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Subject: Crosspost: H-CivWar Review, Nash on Sheehan-Dean, _Why
Confederates Fought_

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (May, 2008)

Aaron Sheehan-Dean. _Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil
War Virginia_. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
2007. xvi + 291 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, index, tables,
illustrations, maps. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-3158-8.

Reviewed for H-CivWar by Steven E. Nash, Department of History,
University of Georgia

It Is All in the Title

The title of Aaron Sheehan-Dean's new book, _Why Confederates Fought:
Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia_, captures both its strengths
and weaknesses. On the broadest level of analysis, this work continues
the ongoing debate over what inspired Confederate soldiers to fight what
proved to be a long and destructive war. The author's answer to the
question raised by his short title is that Confederate Virginians fought
to protect their families and secure their fledgling nation. In
particular, Sheehan-Dean stresses the importance of soldiers' families
in holding men in the ranks against mounting adversity. Such an argument
clearly reflects current debates over the extent and nature of
Confederate nationalism, namely, that it was an ongoing process fraught
with difficulty. His treatment of the subjects in his subtitle, however,
demonstrates the limits of his study.

Virginia is fertile ground for Sheehan-Dean's study of Confederate
voluntarism. It exceeded all other Southern states in terms of numbers
of soldiers in Confederate armies, and it achieved a truly remarkable
mobilization rate--roughly 90 percent of its military-aged white men. An
impressive statistical analysis informs Sheehan-Dean's view of
Confederate soldiers. His numbers challenge claims of deep class
divisions within Confederate ranks, revealing that regiments from all
across the state served in the Southern military. The author compares
county and enlistment data to assess the backgrounds and context of
Virginian men's enlistments as well as their desertion. Sheehan-Dean's
data reveal that nearly 60 percent of Virginian soldiers, from all
social classes and all sections of the state, volunteered to fight
within the war's first five months. Although the future state of West
Virginia failed to provide the Confederacy with troops comparable to its
eligible manpower, other sections of the state contributed more soldiers
than their white military-aged population suggested was possible. In
terms of desertion, Sheehan-Dean also finds that most Virginians who
fled the army did so in 1862. These statistics augment his criticism of
the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" thesis, which faulted sagging
morale among lower-class Southerners for Confederate defeat.

Virginia's Confederate soldiers are the true focus of Sheehan-Dean's
book. Like Gary W. Gallagher in _The Confederate War: How Popular Will,
Nationalism and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat_ (1997),
William A. Blair in _Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in
the Confederacy, 1861-1865_ (1998), Anne Sarah Rubin in _A Shattered
Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868_ (2005), and
others, Sheehan-Dean argues that white Virginians fought doggedly for a
separate Confederacy and clung to that ideal to the end of the war and
beyond. As is true of the best recent scholarship on Confederate
nationalism, Sheehan-Dean carefully delineates the evolution of
Virginian soldiers' national commitment amid the bloody crucible of the
Civil War. Confederate nationalism was not a natural spring pouring
forth from all white Southerners' hearts; it took time to create.
Sheehan-Dean follows David M. Potter in defining nationalism as a
composite of familial, communal, state, and sectional loyalties, but he
demonstrates that the war created additional meaning to the Confederate
nation.[1] In particular, he argues that a hardening Yankee war effort
intensified Virginian soldiers' will to resist. Confederate Virginians'
anger grew as they struggled to relieve the residents of Fredericksburg
after battle seriously damaged their town in December 1862, to stifle
the restlessness inspired among their slaves by Abraham Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation, and to resist the hard war waged by Philip
Sheridan in 1864. The source of Confederate troubles, they felt, could
be easily located north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Such a high demand for
sacrifice and endurance made it clear to the soldiers that their nation
was unlike the Northerners they now abhorred.

A significant component to this evolving nationalism, as described by
Sheehan-Dean, was the development of a new masculinity. Drawing heavily
on the work of Stephen W. Berry II (_All That Makes a Man: Love and
Ambition in the Civil War South_ [2003]), Peter S. Carmichael (_The Last
Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion_ [2005]), and
others, the author contextualizes Virginian soldiers within a world in
which white men coveted their family's emotional rewards as much as
economic success. The idea of defending their families, especially after
the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, invigorated Virginian
troops. As Confederates gave ground in Virginia and settled into a siege
around Petersburg in 1864, Virginian soldiers experienced a crisis in
morale. Soldiers worried that they no longer fulfilled their patriarchal
responsibility to their families. According to Sheehan-Dean, Virginian
soldiers emerged from this crisis as both stronger Confederates and
hardened soldiers. Animosity toward their Yankee antagonists
strengthened soldiers' bonds of affection with their families.
Sheehan-Dean's argument that men rededicated themselves to staying in
the army as a means to protect their families partially responds to Drew
Gilpin-Faust (_Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in
the Civil War_ [1996]) and other historians who have suggested that
women withdrew their support as the war escalated in terms of
destruction and sacrifice. Virginian soldiers convinced themselves that
they could only protect their families from their posts within Southern
armies. In other words, it was no longer a matter of physically
protecting their homes; Virginia's Confederates determined that only
ultimate victory and independence could secure their families in the
future.

