The Confederacy as a Moment
of Possibility
By M I C H A E L T . BERNATH
MOST WHITE SOUTHERNERS WHO SUPPORTED SECESSION IN I 86 I VIEWED
it as a means of protection. Abraham Lincoln's recent electoral
victory had broken the South's hold on national politics and seemingly confirmed that northemers, as southem radicals had warned,
were intent on changing the country in ways that southerners would
not want. Thus, the southern states left the Union in order to preserve
the South: its institutions, slavery, and way of life. Through secession, southemers believed they were upholding the ideals of their
Revolutionary forefathers, defending the system of govemment created by the Founders, and protecting their society and cherished
rights. Secession was a conservative revolution, a "counterrevolution,"
a revolution against change.'
Certainly, this is how Confederate president Jefferson Davis presented the matter. "Ours is not a revolution," he still maintained
during the Civil War's waning days; "our struggle is for inherited
rights."^ The eminent Presbyterian divine James Henley Thomwell
agreed: "We are not revolutionists—we are resisting revolution. We
are upholding the true doctrines of the Federal Constitution. We are
conservative."'' It was the North that had lost its way, had broken the
federal compact, had been overrun by fanaticism and abolitionism,
and had tumed its back on its political and religious traditions. All
the South desired was to be left alone. The North had become sick
and dangerous, and southemers needed to free themselves before
that sickness spread. As one southem essayist wrote in January 1861,
' James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), chap. 8,
"The Counterrevolution of 1861," pp. 234-75, esp. 244-46. The author would like to thank
George Rabie, Robert Bonner, Paul Quigley, Frank Towers, Jonathan Wells, and Dominique
Reill, as well as the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Southern History, for their generous
comments and invaluable suggestions.
^"Speech in Augusta, Georgia," October 3, 1864, in William J. Cooper Jr., ed., Jefferson
Davis: The Essential Writings (New York, 2003), 345^9 (quotations on 346).
^ J. H. Thomwell, Our Danger and Our Duty (Columbia, S.C, 1862), 5.
MR. BERNATH
is an associate professor of history at the University of Miami.
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Volume LXXIX, No. 2, May 2013
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THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
the northem states had become a "cancer," and for the health of the
South, he urged, "let us cut it off.""*
Despite these avowedly conservative intentions, the requirements
and exigencies of war soon forced change on white southemers. Politically, what began as a states' rights confederation was transformed
into a centralized nation-state with powers far exceeding those of the
U.S. govemment before 1861. Economically, the agricultural slave
states undertook a crash course in industrialization, urbanization, and
nationalization. Socially, the pressures of war opened wide cracks in
the seemingly solid class hierarchy of the Old South, and slaveholding elites, in the face of unexpected resistance, were forced to make
concessions to and even take their cues from nonslaveholders. Slavery
itself steadily eroded, and the war that began with Confederate vice
president Alexander H. Stephens declaring the institution to be the
"comer-stone" of southem civilization witnessed the authorization, if
not the implementation, of black Confederate soldiers before it was
over.^ In short, the experience of creating a nation and fighting an allout war for survival produced a series of intemal revolutions that
transformed southem society into something very different from what
slaveholders had seceded to protect. This "Confederacy as a revolutionary experience" thesis was most memorably, forcefully, and concisely argued in Emory M. Thomas's classic 1971 book of that title.^
It remains a dominant theme in Confederate studies and continues to
shape the narratives of Civil War monographs and college courses
alike. And for good reason: The Civil War was a revolutionary experience, and the South was transformed in ways that few members of
the white ruling class anticipated and even fewer desired, even before
defeat overtook them and ushered in the most revolutionary change
of all—the destmction of slavery.
But while the view of secession as a conservative, preservative act
was without a doubt the dominant one held by Confederates, it was not
universal. Some in the South, from the beginning, saw secession, the
formation of the Confederacy, and even the war itself as vehicles for
significant social and political change. In their view, the creation of
"""The Union: Its Benefits and Dangers," Southern Literary Messenger, 32 (January 1861),
1-4 (quotations on 4).
^ "Speech Delivered on the 21st of March, 1861, in Savannah, Known as 'The Comer Stone
Speech,' Reported in the Savannah Republican," in Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens, in
Public and Private: With Letters and Speeches Before, During, and Since the War (Philadelphia,
1866), 717-29 (quotation on 721).
