Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers

By James J. Broomall

How did the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction shape the masculinity of white Confederate veterans? As James J. Broomall shows, the crisis of the war forced a reconfiguration of the emotional worlds of the men who took up arms for the South. Raised in an antebellum culture that demanded restraint and shaped white men to embrace self-reliant masculinity, Confederate soldiers lived and fought within military units where they experienced the traumatic strain of combat and its privations together--all the while being separated from suffering families. Military service provoked changes that escalated with the end of slavery and the Confederacy's military defeat. Returning to civilian life, Southern veterans questioned themselves as never before, sometimes suffering from terrible self-doubt.

Drawing on personal letters and diaries, Broomall argues that the crisis of defeat ultimately necessitated new forms of expression between veterans and among men and women. On the one hand, war led men to express levels of emotionality and vulnerability previously assumed the domain of women. On the other hand, these men also embraced a virulent, martial masculinity that they wielded during Reconstruction and beyond to suppress freed peoples and restore white rule through paramilitary organizations and the Ku Klux Klan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781469649764

James J. Broomall

James J. Broomall is assistant professor of history at Shepherd University and director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War.

Book preview

Private Confederacies

CIVIL WAR AMERICA

Peter S. Carmichael, Caroline E. Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editors

This landmark series interprets broadly the history and culture of the Civil War era through the long nineteenth century and beyond. Drawing on diverse approaches and methods, the series publishes historical works that explore all aspects of the war, biographies of leading commanders, and tactical and campaign studies, along with select editions of primary sources. Together, these books shed new light on an era that remains central to our understanding of American and world history.

Private Confederacies

The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers

James J. Broomall

University of North Carolina Press  CHAPEL HILL

© 2019 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Broomall, James J., author.

Title: Private confederacies : the emotional worlds of southern men as citizens and soldiers / James J. Broomall.

Other titles: Civil War America (Series)

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2019]

| Series: Civil War America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018020212| ISBN 9781469649757 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469649764 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Masculinity—Southern States—19th century—History. | Men—Southern States—Social life and customs—19th century.

Classification: LCC BF692.5 .B755 2019 | DDC 155.3/32097509034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020212

Cover illustration: Detail from photograph of Henry J. Walker and Levi Jasper Walker, 1887. American Civil War Museum, under the management of Virginia Museum of History & Culture (FIC 2013.00272).

This book incorporates previously published material from We Are a Band of Brothers: Manhood and Community in Confederate Camps and Beyond, Civil War History 60, no. 3 (2014): 270–309 (used here with the permission of Kent State University Press); and Personal Reconstructions: Southern Men as Soldiers and Citizens in the Post–Civil War South, in Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South, ed. William A. Link et al. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 111–33 (used here with permission).

To Bill and Pete,

mentors, friends, and colleagues

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Words

CHAPTER TWO

Soldiers

CHAPTER THREE

Battle

CHAPTER FOUR

Demobilization

CHAPTER FIVE

Reconstructions

CHAPTER SIX

Violence

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Three Confederate prisoners at Gettysburg  41

Confederate Camp during the Late American War by Conrad Wise Chapman  56

The Fifty-Ninth Virginia Infantry—Wise’s Brigade by Conrad Wise Chapman  57

Wise Brigade by John J. Omenhauser  59

Ku Klux Klan costumes in North Carolina, 1870  136

Acknowledgments

As any author knows, a book is only possible because of other people. I have been incredibly fortunate in my professional and personal lives to be surrounded by supportive friends and family. Because of family’s precedence in my life, I shall begin by acknowledging those closest and dearest to me. My parents have generously sacrificed vacations to accompany me on research trips, have kindly offered quiet spaces when I needed a place to write, and have supported my passion for history since I was a child. Their love provides me with a constant guide. During my first year in graduate school at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, while pursuing a degree in museum studies, I met Tish Wiggs. Fifteen years and several states later, she remains my constant companion, my best friend, and my beloved wife. She and our beautiful children, Simon, Henry, and Addy are the most important people in my life. Tish and our children give me unparalleled joy and delayed the book’s completion in the most wonderful ways. My in-laws, Sefton and Cheryl, have always given us a warm home to visit and lavished me with support. Cheryl, in particular, has lent her considerable editorial talents to helping me polish and refine this project.

