Ebook582 pages6 hours
The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
About this ebook
Challenging the popular conception of Southern youth on the eve of the Civil War as intellectually lazy, violent, and dissipated, Peter S. Carmichael looks closely at the lives of more than one hundred young white men from Virginia's last generation to grow up with the institution of slavery. He finds them deeply engaged in the political, economic, and cultural forces of their time. Age, he concludes, created special concerns for young men who spent their formative years in the 1850s.
Before the Civil War, these young men thought long and hard about Virginia's place as a progressive slave society. They vigorously lobbied for disunion despite opposition from their elders, then served as officers in the Army of Northern Virginia as frontline negotiators with the nonslaveholding rank and file. After the war, however, they quickly shed their Confederate radicalism to pursue the political goals of home rule and New South economic development and reconciliation. Not until the turn of the century, when these men were nearing the ends of their lives, did the mythmaking and storytelling begin, and members of the last generation recast themselves once more as unreconstructed Rebels.
By examining the lives of members of this generation on personal as well as generational and cultural levels, Carmichael sheds new light on the formation and reformation of Southern identity during the turbulent last half of the nineteenth century.
Before the Civil War, these young men thought long and hard about Virginia's place as a progressive slave society. They vigorously lobbied for disunion despite opposition from their elders, then served as officers in the Army of Northern Virginia as frontline negotiators with the nonslaveholding rank and file. After the war, however, they quickly shed their Confederate radicalism to pursue the political goals of home rule and New South economic development and reconciliation. Not until the turn of the century, when these men were nearing the ends of their lives, did the mythmaking and storytelling begin, and members of the last generation recast themselves once more as unreconstructed Rebels.
By examining the lives of members of this generation on personal as well as generational and cultural levels, Carmichael sheds new light on the formation and reformation of Southern identity during the turbulent last half of the nineteenth century.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 1, 2015
ISBN9781469625898
Author
Peter S. Carmichael
Peter S. Carmichael is the Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies, director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, and author of previous books, including The Last Generation.
Read more from Peter S. Carmichael
A Gunner in Lee's Army: The Civil War Letters of Thomas Henry Carter Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Whartons' War: The Civil War Correspondence of General Gabriel C. Wharton and Anne Radford Wharton, 1863–1865 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to The Last Generation
Related ebooks
Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWilliam Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Brutes In Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890–1920 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFreedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRacism in the Nation's Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Patriotism and Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsConceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsModernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhite Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrom Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1965 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWriting Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsConstructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStaff Officers in Gray: A Biographical Register of the Staff Officers in the Army of Northern Virginia Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5John Brown Still Lives!: America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Reviews for The Last Generation
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
2 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Last Generation - Peter S. Carmichael
2e book_preview_excerpt.html }۲Wݯԓ&VKj)4qxDJF?n6ҩTB1`?؟7nj)%ε2 Jm9q}̕+sav/^a,Xum_^{o!~IuW{+qx[ne5v}7QmOUʵCQk~-
ז?MxGo7z|}]LǶPǢwOj]PsdU]/уqkyV_mwPǾeS?TV:^j{ʒG#ٮ߹'~{y/wmV\(n2k[S//':Qvt0mbezA5+^flxPldO囍k}\rݪma']T}!Ki9,~