Emory M. Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J., 1971).
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
301
the Confederacy presented a unique moment of opportunity. Inspired
by southem independence and encouraged by the unsettled state of
southem society, they pushed agendas for change, some of them quite
sweeping, before the public eye. In so doing, these Confederates promoted different and often competing visions of the purposes and
possibilities of southem nationhood. That the creation of a new nation
would excite such hopes for reform, even perfectionist impulses,
seems hardly surprising—it almost always does—but this is not the
story often told for the Confederacy.' This essay examines the ideas
and activities of three groups of such hopeful Confederates—women's
education advocates, slavery reformers, and antidemocratic theorists—
all of whom embraced the formation of the Confederacy as an opportunity to enact long-contemplated changes. They attempted to harness
the fires of war in order to transform the South into what they believed
it should be.
Of course, members of these groups were far from the only southemers who yeamed for a future different from the one secessionist
leaders presented. Historians have long discussed how poor whites,
southem Unionists, and especially enslaved and southem free blacks
desired and, through their active opposition, pursued radical changes to
the political and social order during the war. Most recently, Stephanie
McCurry has demonstrated how soldiers' wives and slaves—two groups
of southemers explicitly excluded from the Confederate political
process—asserted their voices and became political actors by forcing
Confederate leaders to adapt wartime policies in the face of such
insistent demands and staunch resistance.^ Many historians have emphasized the divisions within southem society and the opposition of many
southemers to Confederate war aims as evidence of the weakness or
incompleteness of Confederate nationalism and a cause of, or at least
^ Recent scholarship has begun to explore some of these questions. John Majewski, in
Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Corifederate Nation (Chapel Hill,
2009), argues that economic self-sufficiency and industdal modernization were intdnsic to many
secessionists' visions of the Confederate future. In Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual
Independence in the Civil War South (Chapel Hill, 2010), I contend that southem cultural
nationalists seized on the birth of the Confederacy as their long-awaited opportunity to cast off
southem dependence on northem culture and to create a Confederate national culture of their
own. Looking more broadly, national movements and reform often go hand in hand, at least
since the late eighteenth century. There are many examples, but perhaps some of the best
remembered reform-odented nationalist leaders are the Italian Risorgimento's Giuseppe Mazzini,
France's Jules Michelet, the Austro-Marxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, India's Mohandas K.
Gandhi, and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser.
^ Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South
(Cambddge, Mass., 2010).
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THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
a factor contributing to, the Confederacy's defeat.^ Thus, those southemers who sought a different path have often been viewed as barriers
to Confederate independence. These demands for change came from
the governed and the enslaved—from those outside the ruling class—
whose attachment to Confederate nationalism was conflicted at best.
As McCurry has observed of Confederate soldiers' wives, "they did
not much speak a language of nationalism at all."^°
What differentiates the Confederates under discussion in this article
from these other, often studied oppositional groups is that their demands
for change came from within the slaveholding elite. Moreover, they
consciously deployed the language of Confederate nationalism to legitimate their agendas. In making their cases, women's advocates, slavery
reformers, and antidemocratic writers all argued that their projects were
part of the same stmggle against the North as the military conflict and
that the realization of the Confederate nation's tme potential and
destiny required significant social and political reform. Always careful
to emphasize the "southemness" of their ideas, they defined themselves as diametrically opposed to their northem enemies. While their
complaints and proposals had deep antebellum roots, they believed
that the creation of the Confederacy provided the opportunity to enact
changes that would have been difficult or impossible to implement
before the war. For these three groups, the Confederate nation was a
point of departure rather than a bulwark of preservation.
Such advocates for change were certainly outliers in wartime southem society, but they were outliers within a certain Confederate nationalist context, and their activities and arguments demonstrate both the
flexibility and the constraints of Confederate nationalism. Looking to
the future of an independent Confederacy, they felt compelled to
discuss, debate, and agitate for their plans for change even as the war
raged. Though their visions for the future were distinct, and in some
ways in direct conflict, these Confederate reformers believed that
the creation of the Confederate nation presented a fleeting moment of
'For instance, see Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of
Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge, 1978); Richard E. Beringer et al.. Why the South Lost
the Civil War (Athens, Ga., 1986); Wayne K. Durrill, War of Another Kind: A Southern
Community in the Great Rebellion (New York, 1990); William W. Freehling. The South vs. the
South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York,
2001); Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the
Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861-1865 (Charlottesville, 2005); David Williams, Rich Man's
War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley (Athens, Ga.,
1998); and David Williams, Teresa Crisp Williams, and David Carlson, Plain Folk in a Rich
Man's War: Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia (Gainesville, Fla., 2002).
'" McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 136.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
303
possibility and imagination. The purpose of this essay is to examine
these three particular groups in turn to determine how and why they
embraced the Confederacy and even the coming of the war as their
ideal vehicles for change.
Emboldened by secession and the revolutionary possibilities of
separate nationhood, women's advocates immediately came forward in
the early days of the Confederacy's life to demand "a more extended
mental culture and a more enlarged sphere of action" for white southern
women. As one of the more remarkable articles to appear in De Bow's
Review during the war concluded, "The beginning of our career as an
independent nation, a career destined, we believe, to be prosperous
beyond all comparison in the armais of history, ought to be signalized by the beginning of a nobler, loftier career for women. . . . [T]he
part contributed by her in throwing off a hateful and despotic sectionalism has not been a slight one; and in the advantages resulting from
the political revolution she ought to share largely."'^ Such forthright
advocacy was an unexpected development. While a nascent women's
rights movement had gained a limited following during the 1840s
and 1850s in the North, particularly in New England and upstate
New York, no such movement had emerged in the southern states.
Indeed, the idea of women's rights was met with outright hostility
throughout much of the South, and the movement was denounced
as yet further proof of Yankee fanaticism. In the Old South, where
conservatism, especially when it came to gender roles, was a point of
pride, southern voices calling for women's rights reform, while not
absent, had struggled to be heard. ^^
During the war years, however. Confederate women and their
male supporters began to speak out with increasing assertiveness.
' ' "Education of Southern Women," De Bow's Review, 31 (October-November 1861), 381-90
(first quotation on 388; second quotation on 390).
' On the cultural barriers southern reformers faced and on southem hostility to the women's
rights movement in particular, see Michael O'Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and
the American South, 1810-1860 (2 vols.; Chapel Hill, 2004), esp. chap. 6; Elizabeth FoxGenovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel
Hill, 1988), esp. 30, 243-44, 282-86, 334-39; Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Slavery
in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order (New York,
2008), esp. 223-27; Fox-Genovese and Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and
Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (New York, 2005), esp. 196-98, 257; Stephanie
McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political
Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York, 1995), esp. chap. 5; Suzanne
Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860
(New York, 1984), esp. 240-44; Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women
and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1998), esp. 37-38, 101-2; and Clement Eaton,
The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (New York, 1964), esp. chap. 13.
304
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
demanding an expansion of the permissible range of female activities
and educational opportunities. Much has been written about the experiences of Confederate women during the war. With most of the men
off fighting, women assumed control, often reluctantly and uncertainly, over the southem home front. They ran the farms, attempted
to manage what they saw as an increasingly unruly slave population,
undertook wage labor, confronted northem invaders, fended off brigands, faced hunger, shortages, and other privations, and took to the
roads as refugees. Many historians have pointed out how the revolutionary experience of war dramatically, if only temporarily, expanded
the boundaries of women's economic and social spheres, undermined
the gender hierarchy of white southem society, and made women,
especially soldiers' wives, into an important political constituency that
no Confederate politician could safely ignore.'^ The wartime experiences of white southem women remain central to our understanding of
the history of the Confederacy and to explaining Confederate persistence and defeat. The focus of this essay, however, is not on those
women who had new roles and obligations thrust upon them by the
exigencies of war, those whom necessity forced to become the "mothers
of invention."'"* Rather, it is on the far fewer who demanded change
from the beginning, those who sought to make the improvement of
southem white women's lives a condition of Confederate independence itself. These advocates urged women to take advantage of the
unsettled nature of southem life and their uncertain economic and
political status to push for immediate reforms.