Just as the strengths of Sheehan-Dean's book flow from his short title,
his subtitle encapsulates many of its weaknesses. While he addresses the
important role of familial responsibility and Virginian soldiers'
commitment to defend their loved ones, he relates few voices from the
home front. This omission constitutes a troublesome tension within the
author's argument. He places Virginia's Confederate soldiers within a
world in which emotional bonds with their families were central parts of
their lives, yet those homes remain peripheral to the story.
Sheehan-Dean seems to suggest that while the men in the ranks worried
endlessly about their families and longed to be with them, many
Virginian soldiers apparently grew detached from the home front. The
Union's hard war tactics reaffirmed their commitment to fight and defend
their loved ones, but Sheehan-Dean offers little insight into the
families they vowed to defend. As these soldiers experienced a crisis of
morale, many of their families confronted Union soldiers and otherwise
embattled communities. The impression given by the author's conceptual
structure is that the home front mattered solely as an ideal, which is
an unsatisfying depiction of an important component of the masculinity
Sheehan-Dean presents.

Most historians will concede that the Confederacy existed as a nation,
but the inner workings of that nascent nation remain hotly contested. It
is for that reason that Sheehan-Dean chose to study Virginia. According
to the author, Virginia's location "along the border with the Union" and
its "large number of diehard Unionists" made it "an ideal place to
examine questions of loyalty" (pp. 7-8). This study only partly realizes
that promise. Sheehan-Dean defines Virginia in such a way that he
sidesteps the state's internal divisions. He argues that military events
defined the physical confines of Virginia and focuses on largely
Confederate areas--but even in these pro-Confederate regions, he
neglects Unionists, such as David Strother of the Shenandoah Valley and
James Hunnicutt of Fredericksburg. Defining Virginia in this way sloughs
off West Virginia and the northern neck, which allows the author to
avoid many messy issues. By eliminating areas troubled by occupation,
desertion, guerrilla violence, and peace organizations from his study,
the author violates his first stated principle for selecting Virginia.
The result is a neat version of Virginia within which the author
explores strictly Confederate loyalty without confronting the conflict
and messiness that defined not only parts of Virginia but also Southern
states like Tennessee, North Carolina, and others.

While Sheehan-Dean's short title asks a question familiar to Civil War
historians, the limits of his work should help steer us toward important
new questions. There were areas of Civil War Virginia that render some
of his conclusions problematic. Both Kenneth Noe, in his _Southwest
Virginia's Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis in the Civil
War Era_ (1994), and Brian D. McKnight, in his _Contested Borderland:
The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia_ (2006), have found
significant divisions within southwestern Virginia. In addition, in _The
War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia_ (2001), Brian
Steel Wills has argued that a "no-man's land" existed in southeastern
Virginia late in the war. More broadly, William W. Freehling has
asserted, in _The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners
Shaped the Course of the Civil War_ (2001), that a major failing of the
Confederacy was its inability to unite all white Southerners behind the
cause. Focusing solely on Virginia's Confederate soldiers prevented
Sheehan-Dean from fully capturing both the commitment of the soldiers
and the tribulations of their families, which points to a troublesome
dilemma in terms of the Confederate nationalism debate. That tension is
a great opportunity to consider where next to take these issues. The
seeming disconnect between the soldiers and their families that
developed late in the war reveals the need for a reassessment of
day-to-day life within the Confederacy. Historians must account for all
Southerners whether they opposed the Confederacy, supported it, or
simply longed to survive the exigencies of war with as little sacrifice
as possible. Sheehan-Dean's struggle to connect the challenges facing
soldiers and their families reminds us not to lose sight of the broader
social and political issues confronting common citizens throughout the
Confederacy. Perhaps, Sheehan-Dean's study will prompt a new wave of
much-needed scholarship that grounds these loyalties within Confederate
daily life.

Note

[1]. David M. Potter, "The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice
Versa," _The American Historical Review_ 67 (1962): 924-950.



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