Introduction

The seeds of this short book lie in my examination of Stephen Dodson Ramseur as a case study in the development of officers in the Army of Northern Virginia. I undertook that military biography more than thirty years ago, tracing the young North Carolinian’s rise from lieutenant to major general in just more than three years. In the course of reading Ramseur’s voluminous correspondence, I was impressed with the intensity of his commitment to the Confederacy. Following graduation from West Point and less than a year in the U.S. Army, he resigned well before his home state of North Carolina seceded, behavior that contrasted sharply with Robert E. Lee’s well-known struggle to chart a path during the secession crisis. Turning his back on the United States seemed an easy choice for Ramseur, and his willingness to do so despite uncertainty about North Carolina’s political course struck me as notable. His conception of loyalty permitted an easy transition from one national identity to another, which, I thought, must have been true of other southern officers as well. With Ramseur and Lee in mind, I thought it might be worth revisiting the subject of loyalty at some point.¹

My work on Ramseur came at a time when scholars were debating fundamental questions relating to the Confederacy. The slaveholding republic lasted just four years but has cast a large shadow over a good part of U.S. history. Its stormy trajectory witnessed massive human and material loss, the end of the institution of slavery, and the development of a stream of historical memory that retained force for many decades after Lee’s soldiers stacked arms at Appomattox in April 1865. Yet many historians have questioned whether the Confederacy was really a nation at all, arguing that its white population never developed true feelings of national loyalty. That model surely did not fit Ramseur, I knew, and probably not Lee either.²

Reading and research over the next two decades have persuaded me of four things that help frame the chapters of this book. First, I believe the Confederacy was a nation. I consider references to a war between the North and the South to be fundamentally flawed because four southern states—Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware—never left the Union, and a big section of the most important slaveholding state broke away to form West Virginia in the midst of war. It is most accurate to think of the conflict as a contest between two mid-nineteenth-century nation-states—the United States versus the Confederacy. One of the two nations, whose entire history unfolded against a background of all-encompassing warfare, simply did not last very long.

My second belief is that a substantial majority of the Confederacy’s white residents developed a strong national identity. Only these people should be called Confederates. I oppose the terms “northerner” and “southerner” to describe the opposing populations. The term “southerner” embraces all white and black residents of the fifteen slaveholding states in 1860, millions of whom, including the overwhelming majority of African Americans, would not have considered themselves Confederates. Among white residents of the eleven Confederate states, however, support for the nation ran deep, although establishing exact percentages of those who supported or opposed the Confederacy—or those who merely sought to remain aloof and unharmed until fighting ceased—is impossible. Despite undeniable evidence of substantial internal opposition to Jefferson Davis’s administration and the war, one fact stands out: only a citizenry determined to achieve independence would have waged a conflict lasting four years, killing one in four of their white military-age males, and inflicting widespread economic and social dislocation.³

My third framing observation is that mainline military forces represented the most important institutional expression of the Confederate nation. Composed of regiments with strong state identifications, the national armies—and, most important, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia—provided tangible and highly visible proof of a collective identity that both united and transcended region, state, and locality. Well before the war’s midpoint, Lee and his army functioned much as George Washington and the Continental Army had during the American Revolution. Lee became easily the most important Confederate leader, and hopes for success rested ever more heavily on the campaigns he and his soldiers waged. As a Confederate officer observed in early 1864, “General Robt. E. Lee is regarded by his army as nearest approaching the character of the great & good Washington than any man living. He is the only man living in whom they would unreservedly trust all power for the preservation of their independence.” A Georgia woman put it more succinctly, describing Lee as “that star of light before which even Washington’s glory pales.”⁴

My final observation, which led directly to my choice of topic for this book, is that military officers formed an important component in the equation of Confederate loyalty. Their statements and conduct not only influenced the men they led but also helped shape attitudes and expectations on the home front. Their reasons for embracing the Confederacy help illuminate the larger topic of Confederate identity and shed light as well on the complex web of loyalties that contended for supremacy during the turbulent sectional squabbling of the late antebellum years.⁵

I take my analytical cue from David M. Potter, who belongs on any short list of the most perceptive interpreters of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. history. In an essay titled “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” Potter usefully reminds readers that every human being possesses numerous overlapping and often mutually reinforcing loyalties, with different ones emerging as most important at various times. Potter discusses, among other things, cultural factors, “the invigorating effect which war has had upon national spirit,” and “community of interest, not in the narrow sense of economic advantage only, but in the broad sense of welfare and security through membership in the society.” Within the South during the Civil War era, the last of these applied most obviously to white insistence on maintaining supremacy in a society that included millions of enslaved black people. Potter also alludes to the tendency among some historians to deny nationality to groups of whom they morally disapprove, even when a group may in every sense satisfy the “theoretical criteria of nationality.” Confederates and their slaveholding republic long have invited such moral disapproval.⁶

I selected three officers in the Army of Northern Virginia to pursue questions regarding Confederate loyalty. Because his letters first piqued my interest in the topic, Dodson Ramseur was an obvious choice. So was Robert E. Lee. By far the most important figure in the army, Lee traditionally has been presented as a Virginian, a reluctant convert to the Confederacy whose most powerful identification always remained with his home state. My reading of his wartime correspondence in connection with other projects contradicts that image. My third subject, Jubal A. Early, combined elements of Lee’s and Ramseur’s reactions to the secession crisis—a Unionist who grudgingly accepted Virginia’s departure from the United States but later came to personify defiant Confederate nationalism. I had studied each of them from various angles in my previous work, so I brought familiarity with pertinent sources to this project. They do not stand in for all Confederates—no three individuals could do that—or even for all officers in Lee’s army. They do represent types of responses to the secession crisis and establishment of the Confederacy that hold interpretive value beyond their specific examples. As a trio, they help us understand the malleability of loyalty and why the war dragged on for four years and achieved such intensity.