Good friends have provided support over the years and helped form many of the ideas underpinning this work during long, meandering conversations. I am happy to acknowledge them: Rob Burdick, Mike Clarke, Rich Condon, Troy Cool, Jeff Curry, Ernie Dollar, Mike Galloway, Chris Graham, Gary Keefer, John McMillan, Chris Meekins, Kevin Pawlak, Dana Shoaf, David Southern, Peter Thomas, Matt Williamson, and Steve Wismer. Through graduate school, academic conferences, and other venues, I have benefited from conversations with and the comments of Kevin Adams, Aaron Astor, Joe Beatty, Joel Black, Brian Bredehoeft, Andrew Canady, Catherine Clinton, Clay Cooper, Jason Daniels, Laura Davis, Angela Diaz, Adam Domby, Greg Downs, Angela Elder, Andrew Fialka, Katie Fialka, Jim Flook, Allison Fredette, Dennis Frye, Lesley Gordon, Matt Hall, Scott Huffard, Jim Knight, Peter Luebke, Jenn Lyon, Ben Miller, Steve Noll, Taylor Patterson, Jason Phillips, Chris Ruehlen, Dan Simone, Jay Smith, Roger Smith, Diane Sommerville, Dave Thomson, Ben Wise, and Angie Zombek. Sean Adams, Bill Blair, Matt Gallman, Jon Sensbach, and Sevan Terzian each read earlier iterations of this project from start to finish. Each of them therefore made an indelible mark on this book—my sincerest thanks for taking the time to read my work and for caring enough to offer tough commentary. More recently, Aaron Sheehan-Dean read this project in its entirety and offered an extremely thoughtful and useful comment for which I am most grateful. At the University of North Carolina Press, first David Perry and, later, Mark Simpson-Vos shepherded me through the process of making my thoughts into this book project. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the anonymous readers from UNC Press. I spent a lot of time responding to the readers’ reports because they pushed me to write a better book. Thank you for the trenchant criticism and insightful commentary.

During a one-year teaching appointment at Virginia Tech, Mark Barrow, Joe Forte, Dennis Hidalgo, Marian Mollin, Matt Saionz, Dan Thorp, and Peter Wallenstein provided support and help when I needed it. Over the years, at sundry conferences or at my request, Paul Anderson, Joe Beilein, Stephen Berry, David Brown, Lisa Cardyn, Paul Cimbala, William Davis, Barb Gannon, Lorri Glover, Matt Hulbert, Brian Luskey, Jeff McClurken, Sarah Meacham, Megan Kate Nelson, Rachel Shelden, David Silkenat, Andy Slap, Trae Welborn, LeeAnn Whites, Tim Williams, and Michael Woods provided either formal or informal comments on this work that greatly advanced my thinking. Portions of this project have been presented before audiences at the Southern Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the University of Georgia’s Southern Roundtable Forum, the Symposium for the Civil War Sesquicentennial Committee of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, the Conference of Florida Historians, the University of North Florida’s Past to Present lecture series, Shepherd University’s Research Faculty Forum, and various Civil War roundtables—thank you to these many audiences for their thoughtful suggestions.

I held my first tenure-track job at the University of North Florida. The department chair, Charles Closmann, provided a supportive environment and made sure I was not overwhelmed by committee work as a junior faculty member; additionally, office manager Marianne Roberts helped me with sundry tasks linked to this project. Greg Domber, David Sheffler, and Dan Watkins became good friends and intellectual companions during my time in Jacksonville. I presented portions of this project before members of UNF’s History Department and acknowledge the helpful commentary of Denise Bossy, Alison Bruey, David Courtwright, Denice Fett, Chau Kelly, and Harry Rothschild. I have since moved to Shepherd University, where I serve in the History Department and act as director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War. Jennifer Alarcon, the center’s program assistant, helped with the final stages of book production and always provided laughter when I needed it most. My colleagues Keith Alexander, Sally Brasher, David Gordon, Liz Perego, and Julia Sandy have made and make Shepherd an incredible home. My students in the Civil War and nineteenth-century America concentration have made teaching and mentoring an enjoyable, even joyful, experience. Our dean, Dow Benedict, is a model leader. And my colleague Ben Bankhurst makes life in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, fun, interesting, and intellectually stimulating.

