Stephen Dodson Ramseur typified a cohort of young men from slaveholding families who made an early and zealous commitment to the idea of a Confederate nation. Reared during the increasing sectional tensions of the 1840s and 1850s, Ramseur developed a powerful sense of southern identity that guided his actions during the secession crisis and into the war years, more than did concomitant loyalties to his native North Carolina and to the republic he served as a West Point graduate and junior officer in the U.S. Army. Ramseur’s unqualified belief in the superiority of a slaveholding society undergirded his southern identity and made for a seamless transition to resolute Confederate purpose. Despite multiple wounds and much hardship during the war, he called for any sacrifice necessary to avoid subjugation to what he deemed a Yankee government and people willing to wage unrestrained war and bent on destroying a social system designed to ensure racial stability and white supremacy.1
An outline of Ramseur’s brief life will help frame consideration of the interplay among his various loyalties.2 Born in Lincolnton, at the edge of North Carolina’s Piedmont region, on May 31, 1837, he grew up in comfortable circumstances. His father, Jacob A. Ramseur, was a prosperous merchant who owned eight slaves in 1840 and twenty in 1850. Dodson, as he was commonly known to family and friends, attended Davidson College before winning an appointment to West Point, from which he graduated fourteenth of forty-one members in the class of 1860. He served as a captain in the Battalion of Cadets, a post awarded more on the basis of military skills than on academic accomplishment, and later was described by a classmate as “respected, honored, and loved” at the academy.3 Commissioned brevet second lieutenant upon graduation and assigned to the Third Artillery, he was promoted to second lieutenant of the Fourth Artillery in March 1861.
Ramseur never took up his new assignment. Resigning his commission on April 5, 1861, well before North Carolina seceded, he was commissioned first lieutenant in the Confederate artillery on April 22 and major in the Corps of Artillery and Engineers in the North Carolina State Troops the following month. He commanded a battalion of artillery under Maj. Gen. John Bankhead Magruder on Virginia’s Peninsula and saw initial action near Yorktown on April 16, 1862. Ambitious for higher rank, Ramseur left the artillery to become colonel of the Forty-Ninth North Carolina Infantry on April 28, 1862. His principal action with the Forty-Ninth came on July 1, 1862, at Malvern Hill, where he received a serious wound in his right arm during one of the last Confederate attacks on that sanguinary day. Six months of painful convalescence ensued, during which Ramseur received news of his promotion to brigadier general. Recovered by January 1863, he took charge of his brigade, a notable one that comprised the Second, Fourth, Fourteenth, and Thirtieth North Carolina regiments, serving in Brig. Gen. Robert E. Rodes’s division of Stonewall Jackson’s Second Corps in the Army of Northern Virginia.
Over the next sixteen months, Ramseur fashioned a record as one of the most aggressive and successful brigade commanders in the Confederacy’s premier military organization. Throughout his tenure in brigade command, he drilled his soldiers hard, paid scrupulous attention to their logistical needs, and most important, demonstrated initiative and composure in combat—attributes that virtually guaranteed success within the culture of command created and nurtured by Robert E. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia. The brigade fought doggedly and suffered horrific casualties at Chancellorsville on May 2–3, 1863. That performance earned Ramseur, who suffered a second wound, praise from both Lee and Jackson. His men helped break the Union line on Seminary Ridge on July 1 at Gettysburg and fought again at the Wilderness on May 6, 1864. Ramseur’s finest hour as a brigadier came at Spotsylvania on May 12, 1864, when his soldiers mounted a memorable counterattack after the Union breakthrough in the Mule Shoe salient. Wounded for a third time, he was summoned to army headquarters to receive Lee’s personal thanks.
Superior service as a brigadier brought Ramseur assignment on May 27, 1864, to head the division formerly under Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early, who had been elevated to command of Jackson’s old Second Corps. Promoted to major general on June 1, 1864 (the day after his twenty-seventh birthday, making him the youngest West Pointer to achieve that rank in Confederate service), Ramseur acquitted himself well at Cold Harbor and in mid-June accompanied Early and the Second Corps to the Shenandoah Valley. His division led Early’s column that saved Lynchburg from a Union force under Maj. Gen. David Hunter on June 17–18 and fought at the battle of the Monocacy on July 9. At Third Winchester on September 19, Ramseur’s soldiers overcame initial problems to wage a stubborn defense against imposing odds. Three days later at Fisher’s Hill, Ramseur commanded the division of Robert E. Rodes (who had been killed at Third Winchester) in a contest that ended with Confederates abandoning the field in confusion.