At the time of Abraham Lincoln’s election, Lee was a fifty-three-year-old lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, Early a forty-four-year-old lawyer in Rocky Mount, Virginia, and Ramseur a twenty-three-year-old second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. All were members of the slaveholding class from the Upper South (though none owned many slaves) and graduates of West Point. Lee and Ramseur were devout Christians, Episcopalian and Presbyterian, respectively, whose faith showed in correspondence with their wives, families, and friends. A lifelong bachelor, Early fathered four children with a white mistress in Rocky Mount, cursed often and imaginatively, and gave little serious attention to his personal religion.⁷

I focus on four levels of loyalty for each man—to home state, to the United States, to the slaveholding South, and to the Confederacy. I understand that multiple factors contributed to each of these loyalties, including, but not limited to, importance of family, place, politics, and religion. I sketch in broad strokes and seek to answer one principal question: How did each man define himself at critical points? For example, did Lee’s identity as a Virginian predominate when he resigned his commission in the U.S. Army? Was the well-being of the United States most important to him when he supported James Buchanan for president in 1856? Did he continue to think first of Virginia when serving as a Confederate general? Ramseur also supported Buchanan in 1856, but was it because he cared most about the nation or the slaveholding South? And did Early have his home state or the United States most firmly in mind when he opposed secession as a member of the Virginia State Convention in the winter and spring of 1861? The answers to such questions allow us to chart the ebb and flow and interconnections of the various levels of loyalty.

This is not a book about honor or religion, though I accord some attention to both. All three men often spoke of honor and duty, attributing their actions to one or both without feeling the need to define what they meant. The two words possess complex meaning, and the southern concept of honor has inspired a fairly large literature that is beyond the scope of my exploration of loyalty. It is enough to say that for Lee and Ramseur and Early, one definition would not suffice. I will generalize to this extent: when referring to honor or duty—sometimes specifically linked to patriotism—they had in mind how their actions would be perceived by, and reflect on, family and friends and how their public reputations would be affected. As for religion, Lee and Ramseur likely would have placed it first among priorities in their lives, and both believed God’s hand ordered all events and that all Christians must strive to be worthy of his approbation. Yet religious considerations did not prompt Lee to leave the U.S. Army or persuade Ramseur to support the Confederacy, and Early, I think it safe to say, never consulted the Bible when facing a moment of decision.⁸

The word “identity” appears often in the pages that follow, but not in the way anyone interested in identity studies would approve. I avoid those often opaque theoretical thickets altogether. When I allude to Lee’s Virginia identity, I have in mind his loyalty to home state. Ramseur’s Confederate identity, in my formulation, represents his conception of belonging to a national community that promised to safeguard the culture and interests he most prized. Similarly, Early’s identity as a loyal citizen of the United States rested on the belief that, under the Constitution, his political and property rights would be protected.

A few themes emerged from looking at my three subjects. First, generational differences mattered a great deal. Born in 1807, Lee lived for many years when sectional tensions garnered few headlines and slavery was seldom a toxic issue. Nine years younger than Lee, Early also grew to maturity before the strident sectionalism of the 1840s and 1850s. In contrast, Ramseur never knew a time free of concern that the white South and its slave-based social system were under attack from the North. The three men’s reactions to secession reflected their generational backgrounds, with Ramseur much less inclined to think the best of northerners and more firmly wedded to the slaveholding South than to the United States.⁹ Second, in each man’s case, the war dramatically increased antipathy toward Yankees. Although hardly surprising, this phenomenon had immense importance in two respects—it produced a more committed effort to win independence and rendered genuine postwar reconciliation extremely unlikely.¹⁰ Third, the examples of Lee, Ramseur, and Early undercut the notion that the doctrine of state rights held sway in the Confederacy. All three thoroughly embraced a nationalist point of view and demanded that state and local interests give way to the needs of the central state.

The last theme relates to the centrality of slavery and race to the loyalties of all three men. Whether looking to state or region or either of the two nations, they often stressed the need to preserve the social and economic structure that guaranteed white control over millions of black people and their labor. Early most often mentioned the economic side of the subject, largely because his father lived close to Ohio, where the prospect of slaves escaping to free territory was higher than in areas farther south. The threat of forced emancipation, whether triggered by John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation, or the movement of U.S. armies into the Confederate hinterlands, raised the specter of potentially bloody social chaos. Even Lee, though typically cast as more moderate in his views on slavery and race than the majority of white southerners, lashed out at anyone who menaced the slave-based social structure. The words of Lee and Ramseur and Early point inescapably to the conclusion that, as historian U. B. Phillips famously observed, “the central theme of Southern history” for the white South always had been “a common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man’s country.”¹¹

The white man’s country most familiar to Robert E. Lee, Stephen Dodson Ramseur, and Jubal A. Early rested on a foundation of slavery. Ramseur never knew any other, and Lee and Early accommodated themselves to a world without slavery and with less certain white dominance only because the U.S. victory in a great war left them no alternative. In the end, their journeys toward Confederate loyalty and unwavering service in pursuit of independence left them angry and disoriented, bereft of stability in an uncertain world.