Much of this agitation took place in the columns of the Confederate
periodical press. With women now making up the bulk of the readership, southem editors devoted increasing space to articles that addressed
'^See McCurry, Confederate Reckoning; Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women
of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1996); George C. Rabie, Civil
Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana, 1989); Edward D. C. Campbell
Jr. and Kym S. Rice, eds., A Woman's War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate
Legacy (Richmond, Va., 1996); Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds.. Divided Houses:
Gender and the Civil War (New York, 1992); Laura F. Edwards, Scarlett Doesn't Live Here
Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (Urbana, 2000); Mary Elizabeth Massey,
Refugee Life in the Confederacy (Baton Rouge, 1964); Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades
(New York, 1966); Victoria E. Ott, Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War
(Carbondale, 111., 2008); Philip N. Racine, "Emily Lyles Harris; A Piedmont Farmer during
the Civil War," South Atlantic Quarterly, 79 (Autumn 1980), 386-97; Giselle Roberts, The
Confederate Belle (Columbia, Mo., 2003); Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From
Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago, 1970); LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in
Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (Athens, Ga., 1995); and Bell Irvin Wiley, Confederate
Women (Westport, Conn., 1975).
'" Faust, Mothers of Invention.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
305
women directly. Most of this writing focused on praising women's
wartime heroism and on urging their care and support for the soldiers.
But these Confederate joumals, unintentionally, also became forums
for debating the role of white women in southem society. In soliciting
southem authors, and especially women, to come forward and contribute to a burgeoning Confederate national literature, editors sometimes
got more than they bargained for.
The case of the Southern Monthly is a good example. Published
by Hutton & Freligh in Memphis beginning in September 1861, the
Southern Monthly was the first of the new Confederate literary periodicals to emerge in the aftermath of secession, determined to take
advantage of the unique publishing environment created by isolation
and the Federal blockade.'^ As the editor welcomed a growing number
of native southem writers for his second issue, he was surprised by the
submission by "Tin-Pan" on the controversial subject of "Women's
Rights."'^ Tin Pan demanded to know why southem women had been
denied "an equal share in the management of our domestic and political affairs." He called for "extending the franchise" and even for
allowing women to hold office. He asked why women's pay was only
"a third" of men's though "[t]heir work is as necessary and expenses
as great." To this "shameful oppression" southem women "ought
to submit no longer," and he encouraged them to "stand for your
rights!"'^ Though the editor printed the letter, he preceded Tin Pan's
piece with a strong condemnation, lest the Southern Monthly's female
readers get any wrong ideas. "It was a part of [God's] plan that woman
should be subordinate to man," he told them, and "[w]hatever tends
to disturb the harmony of God's design is wicked." Putting the matter
to rest, or so he thought, he declared, "Let us have no such nonsense. It
may do for the strong-minded (!) of the United States, but we of the
Confederate States, prefer woman as we found her among our mothers
and sisters and wives. Her rights are those of the husband. She should
ask for no more." Summoning a common metaphor, he concluded,
"Let no power interpose to interrupt the harmony of their lives.
He the stately tree and she the graceful vine, clinging to it with
unyielding tendrils for support."'^
"For more on the Southern Monthly and the campaign for Confederate cultural autonomy
generally, see Bemath, Confederate Minds, 151-210.
'*"Our Sanctum," Southern Monthly, 1 (October 1861), 145-50 (quotations on 147).
"Tin Pan, "Women's Rights," ibid., 148-49 (first and second quotations on 148; remaining
quotations on 149).
'* "Our Sanctum," ibid., 147-48 (first and second quotations on 147; third quotation on 147-48;
fourth quotation on 148).