Ramseur’s growth as a division leader showed at Cedar Creek on October 19. His brigades contributed to stunning Confederate success in the morning, then anchored Early’s defense as Federal pressure mounted in the late afternoon. Married since the previous October 28 to his cousin Ellen Richmond, Ramseur had learned three days before the battle of the birth of their only child (a daughter—although he did not know the gender). At Cedar Creek, he wore a flower in his lapel to honor the child and seemed to be infused with tremendous energy. At about five o’clock in the evening, as Ramseur steadied his troops in the face of heavy assaults, a musket ball pierced his right side and punctured both lungs. Captured during a chaotic Confederate retreat and taken to Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan’s Union headquarters at Belle Grove, he endured a night of intense pain and died the next morning. On November 3, Federals conveyed the body through the lines near Richmond, where it lay in state at the capitol before transportation several days later for burial in Lincolnton.
Reaction to Ramseur’s death bespoke his high reputation within and outside the Army of Northern Virginia. Gen. Lee informed the secretary of war that “the gallant General Ramseur” had been wounded and captured. A Richmond newspaper referred to him as the “Chevalier Bayard” of the Confederacy—a tribute typically bestowed on officers whose service was deemed “without fear and beyond approach”—and the Raleigh Confederate reported “his loss to our cause as a melancholy fact.” The chief artillerist in Early’s Army of the Valley used more prosaic language to make the same point. “Poor Ramseur is dead,” he wrote on October 26, 1864, “… He was one of the bravest of the brave. He thought himself mortally wounded, sent his watch & messages to his wife.” Brig. Gen. Bryan Grimes, a North Carolinian who had served as one of Ramseur’s brigade commanders and succeeded him as head of the division, described his “brave and heroic” former superior’s death as a loss “to his State and the country at large. No truer or nobler spirit has been sacrificed in this … war.”4
Grimes’s allusion to state and nation opens the way to examine Ramseur’s various loyalties, and North Carolina is the place to begin. Although the Ramseur family had been far less prominent in the history of the Old North State than had the Lees in Virginia, it nonetheless claimed substantial roots in Carolina soil. The first members arrived from southern Pennsylvania with other German settlers in 1750,5 and subsequent generations established themselves in the area beyond the Catawba River and eventually in Lincolnton. Active in the Presbyterian church and educational endeavors, the extended Ramseur family included supporters of the Whigs and Democrats in the 1830s and 1840s. Lucy Mayfield Dodson, Ramseur’s mother, hailed from Milton, situated in a rich tobacco-growing region just across the state line from Danville, Virginia, and was the daughter of Stephen Dodson, a prominent citizen who served several terms in the North Carolina legislature. Ramseur thus spent his childhood and adolescence among Lincolnton’s and Milton’s slaveholding elites, secure in his social position among the people in one long-established and another more recently populated part of North Carolina.
Although Ramseur always thought of himself as a North Carolinian and evinced a good deal of state pride, his surviving correspondence includes relatively little evidence that state loyalty stood paramount among factors shaping his life and crucial decisions. In the autumn of 1855, he alluded to North Carolina in explaining what motivated him to do well at West Point. “All that is noble and manly,” he began in answering a letter from his mother, “the devoted love that I have for my Parents, the respect that I feel for my friends, the duty that I owe to my old native State, and my own interest and happiness, excite me to continued exertion, to overcome every opposing difficulty and to perform my whole duty. Thus I will graduate, and be a man, a good and useful man. Then I hope to be qualified for my occupation or profession.” Only one other letter from West Point includes a comparable mention of North Carolina. In the autumn of 1856, Ramseur celebrated the election of Democrat Thomas Bragg to the governorship, offering “[t]hree cheers for Gov Bragg, and nine for the Gallant old State, which knows so well how to appreciate and reward true merit.” Bragg’s success demonstrated that he stood “‘[f]irst in the hearts’ of the people of North Carolina, for such a reward I would gladly live, labor and die.”6
Ramseur’s principal interest in the state seems to have been focused on politics. A devoted Democrat, he followed contests for North Carolina and national offices closely. In August 1855, more than a year before cheering Bragg’s reelection as governor, he welcomed the success of Burton Craige, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives who had supported his admission to West Point. “Huzza a thousand times for the gallant Craige and the Democracy of the 7th Congressional District of N.C.,” he wrote to his close friend and later brother-in-law David Schenck: “Give me an account of the election at my old Home. Send me the vote of the State if it is convenient.” Apart from such examples of engagement with North Carolina politics, Ramseur seldom discussed events in the state unless directly related to his family.7
