantial project. Last but by no means least, the archivists of the Small Special Collections Library of the University of Virginia and the Alabama and Mississippi state archives as well as the Special Collections Department of Hill Library at Louisiana State University gave generously of their time and expertise, recommending sources and serving as consultants on nineteenth century morphology and handwriting. I have had the good fortune to work with outstanding mentors at many stages of my academic career. John T. Wilkes inspired me by his example to pursue an academic interest in history and a professional interest in teaching it to others during my time at the Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School. I have yet to meet a better classroom teacher. At a later stage, Carol Sheriff reluctantly accepted an eager freshman into her Civil War Era seminar at the College of William and Mary and in doing so began an academic relationship build on sage advice and unflagging support that continues to this day. vi When I first met Bill Barney and Joe Glatthaar on a spring day in Chapel Hill, I knew that I had found the perfect team to guide me through my graduate work. Joe has never stopped encouraging me to reach for the next goal or seize a promising opportunity, and his own incredible example of energy, productivity, and enthusiasm has kept me focused and motivated. Those qualities find their ideal complement in Bill’s astonishing ability to conceptualize historical relationships, find promise in even the most underdeveloped ideas, and offer a helpful lead from his inexhaustible knowledge of the historical literature of the nineteenth century. As my career at UNC progressed, I benefited from the additional attributes and perspectives that the other members of my committee could contribute. In the classroom and beyond, all of them have made substantial contributions to my academic development. Fitz Brundage encouraged me to view the study of Confederate soldiers as an American problem with a southern context and cautioned me to keep an open mind as I made my way through their lives. Laura Edwards, a model of clear historical thinking and writing, has helped me to distinguish between the rhetoric and reality of people’s lives in the nineteenth century and shown me how to make use of both. Heather Williams encouraged me to read Confederate soldiers through the eyes of others and to look beyond their letters and diaries to form a more complete picture of their social significance. All five of these accomplished historians have inspired me to a better grasp of important aspects of the historiography of the nineteenth century and pushed me to see where I could make my own contribution. vii I owe no less substantial a debt to the numerous colleagues and friends who have made the last five years the happiest and most fulfilling I have ever known. They mean more to me than I could ever render into words, so I hope they will forgive me for declining to elaborate on each of their contributions. That I refrain from doing so indicates the enormity, rather than the paucity, of my appreciation. To Sarah Barksdale, Friederike Bruehoefener, Nora Doyle, Aaron Hale‐Dorrell, Jonathan Hancock, Rachel Hynson, Anna Krome‐Lukens, Kim Kutz, Liz Lundeen, Brad Proctor, John Robertson, and Mark Slagle, I give my deepest thanks for good company, good fellowship, and good advice. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my family for a lifetime of love and support. My brother Matthew, despite being four years my junior, has often offered me a mature and guiding perspective (as well as a competitive game at the pool table) as I’ve tried to figure out my course in life. Ken Williard was my cousin and companion of many summers and holidays long before he grew into a distinguished soldier and leader of men in the United States Army. This project owes much to our honest conversations over the years as we have compared our experiences, and particularly to our exchanges during a research trip to Savannah where he generously opened his home to me. My grandparents, Ken and Mary Williard, first encouraged me to make sense of the Civil War and the men who fought it as we toured the battlefields of Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Antietam. My last and greatest debt goes to my parents. My mother, Mary Williard, has given me several lifetimes worth of love, support, and encouragement, while my father, David Charles viii Williard, introduced to me a love of knowledge and taught me how to pursue an examined life. No words can convey what they mean to me. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .....................................................................................................................xi INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................................................1
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