This book is dedicated to William A. Link and Peter S. Carmichael. Bill and Pete have been with me since the beginning of graduate school and believed in me when others did not. Because of their trust and through their support I have become a scholar and an author. Perhaps more importantly, though, because of their friendship I have become a better person. They are individuals of untold generosity, charity, and goodwill. They and their wives, Susannah Link and Beth Getz Carmichael, have opened their homes and lives to me in ways usually reserved for family. Bill and Pete have read virtually every word I have written since graduate school. And both always lavished support when appropriate and criticisms when necessary. This dedication is a small but important gesture. Working with Bill and Pete in graduate school was a pleasure. Becoming their friend and colleague is a privilege.

In researching this project and writing this book, I benefited greatly from generous outside support. I would like to formally acknowledge both these institutions and the awards they granted: the Louisiana History Research Fellowship awarded by the Louisiana State University Libraries’ Special Collections; the Research Appointment Fellowship awarded by the Institute for Southern Studies, University of South Carolina; and the Archie K. Davis Fellowship awarded by the North Caroliniana Society, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The University of Florida’s History Department, its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Richard J. Milbauer Chair, the University of North Florida’s Faculty Development Research Grant, and Shepherd University’s Professional Development Grant provided generous support for conferences, research, and travel over the years. The Kent State University Press and the University Press of Florida allowed me to reprint portions of previous publications in this book.

Introduction

On June 20, 1863, Commissary Sergeant Harrison Wells of the Thirteenth Georgia Infantry Regiment encamped along the banks of the Potomac River near the small hamlet of Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Part of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s invading Army of Northern Virginia, he was preparing to cross the Rubicon, positioned on the brink of the Union. He did not miss the moment’s gravity. Writing to his fiancée, May Mollie Long, Wells reflected, I think that we will certainly have the best of success this time; and I am pretty certain that this will be a glorious campaign for us. Despite his optimism, Wells was tired. Deprived of his loved one’s society at home and desperate for news, he had seen many hardships and dangers since he last wrote Mollie. Hard marches and sharp fights had defined the Pennsylvania Campaign for the rank and file. Wells’s position in the army meant that he did not have to fight; some charged that commissaries were cowards. But he had joined the fray to do his whole duty to his country, benefit his fellow soldiers as much as possible, and if not lighten, at least share some of their hardships.¹

Race, class, and gender defined white Southern masculinity.² Wells’s June letter places these markers of identity in stark relief. Worried about his public honor, he left the safety of the commissary stores for the uncertainty of the front lines. Grounded by his family, he desperately yearned for their comforting correspondence. Reared in a slaveholding society, he maintained that the Confederate raiders should return from Pennsylvania with slaves. And as a soldier in Lee’s army, he pledged fealty to nation. Nothing about Wells’s sentiments is surprising, even if the letter itself is revealing. His words demonstrate what scholars have long argued about the centrality of honor, manhood, and ideology to the Confederate soldier’s war.³ Yet Wells’s letter also points to something less commonly observed by historians of the Civil War era: his choice of expression.⁴ When he received news from home, he felt loved. He recounted his soldiery comportment in prideful terms. Expectations for an upcoming battle and subsequent victory evoked excitement. The rigorous campaigning had tired him. And he embraced his fellow soldiers as beloved comrades. Harrison Wells felt the experience of war. The emotions and feelings it engendered became both a means of understanding and a model for self-expression.

This book seeks to understand the emotional worlds and gender identities of white Southern men in the Civil War–era South. Ethnography and argument are equally important to this project.⁵ I argue that Confederate men, raised in an antebellum Southern culture that demanded self-control, struggled to understand their wartime experiences. They responded by creating emotional communities composed of fellow soldiers who crafted a common language of uncertainty. Soldiers relied on each other for psychological support, physical comfort, and personal security. Descriptive letters home related the range of emotions engendered by a conflict that had undermined white Southerners’ self-assuredness and left many grasping for comprehension. During the Reconstruction era, whites resurrected their wartime communities during veteran reunions but also in paramilitary groups. Nostalgic over the past and angry at the present, white Southerners intended to restore a social order undone by emancipation and war and created a mythology to explain their lost cause.