The final stage of the sectional crisis and the war years revealed the degree to which Ramseur looked beyond North Carolina for his primary allegiances. As already noted, he believed North Carolinians waited too long to secede, resigning his U.S. Army commission several weeks before the state’s secession convention voted on May 20, 1861, to depart from the Union. As the war unfolded, Ramseur applauded evidence of staunch service by military units from his home state but worried about the degree to which North Carolinians on the home front embraced the Confederacy. As early as September 7, 1861, scarcely 3½ months after North Carolina seceded, he commented about reports of waning enthusiasm behind the lines. “I confess,” he wrote in response to a pessimistic report from his brother, “it gives me the ‘Blues’ to have such a gloomy account from North Carolina. ‘A weak, timid governor surrounded by broken down politicians.’ With ‘few arms and ammunition scarce’ surely this is discouraging. That we must all suffer, and severely, I doubt not, but should we therefore hesitate or turn back? A noble spirit spurns difficulties. A victory without dangers is too cheap to be glorious!” Closing his discussion of North Carolina with a tone of hollow optimism, Ramseur professed assurance “that the patriotism and gallantry of the Old North State will now shine forth with increased brilliancy.”8
The peace faction that developed in North Carolina in 1863–64 profoundly disturbed Ramseur, and the actions of William Woods Holden of Wake County, who edited the North Carolina Standard and became the state’s most prominent critic of the Davis administration, provoked violent denunciations from him. In the summer of 1863, Ramseur blamed Holden for increased desertion among North Carolina troops in the aftermath of Gettysburg and questioned the depth of support for the war among the state’s civilians. “The Army, I think, I know, is sound,” he wrote his brother somewhat defensively, “and will do honor to the State. If the people at home do not condemn us in dying in this cause.” Ramseur’s own brigade almost unanimously denounced “Holden & his Tory party,” but he wondered, in a passage that revealed obvious doubts, whether it could “be possible that Holden’s influence is as potent for evil as you think? I can not think so. Are there not true men enough to put him down?”9
In February 1864, along the Rapidan River military frontier, Ramseur reacted to news that Holden might enter the gubernatorial race against Zebulon B. Vance. “I have heard it said that Holden will be a candidate for nex[t] Gov.,” he observed. “Surely this can not be. If indeed he does run, will not Vance beat him badly.” Adopting much more pointed language, he expressed a hope that “North Carolina is not so low, so disloyal, as to bow to Holden as Gov. If so, then Good bye to the Old State, whose history might be so high, proud & glorious, but whose fair fame has been tarnished by the blackest of all traitors. But I wont allow myself to think of such a possibility.” Although voters inside and outside the army overwhelmingly supported Vance in the election late that summer, Ramseur’s overall correspondence relating to Holden leaves no doubt that he harbored continuing concerns about strength of will among North Carolina’s civilians.10
Stalwart North Carolinians in the Army of Northern Virginia provided Ramseur’s greatest source of state identification during the war. After the battle of Ream’s Station on August 25, 1864, for example, he cheered Lt. Gen. A. P. Hill’s success against Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock’s Union Second Corps and emphasized that victory was due to “Three North Carolina Brigades! Hurrah for the Old North State! I hope Richmond papers will do our gallant troops full credit for their glorious achievement.” As the last sentiment suggests, Ramseur fretted that Virginia newspapers would slight North Carolina’s military contributions. His state pride often took the form of a rivalry with Virginia, whose officers dominated the Confederate high command and whose soldiers, believed Ramseur and many other non-Virginians, garnered unfair attention from the capital city’s influential press. He thought his brigade had suffered from such biased reporting after Chancellorsville, where the North Carolinians had mounted a costly assault—“charged over two, or large parts of two, brigades from Va. who refused to march onward & meet the leaden storm of Yankee bullets.” He relied on newspapers in North Carolina to publish the truth about how the state’s units performed in battle.11
From Ramseur’s perspective, his brigade sustained the honor of North Carolina by repeatedly suffering heavy casualties and winning praise from the army’s top officers. After his regiments lost more than half their number in savage fighting at Chancellorsville on May 3, 1863, Robert E. Lee sent a plea to Governor Vance for replacements to fill the depleted ranks. “I consider its brigade and regimental commanders as among the best of their respective grades in the army,” affirmed Lee in words that residents of any state would welcome regarding their regiments and officers. At Chancellorsville, continued the army’s chief, “the brigade was much distinguished and suffered severely, General Ramseur was among those whose conduct was especially commended to my notice by Lieutenant-General Jackson.” In his own report of the campaign, Ramseur proudly claimed that his men merited “the thanks of our beautiful and glorious Confederacy.”12
That claim illuminates how Ramseur ultimately positioned his sense of state loyalty in relation to a more powerful devotion to the Confederacy. On the one hand, disappointment or even shame at his North Carolina connection surfaced at various times. If state politics or antiwar activity hindered an all-out effort to establish a slaveholding republic, as seemed possible in the winter of 1864, Ramseur stood ready to say “[g]ood bye to the Old State.” On the other hand, resolute service by North Carolinians in uniform brought out his deepest attachments to the state and its people. Whether assessed in terms of positive or negative behavior, North Carolina’s importance, for Dodson Ramseur, always remained secondary to that of the Confederacy.
