Stephen M. Hood - Patriots Twice: Former Confederates and the Building of America after the Civil War

Former Confederates and the Building of America after the Civil War

Stephen M. Hood

2020 Stephen M. Hood

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any way, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hood, Stephen M., author.

Title: Patriots Twice: Former Confederates and the Building of America after the Civil War / by Stephen M. Hood.

Other titles: Former Confederates and the Building of America after the Civil War

Description: El Dorado Hills, CA : Savas Beatie, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: After the American Civil War, former members of the defeated Confederate military attained prominent positions in the reunified nation. Former rebels served in the federal government, the U.S. Army, founded colleges and universities, and became presidents of several national professional societies.

Patriots Twice reveals many of the high-achieving former Confederates who helped build postwar America. provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020013913 | ISBN 9781611215151 (hardcover) |

ISBN 9781611215168 (ebook)

ISBN 9781611215168 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: VeteransEmploymentUnited StatesHistory19th century. | VeteransEmploymentUnited StatesHistory20th century. | VeteransConfederate States of America. | United StatesHistoryCivil War, 1861-1865Veterans. | VeteransUnited StatesHistory19th century. | VeteransUnited StatesHistory20th century. | United StatesPolitics and government1865-1877.

Classification: LCC UB357 .H54 2020 | DDC 973.8092/697dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013913

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To my granddaughter,

Harper Elizabeth Hood

[I do not] despair of the future. The truth is this: the march of Providence is so slow, and our desire so impatient, the work of progress so immense, and our means of aiding it so feeble, the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

Robert E. Lee to Charles Marshall, September 1870

This book was inspired by the current cultural, political, and scholastic movement of reassessing historical characters and causes, removing symbols, monuments, and memorials, and renaming buildings and landmarks of those deemed unworthy by current social values. When this book was being written (2018-19) the imperiled monuments were primarily those related to the Confederate States of America. This issue has also spread to historical characters and causes before and after the 1861-65 American Civil War. Many historical personages, from fifteenth century to today (from European explorers to the Founding Fathers) are being reassessed and reinterpreted based upon ever-changing social and cultural standards.

The Confederacys brief life during the Civil War, although vitally important, was only a chapter in the lives of those who survived the conflict. When the controversy over the modern interpretation and portrayal of the Confederacy erupted in the mid-2010s, I became curious about what former Confederates did after the war and how they lived their professional lives in a country that had been torn apart by such a bloody war. It had been reunified, but had the nation, at least for the most part, truly reconciled?

Biographies of prominent Southern soldiers and politicians typically include something about their prewar lives and of course their wartime service, but in most cases their postwar lives are consigned to footnotes or a short postscript. After writing this book, it is now clear that the dearth of postwar coverage shortchanges these men, as well as modern Americans who read about them and live in the country they helped to create after the guns fell silent.

In late 2016 during the early months of the national controversy over Confederate memorials, I decided to research former Confederates and study, as much as possible, their postwar lives and careers. Before my work began the bulk of my universe of knowledge in the arena of former soldiers who attained postwar prominence consisted of a slim handful of Confederate Army generals like Joseph Wheeler, Fitzhugh Lee, Thomas Rosser, and Matthew Butler (all of whom served as U.S. Army generals during the Spanish-American War), Stephen D. Lee, the former Confederate general who became president of Mississippi State University, and Robert E. Lee, who assumed the presidency of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia.

What I discovered during my research was, in a word, fascinating. Eightnot fourformer Confederates became U.S. Army generals during the Spanish-American War. Starting in 1869 with Ulysses S. Grant, a total of ten postwar U.S. presidents appointed dozens of former Confederates to fill high-ranking federal government positionssome at the highest pinnacles of various parts of our government, including chief justice of the Supreme Court. Ex-Confederates also presided over national professional societies and institutions outside of government, including the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, and the Sierra Club. Former soldiers who had donned the gray founded many colleges and universities and became presidents and chancellors of many morenot just in the Deep South (as one might expect), but in such unlikely locales as California, Colorado, Missouri, Maryland, and West Virginia. These men also taught at universities and colleges in the Union states and territories of California, Colorado, Wisconsin, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Many were elected or appointed to state, territorial, and local political offices in the old Confederacy, but this also took place in Alaska, Colorado, Oklahoma, California, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Minnesota, Utah, Kansas, the Panama Canal Zone, and West Virginia, which had seceded from Virginia in 1863 to fight against the Confederacy.

I did not investigate, analyze, or render opinions on the personal politics, opinions, or values of any of these former Confederate because that was beyond the scope and purpose of this work. Whether a man deserved his position at the time, and/or his subsequent historical notorietyif anyare better left to other researchers. Patriots Twice does not analyze, accuse, condemn, glorify, or criticize any of them. Instead, I identified and chose men based solely on their tangible professional accomplishments and the fact that (in most cases) they were welcomed into their positions by men who had worn blue uniforms and fought for the Union. If those who had crossed bayonets with these former Confederates and had suffered the most during those four long years could welcome, work with, and share the benefits of the professional contributions of these men, why are people 155 years removed from the war so virulently opposed to even a marble or bronze likeness of a Confederate soldier or a name on a building?

Any history book should be titled or described as a history of rather than the history of because new information will always be discovered and historians must constantly decide what material to include or exclude. This book is no different. More than a million men served the Confederacy. I limited entries to those whose postwar successes will be readily understood and hopefully respected by present-day Americans.