The white Southern men who became Confederate soldiers seceded from the Union in order to establish an independent nation founded on slavery. To secure this goal, they provoked a war that destroyed the institutions they and their leaders had intended to preserve. This story is well known, and the white South’s defeat became, in historian C. Vann Woodward’s phrase, the burden of southern history.⁶ Scholars are less secure in their knowledge about how these events personally affected Southerners over the course of time. Historians have debated the extent of change prompted by civil war and social reconstruction and how, in turn, individuals reacted to and were transformed by these events. Several prominent scholars of the postbellum South have charged that Southerners remembered the war but that its pains and its consequences were eventually forgotten. The conflict did not decisively change Southerners’ intellectual frameworks, excepting the readjustment to emancipation.⁷ Conversely, cultural and intellectual historians have posited that the forces of war and emancipation forever shifted white mind-sets and came at great personal costs. Former Confederates’ war of defiance continued into the years of Reconstruction and beyond, and many veterans struggled with long-term traumas sustained during their military service.⁸ Private Confederacies engages these debates and seeks to understand how the American Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction affected the personal lives, emotional expressions, and gender identities of white Southern men. By so doing, this project shifts the locus of inquiry and expresses the significance of emotion and gender to cultural evaluation, charts the shifting contours of relations among men and between men and their families, explores the association between private feelings and public acts, and reexamines nineteenth-century Southern history through an exploration of personal narratives that are inseparable from broader sociopolitical developments.

Close-grain studies of white Southerners’ psychological suffering as a result of the conflict and its impact on the collective household have illustrated the Civil War’s long shadow.⁹ The emerging picture is tragic and illustrates the Civil War’s human costs.¹⁰ Although this scholarship has influenced Private Confederacies, this project also heeds recent warnings that have pushed back against the dark turn in Civil War–era studies.¹¹ As historian Frances M. Clarke has charged, Victorian Americans found redemption in the war’s carnage and believed that suffering positively influenced personal character and society.¹² Private Confederacies mediates between these historiographical camps, demonstrating that white Southerners grappled with personal demons while also readjusting to wartime and postbellum life. It is only by considering the dialectic between public and private experiences that the depth of Southerners’ lives can be plumbed. This work, therefore, focuses on the external expression of emotion and an examination of thoughts and feelings that reveal Confederates’ inner experiences.¹³

In the antebellum South, slaveholders relied on public masks to confer power and construct a particular vision of self.¹⁴ More broadly and among different classes, self-mastery signaled a man’s control over himself and an elevation above slaves, women, and children—individuals who became defining others.¹⁵ Once in Confederate armies, men sought to gain control over an authoritarian and often unpleasant life, for an individual’s behavior, as viewed from the outside, dictated public reputation.¹⁶ Few men went to war realizing the rigors of campaign or the terrors of combat. Some soldiers endured the contest well—emphasizing the necessity of personal sacrifice for family and country—whereas others succumbed to depression and found little meaning in the struggle.¹⁷ Within these broader camps, individuals could and did change their feelings over time, thereby demonstrating fluidity in their personal responses to war.¹⁸ Ambiguous reactions to the Civil War should come as no surprise, given the scale of human loss and suffering.

Confederates’ range of reactions to war and reconstruction is best understood and accessed through the study of individuals—a methodological approach underpinning this project. The example of William J. Clarke is illustrative. In 1865 Clarke returned to his North Carolina home, restoring family relations and renewing friendships; however, he could not easily rebuild his prewar life. Four years earlier, Clarke had left his wife, Mary Bayard, and their children for war. He had promised to acquit himself as becomes the husband of a heroic woman and to leave their children a noble heritage if he should fall in battle.¹⁹ Having received the rank of colonel and been recognized for his gallantry, Clarke had fulfilled his promises. But upon his return, he suffered physically from battle wounds, which confined him to bed, where he turned to a journal as his confessor. To the public, he self-consciously projected the image of the proud Southern warrior. In his small, leather-bound book, however, he recorded his inescapable physical and emotional pains: suffered a good deal, feeling very badly, and "my wounds

[have]

been painful" are just a few lines denoting his considerable anguish.²⁰ Uneven financial fortunes and an uncertain future compounded these traumas and left Clarke depressed and prone to excessive drinking. His feelings and behavior disrupted hopes for a seamless family reunion, as Mary Bayard struggled to maintain the public veneer of domestic tranquility and the personal happiness of her children. Clarke’s inner demons and Mary Bayard’s outward facade demonstrate the tangled relationship between private experience and public expression in Southern culture.