The United States never inspired an equivalent form of national loyalty during Ramseur’s pre–Civil War years. This is not to say he lacked any attachment to his nation. Most important, he drew particular satisfaction from the fact that Americans could boast of a “glorious birthright, won by their ancestors in the bloody revolution.” The young Dodson Ramseur knew that his town and county were named after Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, a Revolutionary hero who accepted the British surrender at Yorktown. He heard stories about one of his great-grandfathers who had fought in the southern campaigns from 1780 to 1783, a veteran of the battles of King’s Mountain, where he was wounded, and Eutaw Springs. Closer to home, he could wander over the ground near Ramsour’s Mill, where Loyalist and Patriot militiamen collided in a bitter engagement on June 20, 1780 (another of his great-grandfathers operated the mill at the time of the battle). The Patriot victory demoralized Loyalists in the region and created scars in Lincoln County that anticipated those inflicted by a much greater civil war the next century. For many young men of Dodson Ramseur’s generation and locale, aged veterans of the battles in the Carolinas provided a tangible link to the nation’s Revolutionary origins.13
More personally, Ramseur believed a career as a military officer would yield honorable service to the nation. From early boyhood, he often imagined himself a soldier and loved to read about martial figures he called the “World’s renowned Heroes.” While still at Davidson College in 1854, he had rhetorically noted to David Schenck, “[W]ho knows but that ‘I may write my history with my sword.’” Ramseur manifested an awareness of national obligation shortly after reaching West Point in the summer of 1855: “I am determined to do my duty. I am aware … of the importance and honor of the position I now occupy, but more especially, of that which I will certainly occupy, if I remain true to God, to my Country, to my Parents, and to myself.” While at West Point, he explored the historic sites in the area, including the remnant of Fort Clinton, part of a series of Revolutionary War works. His strongest statement of loyalty to the United States mentioned the fort’s picturesque aspect. “From my window,” he wrote on April 6, 1857, “I look out … upon the white ruins of old Fort Clinton, surrounded by dark Cedars, an eloquent and lasting monument to the throes of that ‘Time which tried men’s souls.’ I love the old Fort; and as I climb around its falling battlements, or grope among its dusty dungeons, my heart swells with grateful, patriotic pride, and I thank God that I am an American.”14
The reverie triggered by the sight of Fort Clinton suggests a genuine affection for the United States, but Ramseur’s occasional expressions of national pride pale in comparison to the depth and emotional power of his identification with the slaveholding South. Within the hierarchy of his pre–Civil War loyalties, devotion to the South stood first. He believed fervently in the superiority of the slaveholding society within which he grew to maturity, responded passionately to what he saw as aggressive moves against the South by abolitionists and other northerners, and foresaw the disruption of the republic along sectional lines long before the secession crisis of 1860–61. This loyalty and that to North Carolina, it scarcely needs to be mentioned, complemented one another very well.
Ramseur’s thorough embrace of the South’s slaveholding society runs throughout his antebellum correspondence. The presidential election of 1856, which pitted Democrat James Buchanan against the fledgling Republican Party’s candidate John C. Frémont, stirred Ramseur’s strong sectional identity. Robert E. Lee supported Buchanan because he thought the Pennsylvanian would calm sectional tensions and thus help the Union. Ramseur did so because he thought Buchanan would be best for the South. The canvass played out against a backdrop of violence. Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of the Senate, and increasing bloodshed in Kansas Territory, where both pro- and antislavery forces perpetrated outrages, received wide coverage in newspapers. “Yes, a crisis has already arrived,” Ramseur wrote in mid-September, “which demands every Southerner to stand forth and battle for his rights, sacred rights, bequeathed by Revolutionary Ancestors, dearer to him than life itself. O God! strengthen the hearts and nerve the arms of every Son of the South and enable them to march forth and maintain their rights with the determination and dignity of Freemen!” For white southerners such as Ramseur, the “massacre” of five proslavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas and other incidents raised the specter of an abolitionist war against the peculiar institution. “Does not your blood boil with indignation,” he asked a friend in North Carolina, “as you read of abolition & outrages, cowardice & cruelty now daily enacted in Kansas Territory?”15
In the wake of Buchanan’s victory in November, Ramseur attacked Frémont and the Republicans and offered a paean to the institution of slavery. “Look at the vote of the North in the late contest,” he observed, continuing, “[a]n overwhelming majority for a renegade, a cheat and a liar, only because he declared himself in favor of abolishing slavery, the very source of our existence, the greatest blessing for both master & slave, that could have been bestowed upon us.” Ramseur singled out the results in New Hampshire, a traditionally Democratic state where Frémont received 54 percent of the vote, as “amply sufficient to satisfy any impartial mind that opposition to Southern institutions was the ruling principle. See what strides the rankest Abolitionism is making over the entire North!” He labeled Republicans “defeated Scoundrels, Enemies of their country, their Sod, & themselves. Cheers! Long & loud for those noble & daring patriots who have achieved the glorious victory.” The conflation of Republicans and abolitionists, which badly distorted political reality in the free states, allowed Ramseur to play down the possibility of any true sectional rapprochement.16
