Emory M. Thomas - The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865

N ATIONALISM has been a perennial theme in American historiography, but surprisingly enough historians have devoted but scant attention to the analysis of Southern nationalism. Yet the brief and tragic experiment of the Confederate States of America with nationalism provides a laboratory scarcely less interesting than that provided by the American States between 1774 and 1789. Because historians are camp followers of victorious armies, most of them take for granted the triumph of the first American bid for nationalism and the failure of the Southern. Yet, on the surface at least, the Old South of the fifties and sixties boasted more and more persuasive ingredients of national unity than had the American states in 1774. For the Southand the Confederacyhad, among whites at least, far greater ethnic homogeneity than had the United States of the 1770s, for less than one percent of the population of the Confederate States was foreign born. It acknowledged a greater degree of religious unity than could be found in the original Statesfor outside Maryland and Louisiana the whole of the Southern population was not only Protestant but evangelical. It displayed a substantial economic unity, with concentration on staple crop agriculture and on slaves as a work force. By modern standards it confessed pronounced class differences, but by its own standards it could boast that it was a classless society, for all whites could claim membership in an upper class: here was a principle of social philosophy which speedily took on the authority of a moral and a religious principle and provided the South with one of the most powerful of all the forces making for national unitya common ideology. Nor, for all its inferiority in population and resources, was the Confederacy without military advantages: a territory more extensive than any which had ever been conquered in the whole of modern history; interior lines of communication; a long military tradition and superior military leaders; and a not unreasonable expectation of a foreign intervention which would rescue the South as French and Dutch intervention had rescued the new United States during the Revolutionary war. Perhaps most important of all was the elementary consideration that the South did not have to win on the field of battle in order to achieve independence, for it could afford to lose all the battles and all the campaigns and still triumph as long as it was prepared to settle simply for independence with no demands on the Union except the elementary one that it let the Sisters depart in peace.

With all these advantages, why did the South lose? That is the question to which Professor Thomas addresses himself in The Confederate Nation: 18611865, and whose answer he seeks down almost labyrithine ways. Was the failure political and constitutional; was it perhaps impossible for a government based on the principle of decentralization and state rights to fight and win a modern war? Was it military, insofar as the Confederacy never achieved unity of command, and never exploited its resources effectively? Was it economic and financialreliance on an agrarian economy which, with the success of the Union blockade, was unable to provide essential manufactures? Was it diplomaticthe failure of King Cotton to vindicate his sovereignty? Was it, in the end, moralthe inability of a crusade for slavery to rally support from those Old World states whose recognition and support was, in the end, essential to victory?

In The Confederate Nation Professor Thomas has reflected the powerful and persuasive political, cultural, and racial claims of Southern nationalism against the background of the economic, the diplomatic, and the moral, which proved less responsive to importunate demands for national independence. He has traced the evolution of that section which we know as the Old South into the Confederate States, and then the fortunes and misfortunes of the embryonic Confederate nation as it embraced defeat and yielded to disintegration. In the course of this review he provides us with a picture of an alternative American nationalisma nationalism which, with all its roots in America, had in many respects more in common with the nationalism of the Old World than with that of the New.

The Confederate Nation: 18611865 is a volume in the New American Nation series, a comprehensive, cooperative survey of the area now embraced in the United States. Other aspects of this era are set forth in David Potters Impending Crisis, Clement Eatons Growth of Southern Civilization, Russel Nyes Society and Culture in America: 18301860, and in forthcoming volumes on the Civil War, constitutional development, and the culture of the war and the postwar years.

H ENRY S TEELE C OMMAGER
R ICHARD B. M ORRIS