WILLIAM BARNEY’S MARVELOUS TALE, THE MAKING OF A Confederate, is likely to catch its readers off guard. Barney is drawn to the question of Southern white identity and its tortuous relationship to that seminal event in its creation, the Civil War. He is well aware of the way Lost Cause proponents have reshaped the war’s narrative to forge a white identity shorn of its more troubling aspects. In the eyes of those proponents, the cause that was lost in Southern defeat was the fight for states’ rights and the right to secede from the Union. Slavery, the South’s “peculiar institution,” became a secondary, almost glancing part of their narrative.
The obvious counter to this mythology is to demonstrate, as more than one scholar has, that the leaders of the secession movement boldly and repeatedly insisted at the time that slavery was “the immediate cause of the late rupture,” to quote Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens in March 1861. States’ rights was more a political tool than a sacrosanct principle, and Southerners willingly used federal power to override the wishes of Northern states, as when the Fugitive Slave Law employed federal power to force Northerners to protect slavery.
Barney understands these facts, of course, but in exploring the creation of a Southern white identity he has not rounded up the usual fire-eating suspects. Instead, he tells the story of an unstereotypical planter and his extended family. Walter Lenoir was not a low-country nabob who gloried in slavery’s positive good or saw the institution as central to his life. He came from the piedmont country of North Carolina and professed to find the slaves he owned almost more of a burden than they were worth. In the late 1850s he remained a Unionist and even considered moving to Minnesota. (His land-hunting expedition up north makes a fascinating counterpoint to a similar search about the same time by a former Tennessee slave, James Thomas, whose journey is profiled in a companion book in this series by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, In Search of the Promised Land.)
When the war came, however, Walter Lenoir and his family threw their support to the Confederacy, and Barney skillfully traces the anguished steps of a soldier who serves, fights, is severely wounded, and ultimately is transformed by the war as he struggles to give meaning to the remainder of his life. The end result is an unorthodox tale of one man’s Lost Cause. We discover, with fresh eyes, how Lenoir deals with the patriarchal burdens of family history and grapples with the often troublesome relations with his slaves and with poor white tenants on his lands. It is not the story we were expecting, and as such exhibits what the editors hope is one prime virtue of the Oxford New Narratives in American History: the pleasure of being caught off guard.
James West Davidson
Michael B. Stoff
Series Editors