Ramseur unabashedly embraced the idea of secession as an alternative to accepting northern interference with the slaveholding South’s social structure. Although happy with Buchanan’s election, he saw it as no more than a temporary victory. “Our Country is safe for a few years more,” he suggested, “& I believe those years to be very few. … [A]ny man of the smallest observation can plainly see, that the Union of the States cannot exist harmoniously; that there must, & can & will be a dissolution, wise, peaceful & equitable, I hope, but at whatever cost, it must come.” By “country,” Ramseur in this instance probably meant the United States, as the subsequent reference to “the Union of the States” suggests; however, by 1856 he also thought in terms of a prospective southern nation. He believed the sections had taken divergent cultural paths that eventually would bring a national disruption. Whether he was correct in positing the development of conflicting cultures—a topic historians have debated endlessly—is beside the point. Ramseur accepted such a schism as reality and acted accordingly. “Our manners, feelings & education is as if we were different Nations,” he insisted: “Indeed, everything indicates plainly a separation. Look out for a Stormy time in 1860. In the mean time the South ought to prepare for the worst. Let her establish armories, collect stores & provide for the most desperate of all calamities—civil war.”17
In early 1858, with coverage of the turmoil in Kansas Territory prominently in the news, Ramseur took a political stance devoid of any foundational loyalty to the United States. “I am a Secessionist out and out,” he stated proudly, “… in favour of drawing the dividing line from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Let us establish a Southern Union, a glorious confederacy, whose foundation shall be Liberté et Égalité. … I have the immortal Calhoun with me for now, the ‘Balance of Power’ is, or soon will be, lost to us if Kansas is refused admittance as a slave state. I think the South will be wrong to do anything but withdraw & establish an independent & glorious Nation!” Sectional turbulence had been part of Ramseur’s consciousness since his preteen years, and he and others of his generation had experienced no war or other defining event that promoted feelings of national solidarity capable of overcoming sectional biases. Moreover, since Florida and Texas had been admitted to the Union as slaveholding states in 1845, four new free states had been added (Iowa, Wisconsin, California, and Minnesota; Oregon would make a fifth one year later), placing the South at a disadvantage of four senators—which undoubtedly contributed to Ramseur’s beleaguered frame of mind.18
A harsh view of Yankees permeated Ramseur’s thinking and letters, an attitude shared by many of his generation. While at West Point, he forged friendships with a few northern men—Ohio-born George Armstrong Custer and New Yorkers Wesley Merritt and Walter McFarland among them—and conceded the presence of “some few noble spirits among the Northerners.” Merritt later described Ramseur as “one of my dearest friends at West Point,” and both he and Custer sat with their old West Point comrade during his last painful evening at Belle Grove in October 1864. But in the aggregate, nonsoutherners routinely were the targets of Ramseur’s biting criticism, with New Englanders most often in his crosshairs. “Among the Cadets,” he observed in the autumn of 1855, “none are called Yankees except those from Mass. N.H. Vt. & several of the New England states. With these the southerners do not associate and indeed, they are generally kept at a respectable distance by all.” In April 1856, he professed a willingness to encourage most of the plebes in the next incoming class but not any “miserable Abolitonist,” whom he would treat severely. When Ramseur imagined a new southern nation, he thought that “[t]he first infernal Yankee who shows his face across our line [should] be tarred & feathered for the 1st offence & hung as high as Haman for the second!”19
Ramseur described southern men as “far superior to the Yankees in every respect except the habit of close application to studies. They make much better officers than the Yankees. … more than two thirds of the Cadet Officers are always Southerners.” He became very close to a pair of South Carolinians: Wade Hampton Gibbes, whom he described as a “fine fellow, a real southerner, frank, warm-hearted and generous to a fault,” and Frank Huger, a member of one of the state’s first families. During 1857 and 1858, clashes among cadets over political issues increased, including one pitting William McCreery of Virginia against James Harrison Wilson of Illinois. Gibbes acted as second for McCreery in a contest that resembled a formal duel. The two young men fought to a draw in front of a large crowd of cadets. Gibbes later clashed with New Yorker Emory Upton, who had attended abolitionist Oberlin College before enrolling at West Point, in one of the academy’s most famous sectional confrontations of the prewar years. Ramseur’s fondness for Gibbes is noteworthy because many at the academy considered the South Carolinian an extreme secessionist and agitator. Ramseur shared Gibbes’s political opinions but escaped being labeled a sectional provocateur.20
A family financial crisis deepened Ramseur’s animosity toward Yankees. His father suffered a major reverse in 1857–58, falling prey to a cascade of debts that eventually ruined his business. Jacob Ramseur lost both social and economic position, settling for a clerkship at a local cotton factory owned by a brother-in-law. The episode took on a doubly painful character for Dodson Ramseur because the key figure in the debacle was a dishonest northerner. He poured out his frustration in early November 1857. Knowledge that his parents and family had “been robbed of all earthly goods by the damning treatchery of a miserable Yankee, a villain, a liar, a fiend of Hell, a——, too overcomes me.” Should he ever meet the man, vowed Ramseur, “I shall certainly crush him to atoms.” Looking toward the future, Ramseur envisioned leaving the army after three years to make enough money as a civil engineer to support his struggling family. According to his closest friend, Ramseur’s mother declined precipitately after the financial setbacks, succumbing in November 1859. This cruel blow surely intensified the young officer’s loathing of northerners.21