Clarke at first appears to be just one of the thousands of traumatized veterans who had no hope of financial success or personal redemption in the postbellum South. But this portrait is incomplete. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, Clarke had studied law in the antebellum era and served as a lawyer in Raleigh. This training and experience aided him during the political tumult of the Reconstruction era. He and his family eventually moved to New Bern, North Carolina, where he served as a trustee and then principal of New Bern Academy. Later, after declaring himself a Republican, Clarke served on the state senate, oversaw the publication of the weekly newspaper the Signal, and acted as a political agitator. At the height of Ku Klux Klan violence in North Carolina, Governor William W. Holden appointed him commander of the First North Carolina State Troops. In July 1874 Clarke declared himself no bolter—no disorganizer but instead a citizen seeking to purify the temple, not destroy it.²¹ Although his opinions and politics upset many Democrats in the region, Clarke became a prominent public figure in post–Civil War North Carolina as he assumed key political, military, and educational posts.²²

Clarke was a disabled veteran, a state military officer, an educator, a political agitator, a husband, and a father. The Civil War had damaged him, but he also sought to change the world created by that conflict. Clarke’s story illustrates the range of reactions to war, emancipation, and reconstruction and refuses to subscribe to neat categories. Instead, his example is instructive and opens a central question in Civil War–era studies: How did Confederates make meaning of their wartime experiences and reintegrate into civilian life after the war’s close?

As Clarke had discovered, destruction and creation paradoxically marked the two faces of Southerners’ civil wars. As veterans mustered out of the military, home as a haven was no longer so simple as many had hoped for and as people today might imagine. Instead, the fractured lives of Confederate veterans created fissures in the post–Civil War South’s domestic and social arenas. Thousands of veterans returned home damaged, starkly revealing the conflict’s human cost and enduring consequences. The Civil War also created new relationships, as manifested in how Southern men interacted with and perceived one another, interactions characterized by new levels of emotional disclosure, physical intimacy, and feelings of camaraderie that carried over into the postwar era.

Men are central to this story, but only with the explicit acknowledgment that women and children directly informed masculinity, for gender is socially constructed and the product of context, class, and place.²³ Antebellum white Southern men adhered to an honor-based culture that had fostered the creation of distinct expressions of Southern manliness based on Christian gentility, physical prowess, and ideological principles.²⁴ Strict lines of gender and racial hierarchy moderated and governed Southerners’ public emotional expressions. Men commanded themselves and their feelings firmly, which bolstered an atmosphere of competition, erected barriers between men, and maintained a white social order. The crisis of war called this order into question and forced the reconfiguration of prewar behavior and expression as white Southerners, now Confederate soldiers, lived with and fought in military units that together experienced the strain of combat and the effects of want—all the while being separated from suffering families. The war created contradictions in men’s emotional regimes as they came to rely on other men for support, learned of a family structure altered by the conflict’s financial and emotional strains, and witnessed the abolition of slavery. With military defeat, whites questioned themselves as never before, sometimes suffering from self-doubt.²⁵ Civil war had necessitated new models of expression between veterans and among men and women. War caused men to express levels of emotionality and vulnerability that society once saw as the purview of women.²⁶ But white men also embraced a virulent, martial masculinity that they wielded during Reconstruction and beyond to suppress freed peoples and to restore white rule. Thus, in the wake of the Civil War, contrasting models of masculinity emerged from war and defeat.

Each of the men examined in this project served the Confederacy in some direct capacity—as an infantryman, as an officer, as a government official. The work connects people experientially, but only with a consideration of how age and life experience shaped reactions and ideas in sometimes starkly different ways: the view of a veteran of both the Mexican-American War and Civil War and the contrasting one of a twenty-two-year-old Confederate soldier. The project started out as an examination of the postwar lives of Confederate veterans. As the research progressed, questions reoccurred while particular sources came to dominate the answers. How, for example, could Southerners’ reactions to military defeat be understood without uncovering their models of expression before and during the Civil War? In what terms did veterans understand and communicate their wartime experiences? In addressing these questions, a new framework emerged that included the prewar and wartime South as a way to reveal the complexities of the postwar era. Further, a narrow range of documents—notably, letters and diaries—became essential to addressing the project’s questions, for this evidence offered a critical way to examine men’s emotional lives.