306
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
But the matter was not concluded. The following month the joumal
received a scathing letter from Mahala Jane Cross. She mockingly
congratulated the editor for his "wise and masterly" response to Tin
Pan. "What if [Tin Pan's] incendiary writings should stir up the latent
strong-minded in our midst to insurrection?" she asked, tongue in
cheek. "What if they seize the high places of Govemment, get the
reins in their own fair hands, set the deposed to knitting socks for
the absent soldiers, or rocking cradles for the present babies?" Cross
saved her sharpest barbs for the editor's stately tree/clinging vine imagery. "I was once, when very young and giddy, a believer in the 'strongminded' doctrines," Cross confessed. "I argued (very sophistically I
now admit,) that nature itself pointed out that woman should be taught
to stand alone," but the editor's "'stately trees and clinging vines'
simile" had cured her of such foolishness. "[I]f you know of any
handsome young tree, why, I'm the vine waiting with those 'unyielding tendrils,"' she quipped in her parting shot.'^
This spirited exchange in the Southern Monthly was exceptional in
its tone, but not in its subject matter. This was not the last time that the
issue of women's rights would appear in the Southern Monthly before
its suspension in May 1862, nor did women's advocates confine themselves to its pages.^° In making their case for reform, however, these
activists had to tread very carefully so as not to appear to be in league
with the "fanatics" of the North. Their ideas and their motives were
purely and authentically southem, they assured readers, and they took
great pains to distance and distinguish themselves from the northem
radicals whom they held in abhorrence. This all-important distinction
was what "an intelligent lady in Texas" tried to convey in a letter to
De Bow's Review. "I am no advocate for 'woman's rights' in the present
acceptation of the term," she explained defensively, "but I contend
that she is entitled to equal advantages of mental culture, and the
selfishness of man should not withhold them from her."^' Another
De Bow's columnist was even more explicit: "We are in favor of
"Mahala Jane Cross, "Woman's Rights," Southern Monthly, 1 (November 1861), 227-28
(first, second, and third quotations on 227; remaining quotations on 228). The best the editor
could muster, "wdth[ing] under her tomahawking," was personal insult, venturing that the
"strong-minded" Cross was no doubt "some luxudant 'vine' that had fiung its tenddls around
some slender sapling, and with mere weight had bome the same, bending and helpless, to earth."
"Our Sanctum," Southern Monthly, 1 (November 1861), 225-35 (quotations on 228).
^°See also Lelia W., "Woman a Patdot," Southern Monthly, 1 (October 1861), 113-15;
Izilda, "A True and Simple Tale of '61," ibid., 1 (December 1861), 280-82; Mary J. S. Upshur,
"A Woman's Plea for the New Republic," ibid., 1 (Apdl 1862), 602-5; and Eliza E. Harper,
"An Appeal to the Women of the South," ibid., 605-7.
^' "Editodal," De Bow's Review, yi (January-February 1862), 161-70 (quotations on 164).
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
307
woman's rights in the highest, noblest sense, and therefore we plead
her claim for higher intellectual culture. But for that pestilent doctrine,
springing latest-bom and ugliest from the foul embrace of Yankeeism
and infidelity, we have no sympathy. . . . Those creatures in the
Northem States who appear in the pulpit, at the bar, on the lecturer's
stand and on the arena of politics, are not women; they are horrible
abortions, nondescripts, utter perversions of human nature."^^
Whereas northem lunatics sought "to make woman usurp the place
of man" by "assert[ing] a physical equality which does not exist," the
demands of Confederate reformers were far more reasonable.^^ As
"Lelia W." explained in the Southern Monthly, reformers who sought
to "cultivate a spirit of self-reliance" in the southem woman did not
mean "that she should become masculine." Rather, "she must rise
above the weakness and follies generally attributed to her sex, leam
to depend on herself and still maintain her womanly qualities."^'*
There would be no wearing of bloomers in the Confederacy, these
writers promised.^^ While they complained about wage inequality
and campaigned to open to women some professions—those "which
do not necessitate the rude struggle and rough contact of men," such
as medicine and the fine arts—few joined with Tin Pan in calling for
woman suffrage. Instead, their demands focused largely on securing
for southem women the right to a thorough and useful education.
Speaking for women's education advocates throughout the Confederacy, a columnist in De Bow's declared, "That system of society
is wrong which condemns woman to comparative ignorance, which
provides inefficient means for the gratification of that desire of knowledge which is the grand characteristic of human beings."'^^ It was the
righting of this wrong to which these writers devoted their efforts and
for which, they believed, the war and the birth of the Confederacy
provided unique opportunities for action.
Although southem female academies and seminaries had proliferated during the late antebellum period and more rigorous and comprehensive curricula had been introduced, such improvements were
hardly sufficient, at least in the eyes of these critics. Calls for educational reform had surfaced sporadically in the Old South, but such
^^ "Education of Southem Women," De Bow's Review, 31 (October-November 1861), 387-88.
''•^ Ibid., 387 (first quotation), 388 (second quotation).
^ Lelia W., "Woman a Patriot," 114.
^'See, for example, George Fitzhugh, "The Women of the South," De Bow's Review,
31 (August 1861), 147-54, esp. 153.
^* "Education of Southem Women," De Bow's Review, 31 (October-November 1861), 388-89
(first quotation on 388; second quotation on 388-89).