The strongest evidence that Ramseur’s southern loyalty trumped those to both state and nation came during the spring of 1861. Posted to Washington, D.C., with a battery of light artillery, he resided in the capital as the Union broke apart. On February 28, North Carolina voters rejected a proposal to convene a secession convention. Four days later Abraham Lincoln delivered his first inaugural address, which denied the right of secession, placed the issue of civil war in the hands of white southerners the president called “my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen,” and reminded listeners (and later readers) of the “mystic chords of memory” connecting all Americans to the Revolutionary generation’s sacrifices in creating the nation. Although we have nothing from Ramseur’s pen at this time, he surely was disappointed with North Carolina’s lack of action and unmoved by Lincoln’s plea for union. Four and one-half years earlier he had lashed out at “[b]lack Republican hell-hounds” as a set of “base black-hearted traitors to the Constitution and our Country”—by which he meant the white South’s slaveholding country protected by “sacred rights, bequeathed by Revolutionary ancestors.” On April 5, more than six weeks before his home state seceded and a week before Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Ramseur submitted a brief letter of resignation to the U.S. Army. He soon began a journey to the new Confederacy’s capital in Montgomery, Alabama, away from an old allegiance and toward a new one.22
Ramseur’s actions in April 1861 raise the question of whether a nascent southern nation existed before Lincoln’s election ignited the secession movement in the lower South. As I noted in the introduction, historians have argued for many years, and with considerable fervor, about the existence of true Confederate national sentiment. The manner in which the Confederacy’s white population waged the war, with its crushing human and material toll, and its tenacious commemoration of the conflict during ensuing decades persuade me that such sentiment unquestionably existed. For most of the generation that experienced the conflict, the Confederacy represented their best chance to preserve the economic and social promise of the founding generation—the Revolutionary “sacred rights” to which Ramseur often referred—in the face of growing northern dominance. The right to own slaves and take them anywhere, to order society on that bedrock, and thus to maintain control over millions of enslaved black people while guaranteeing a form of equality for all white people took on profound importance. Those who shared Ramseur’s views possessed a loyalty to the South forged amid chronic sectional tensions and characterized by bonds of sympathetic interests across state lines, a shared Revolutionary inheritance, and a belief in common destiny—factors important to any conception of national community. The somewhat nebulous abolitionist threat between the 1830s and the early 1850s turned more ominous in the mid-1850s with the advent and rapid success of the Republican Party, setting the stage for a transition from a nascent southern to an actual Confederate nation.23
Ramseur’s southern loyalty quickly converted into a Confederate one. In September 1856, he told David Schenck that “an awful crisis is approaching, which will decide whether we shall still advance with rapid strides towards a perfect state of civilization, as one great and united people; or, whether we shall be … destroyed by civil wars.” That letter also referred to Republicans as traitors to “our Country.” Ramseur’s emphases in these passages on a civilization and nation that suited proslavery southerners such as he and Schenck help explain his seamless embrace of the Confederacy. The newly established republic represented an ideal to Ramseur, one impossible for him to imagine if the southern states remained yoked to those above the Potomac and Ohio rivers. Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens’s “Cornerstone Speech,” delivered two weeks before Ramseur resigned from the U.S. Army, delineated themes the North Carolinian would have seconded. The “great truth” of black inferiority and the superiority of a slaveholding society formed the cornerstone of the Confederacy, insisted Stephens. “If, we are true to ourselves, true to our cause, true to our destiny, true to our high mission,” Stephens said in closing, “in presenting to the world the highest type of civilization ever exhibited by man—there will be found in our Lexicon no such word as FAIL.”24
From the first weeks of the war until his mortal wounding at Cedar Creek, Ramseur consistently called for subordination of all personal, state, and local interests, including North Carolina’s, to those of the new nation. His antebellum loathing for Yankees deepened into hatred as the war progressed, and he consistently argued that no sacrifice was too great to avoid subjugation to Abraham Lincoln and his Union armies. His daring leadership on many battlefields impressed superiors, inspired men in the ranks, and occasioned positive comment behind the lines. The overall impact young officers from the slaveholding class, such as Ramseur, had on Confederate fortunes cannot be quantified; however, they ranked among the most ardent nationalists, and their words and actions surely strengthened feelings of national community.25