Both the sources underpinning this study and the men and women examined herein limit the book’s claims. The majority of the white Southerners discussed in Private Confederacies were slaveholders or members of slaveholding families who wrote extensively about their personal experiences; further, the project’s study group is drawn largely, though not exclusively, from the Eastern Seaboard and Upper South.²⁷ This privileged group disproportionately turned out to fight because they were highly invested in and derived the most benefit from slavery. Social and economic class shaped their commitment to the Confederacy, and they willingly endured the physical and emotional hardships that came with military service because they had the most to gain or lose from the war’s outcome.²⁸ The two chapters on the wartime era almost exclusively consider the war in the East and the Army of Northern Virginia. Rather than trying to find a representative sample of typical soldiers, this project started out with an entirely different premise that considered the exceptional importance of slaveholding Confederates as vital to the understanding of war and peace in the American South.²⁹ Wielding a disproportionate degree of power in the antebellum era, enlisting in extraordinarily high numbers during the Civil War, and spearheading extralegal resistance to Reconstruction, elite Southerners’ words and actions reveal the varied personal and emotional reactions to the Civil War era. Historians have mined similar evidentiary bases to understand how, in Drew Gilpin Faust’s wording, white Southerners wrote to explain—themselves to themselves, to each other, and to the wider world.³⁰ White elites projected a vision of filial piety that underpinned a public discourse integral to the South’s hegemonic culture.³¹ Untangling this imagery illuminates a constructed depiction of men in war and peace but also exposes an elusive unity because neither secession nor the Confederate cause received wholesale support.³²

This work is most engaged with those scholars who write, in historian Jason Phillips’s words, studies of citizens at war.³³ Reid Mitchell and Joseph Glatthaar have been at the forefront of this methodology, crafting intimate views of how the rank and file understood and portrayed the Civil War. So, too, is the project indebted to Bell Irvin Wiley’s groundbreaking scholarship on the common soldier and his world. The communities from which these soldiers came assume primacy in my analysis and demonstrate the integrity of home and battlefronts. As Glatthaar notes, Soldiers brought cultural notions and values from home that shaped the way they felt and performed their duties as soldiers.³⁴ Private Confederacies follows the lead of this scholarship by first considering Southern men’s prewar writings and social lives to reveal their models of self- and emotional expression during wartime. The project’s emphasis on men’s interior worlds has important consequences when considering their military experiences. Although soldier communities are well understood as sources for morale, historians have not fully appreciated them as networks of emotional support that were different from and deeper than antebellum male friendships. Battle rendered many men incapable of adequately communicating the experience of war to friends and family who remained at home, thereby heightening the sense of brotherhood they shared with other veterans. Once men reentered civilian society, the martial manhood and soldier communities forged in civil war were transformed into tools to suppress freed peoples through paramilitary organizations and the Ku Klux Klan.

Private Confederacies privileges individual stories, for people ultimately shaped both the personal and the emotional contours of Southern culture. By examining men between the antebellum and postbellum eras, the book seeks to understand Confederates’ changing responses to other veterans and their families. A diverse range of scholarship over the past several decades has demonstrated how both social mores and expected patterns of behavior guide emotional expression and gender identity. Building on these approaches, this work primarily uses letters, diaries, memoirs, and public performances to illuminate Southerners’ inner and outer worlds. Recorded words reveal how individuals both understood and gave meaning to war and reconstruction. As such, writers are quoted often and freely, as their words and the nuance of their expressions shed light on abstract thoughts, cultural forms, social conditions, and personal lives.³⁵ Further, primary source materials are used with little or no editing in order to preserve the integrity of original words and phrases; sic is not employed unless absolutely necessary. When writers’ disparate words are examined together, broader cultural patterns are revealed. Although individuals underpin this study, Private Confederacies seeks to understand the culture that men and women continually shaped and reshaped in order to discern broader patterns. Coupling culture’s ethos with an individual’s sensibility can reveal, in Clifford Geertz’s phrase, a collective text.³⁶ Studying the intersections between private ideas and public acts allows this work to reach beyond the idiosyncrasies