308
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
demands became more insistent in the wake of secession and intensified as the war dragged on.^^ Continuing deficiencies in southem
female education had stunted the intellectual maturity of young women
and prevented them from realizing their God-given potential, these
Confederate reformers charged. "This much flattered and much abused
sex is in no one thing, perhaps, so much flattered and so much abused
as in her Education," complained Edward Southey Joynes, acting
professor at Hollins Institute, "the oldest and largest female Seminary
in Virginia." He contended that female education, "as too often conceived and practiced," was "at once a shallow pretension and a gross
outrage." Even for those who could afford it, southem female education, especially higher education, was narrow, frivolous, and of
too short duration: "The knowledge imparted is a mere smattering;
the accomplishments mere tinsel gloss," reformers argued. As most
southem female schools had followed "Northem models," used northem textbooks, and even employed northem teachers, the Yankees
were in part to blame for this sad state of affairs. But southemers bore
the primary responsibility both for adopting these flawed models and
for refusing to adequately fund the region's stmggling schools. "In
every Southem State there are one or more [male] universities, built
by the public money . . . . Can any one point out such an institution for
young women in all the South?" the writer in De Bow's demanded.^^
Thanks to their parents' and their states' neglect, southem women had
never been given the opportunity to prove themselves. Dr. James G.
Ramsay observed in an 1863 address before the "Young Ladies" of
Concord Female College in StatesviUe, North Carolina. "How long and
uninterruptedly has she been permitted to remain at the few schools
" O n antebellum elite southem female education and especially its advances, see Christie
Anne Famham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization
in the Antebellum South (New York, 1994); and Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak:
Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill, 2006). See also
Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New York, 1982),
123-38; Sally G. McMillen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South (Arlington
Heights, 111., 1992), 77-85; Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United
States (2 vols.; New York, 1929); Rabie, Civil Wars, 18-22; Anya Jabour, Scarlett's Sisters:
Young Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill, 2007), esp. chap. 2; and Jonathan Daniel Wells,
Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (New York, 2011), esp. chap. 2.
^* Hollins Institute, The Education of Teachers in the South: Embracing a Letter from Prof.
Edw'd S. Joynes to Geo. P. Tayloe [Taylor], Esq., and a Plan for the Foundation of a Normal
School in Hollins Institute, Virginia; To Which Is Added a Catalogue of the Institute, for the
Sessions 1863-4 (Lynchburg, Va., 1864), 13 (first quotation), 3 (second quotation), 14 (third
and fourth quotations). On Hollins Institute, see Dorothy Scovil Vickery, Hollins College,
1842-1942: An Historical Sketch (Hollins College, Va., 1942).
^'"Education of Southem Women," De Bow's Review, 31 (October-November 1861), 383
(first and second quotations), 384 (third quotation).
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
309
and colleges, scarcely deserving the name, which have been doled out
to her, as a favor, rather than as a right?" he asked pointedly.^°
Ultimately, the inadequacies of female education stemmed from
"an incorrect estimate of woman's powers, and in a false view of her
relation to man," and reformers labored to disabuse southemers of
such pemicious, albeit entrenched, notions.^' Southem society, as a
whole, expected too little of its women intellectually, reform advocates insisted. As Professor R. N. Price lamented to the readers of the
Nashville-based Home Circle in April 1861, "The accomplished lady
of the day . . . . is little more than a striking and attractive article of
parlor fumiture; . . . a butterfly, that flutters a while in the social
breeze, exhibiting her pretty colors for the amusements of amateurs."^'^
For this reason, some fathers saw little need for their daughters to
receive the equivalent level of schooling as their sons, and husbands
often expected in their wives other qualities than well-developed
minds. Many planters, the Southern Cultivator chided in November
1861, "tormented by seeing an idle negro" remained "undisturbed at
sight of an idle daughter."^^ Writing on the same topic in the same
month, an essayist in De Bow's Review noted with disgust that "[w]e
know men of high literary culture . . . who would give to women, their
companions and the mothers of their children, a literary culture not very
different from and but little higher than that of kitchen-maids." In
seeking a partner, southem men to their discredit were too "easily
satisñed," requiring merely that "[s]he must be handsome in person—
must be able to read and write with tolerable correctness—must be
able to enter a drawing-room gracefully and chat fluently on agreeable
nothings, and must have educated her fingers sufficiently to be able
to play some of the popular music of the day."^"*
The fault for this alleged intellectual infantilization of southem
women rested only partially on men's shoulders, however, for "[i]f
he is to blame for asserting the inferiority of woman she is to blame
for assenting so readily to the imputation."^^ There was no disguising
^^ James G. Ramsay, An Address Delivered by Hon. James G. Ramsay, M.D., Before the
Young Ladies of Concord Female College at Statesville, May 29th, 1863 (Statesville, N.C,
1863), 9.