Ramseur mirrored Robert E. Lee’s support for a more intrusive national government if necessary to win the war. He favored any measure that would put the largest number of men into uniform. “I do hope Congress will pass some sensible laws this session,” he affirmed in late 1863, “improving the currency & increasing the army by enrolling every man who has employed a substitute.” (Most conscripted men who had hired substitutes eventually were made eligible for the draft.) He lauded Jefferson Davis’s call for an extension of conscription and suspension of habeas corpus in early 1864—the latter a presidential action that unhinged strong supporters of state rights—as well as a congressional ban on the importation of luxury goods. When the army faced a severe shortage of food in the winter of 1863–64, he favored a national mobilization of resources almost certain to bring hardship to the home front. “The Army must be fed,” he insisted, again in language almost identical to Lee’s on the same issue, “even if people at home must go without.” Black people as well as white should feel the pinch. At a time when soldiers’ rations consisted of I⅛ pounds of flour and ⅛ to ¼ pound of meat per day, he told his brother that their sister “ought to limit the negroes to ⅛ to ¼ lb. of meat, when they have vegetables. Our whole people should do this & send the surplus to the army.”26
Ramseur exhibited scant patience with soldiers or civilians who obstructed the war effort. A long letter in March 1862 set an exacting behavioral standard that reappeared frequently in his wartime correspondence. Confederate military failures in North Carolina and Tennessee, he believed, had unmasked disgraceful behavior among some southern officers. Roanoke Island had fallen to Union forces under Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside in early February because of “cowardly or ignorant officers who had the command of brave men.” Unaware of, or indifferent to, the fact that Roanoke’s defenders had faced a far more powerful enemy, Ramseur hyperbolically proposed a merciless penalty: “Hang every officer who surrenders! We are fighting for existence as well as honour & right, but what were the first without the last!” The manner of Fort Donelson’s capitulation similarly outraged him. The two top Confederate officers, Brig. Gens. John B. Floyd and Gideon J. Pillow, had abandoned the garrison, leaving Brig. Gen. Simon B. Buckner to suffer the humiliation of accepting U. S. Grant’s terms of “unconditional surrender.” Pronouncing Floyd “a scoundrel beyond hope of redemption,” Ramseur sputtered, “I tell you had F. & P. possessed moral courage there would have been a different result at Donelson.”
In this letter, Ramseur also echoed Lee’s call for resolution among civilians. Although widespread hardship had yet to reach across much of the Confederate home front, news from North Carolina revealed a divided population insufficiently focused on the vital goal of establishing a new nation. “Let us stop our miserable political squabbles,” wrote Ramseur angrily, “& as one man put our shoulders to the wheel, pulling & pushing, working & suffering all things, until our independence is achieved, & whoever baulks or hesitates or disobeys, let him be put out of the way, speedily, surely, eternally.” In order to win the war, he would accept consolidation of power in the hands of a dictator if necessary and hang traitors—“as did our forefathers”—and cowards.27
The level of mobilization favored by Ramseur subjected Confederate society to extreme stress, resulting in desertion, draft evasion, hoarding of goods, vocal opposition to intrusive governmental interference in the economy, and violence on the home front. The American Revolution had witnessed comparable internal fractures within the colonial population (as the battle of Ramsour’s Mill showed), and the Lincoln government also dealt with a storm of controversy relating to emancipation, conscription, suspension of habeas corpus, and other policies. But the Confederacy suffered greater turmoil than the United States because the central government took more drastic actions and contending armies operated almost solely within its boundaries. In the backwash of major campaigns and among the hills and mountains of the Confederate upcountry, irregular units and freebooters preyed on civilians and disrupted the normal patterns of life. Few states endured greater political and social roiling than North Carolina, something Ramseur’s correspondence with David Schenck tracked in detail. Remarkably, most Confederates adapted to escalating governmental demands, and the Davis administration managed to sustain a fierce resistance to Union military power despite internal strains.28
Ramseur made no special allowances for himself during the war, habitually placing the national cause before personal and family concerns. Although desperate to see Ellen Richmond, his cousin and fiancée, in March 1863, he wrote, “Just now, I feel that I would give everything I possess to be with you my Sweetest Nellie,” but “[d]uty calls me away and though sometimes my heart aches to be with you, yet I remain here willingly in the service of our Country’s glorious cause.” Dodson and Ellen were married in October 1863 and spent three months during the ensuing winter together in his brigade’s camp near the Rapidan River. She left the first week of April 1864, and constant campaigning after the advent of the Overland campaign prevented a reunion. The separation weighed heavily on Ramseur, made all the worse by continuing financial instability for his family in Lincolnton. Two weeks before his death, Ramseur worried about Nellie’s condition as she reached the final stage of pregnancy: “I cant tell you how full of anxiety I am to hear from you. … Ah! Me! How I do long to be with you My Beloved Wife. … We must bear separation, hardship and danger for the sake of our Country. We must dare and do in the cause of liberty. We must never yield an inch or relax any effort in the defence of our homes or the establishment of our nationality.”29
Most obviously, Ramseur backed unyielding nationalist rhetoric with utter fearlessness, sometimes bordering on recklessness, on the battlefield. His five wounds—at Malvern Hill, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, and two at Cedar Creek—attested to his habit of leading from the front. Such was his reputation in this regard that Frank Huger, a West Point friend and able Confederate artillerist, remarked somewhat drolly after Gettysburg, “Ramseur was not hurt this time.” Virtually the entire high command of the Army of Northern Virginia praised Ramseur’s bravery in the course of the war, as when, after Chancellorsville, Maj. Gen. A. P. Hill remarked on his “gallant leadership” and Maj. Gen. James E. B. “Jeb” Stuart applauded his “heroic conduct.” Jubal Early, Ramseur’s superior in the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign, spoke of his lieutenant as “a most gallant and energetic officer whom no disaster appalled, but his courage and energy seemed to gain new strength in the midst of confusion and disaster. He fell at his post fighting like a lion at bay.” An officer in the Second North Carolina Infantry summarized the effect of his style of leadership, describing Ramseur in 1864 as “universally beloved by every man in his brigade. No braver or better man lives than he is. … He fights hard and is very successful. His men like to fight under him.”30
Neither setbacks on the battlefield nor worsening conditions on the home front weakened Ramseur’s commitment to an all-out effort to win Confederate independence. “Sad and grievously disappointed” after Gettysburg, he nonetheless urged Nellie not to “dream for a moment that my confidence in the final success of our cause, the complete and glorious triumph of our arms, has abated one jot or one tittle.” Although harboring no illusions about how difficult a path lay ahead, he was “prepared to undergo dangers and hardships and trials to the end. We have yet much to suffer. We will suffer it all bravely and heroically. A glorious and honorable Peace will be our rich and lasting reward.” He remained resolute after the unprecedented bloodletting of the Overland campaign and difficult operations in the Shenandoah Valley between May and September 1864. “Whatever course the North pursues our duty is very plain,” he wrote Nellie from near Winchester. “We must fight this fight out. … Too much precious blood has been shed for the maintainance of our rights, too great a gulph has been opened up between us & our foes to allow even the idea of reunion to be entertained. No! No! We can & we must bear & suffer all things rather than give up to Yankees & mercenaries our glorious Birthrights.”31
The last sentence of his letter to Nellie underscores how Ramseur’s resolution, deeply rooted in antebellum devotion to the South’s slaveholding society, demanded no compromise with an enemy he saw as committed to destroying everything of value. He regularly deployed the harshest terms when referring to Lincoln and the U.S. armies—the “Northern Tyrant” and his “vandal hordes,” as he put it in one letter. Although his reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation is not recorded, it easily can be imagined. Lincoln’s proclamation of December 8, 1863, which offered amnesty to most Rebels who would swear an oath of allegiance to the United States and accept emancipation, elicited a sarcastic reaction. “Were you not all amused at old Abe’s proclamation,” he asked Nellie. “Really he takes it for granted that we are all whipped. I think the Old Abe has much work ahead of him before he can persuade us to accept his terms. Don’t you?” The targeting of civilian property by Union soldiers during the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign provoked Ramseur, who railed against the “hand of the destroyer”: “Truly it does seem sacraligeous to despoil such an Eden-like spot by the cruel ravages of war!” The Yankees “respect neither helpless age nor tender woman. Surely a just God will visit upon such a nation and such an army the just indignation of His terrible wrath!”32
Devout Presbyterianism and unflinching Confederate nationalism often comingled in Ramseur’s letters. As the Army of Northern Virginia prepared for the spring operations in April 1864, he prayed “most earnestly that Our Heavenly Father will so order all things that our Enemy will be driven back in confusion, that his heart may be changed so that he will be persuaded to let us depart in peace. Oh! I do pray that we may be established as an independent people, a people known and recognized as God’s Peculiar People!” He revisited this theme in early September, placing the Confederate struggle in a world context. “Let us pray for peace,” he implored Nellie, “[t]hat the minds & hearts of our Enemies may be turned from War & that our Heavenly Father will establish us in peace & independence. That we may be a Nation whose God is the Lord! An Example of National Christianity to the Nations of the Earth!”33
That September, as Ramseur anticipated postwar life in an independent Confederacy, he turned again to the Revolutionary example. Since boyhood, the exploits of the founding generation had captivated him. Those patriots had risked everything in a contest against Britain’s military and economic might. They had created a government that protected the rights and liberties essential to Ramseur’s idea of a superior slaveholding civilization. “How proud I will be,” he wrote Nellie less than two weeks before the battle of Third Winchester opened the final stage of the 1864 Valley campaign, “to tell our children that I fought and helped to win some of the great battles of this Second War of Independence! Wont you My Darling.”34
Six weeks after his superior penned those lines, Maj. R. R. Hutchinson informed Ellen Ramseur of her husband’s death. A member of Ramseur’s staff present at Belle Grove, Hutchinson wrote on October 20 that the general’s “last thought was of you and of his God, his country and his duty.” He wished that he “could once see his wife and little child before he died” but trusted to meet them hereafter. “He died as became a Confederate soldier and a firm believer,” read Hutchinson’s last words, which convey an important truth about the trajectory of Ramseur’s loyalties. He considered himself a North Carolinian and southerner for whom the Confederacy had become paramount. Such loyalty to the Confederate nation among other young officers, as well as among the men they led and inspired, helps explain the length and fury of the Civil War.35