•" "Education of Southem Women," De Bow's Review, 31 (October-November 1861), 385.
'^ R. N. Price, "Popular Objections to a High Standard of Female Education; No. I," Home
Circle, 1 (April 1861), 202-6 (quotation on 205).
'^ [Charles Wallace Howard], "The Education of Our Daughters," Southern Cultivator,
19 (November 1861), 281-83 (quotations on 282).
'" "Education of Southem Women," De Bow's Review, 31 (October-November 1861), 386.
"/Wá., 389.
310
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
the fact that women had been "operatives" in their own oppression, "the
connecting link between freedom and slavery," as Price put it.^^ "[O]ur
women marry too early" was the constant cry of educational reformers
as they tried to convince southem girls to stay in the classroom. "A
vicious public sentiment has stamped the character of a woman who
remains unmarried . . . with something of disgrace," they complained;
thus, "young women yet in their early teens, chafe at the restraints
of the school and sigh to launch forth upon the ocean of life." Rushing into courtship and then marriage "not only with minds but bodies
undeveloped," these young women condemned themselves to mental
immaturity. In pushing for change, educational activists therefore
recognized that they must fight on two fronts and that "reform in the
system of education, to be complete, must begin with [southem
women]" themselves.^^
A more rigorous and broader-based education would correct these
past injustices but would in no way challenge the southem social or
gender order, these reformers repeatedly assured Confederates. Advocates only sought to provide women with an education that would
properly prepare them for their roles as companions, helpmeets, and
mothers. In making the case for the further expansion of female
academies' curricula, proponents self-consciously avoided claiming
intellectual equality between the sexes. To many southem ears, such
an assertion would have smacked of Yankee fanaticism. Instead,
reformers argued, "The relation which exists between [men and
women] is rather that of equivalence than of equality."^^ "Female
intellect differs from male intellect in kind, not in degree," Price
explained; and though women might inhabit a different social sphere
than did men, "it remains to be proved that a high order of mental
development is less necessary in the one sphere than in the other."''^
The education that reformers championed would be appropriate to
southem women and their place within southem society, while
allowing them to explore their full intellectual potential. The aim,
Edward Joynes promised, was "to educate neither belles nor bluestockings, but women, for woman's sphere."^^
f* Price, "Popular Objections to a High Standard of Female Education; No. I." 206.
•" "Education of Southem Women," De Bow's Review, 31 (October-November 1861), 389-90
(first through fourth quotations on 389; fifth quotation on 390).
^*/èirf., 385.
"Price, "Popular Objections to a High Standard of Female Education: No. I," 203
(first quotation); R. N. Price, "Popular Objections to a High Standard of Female Education:
No. Ill," Home Circle, 7 (June 1861), 360-62 (second quotation on 360).
"^ Hollins Institute, Education of Teachers in the South, 14.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
311
War, especially a war for national existence, might seem an inopportune moment to enact sweeping educational changes, but these advocates argued precisely the opposite. They passionately believed that the
war offered the only time to command attention, enlist public sympathy,
and demand new opportunities for women. "Though we are still in the
din and dust of the conflict, it is not too early to call attention to the
reforms needed, nor too early to begin those reforms," the writer in
De Bow's declared."*' Such complaints against the defects of southem
female education may not have been new, but separate nationality had
invigorated reformers with a new sense of purpose and provided them
with new arguments for immediate action. "The times, indeed, look
dark around and before us; but believe me, never before has there been,
in this country, a time so favorable for the inception of great undertakings, as now," Edward Joynes insisted. He promised that "seeds
sown now, in the eager and eamest minds of our people, will take
deeper root and bear surer fmit, than if postponed to a later day.""*^
Southem independence mandated reform, these writers insisted,
and the war years presented a unique opportunity. For one, reformers
immediately recognized that with young southem men departing for
the front and male schools and colleges forced to close or operate in
diminished capacities, southemers had no choice but to confront the
realities and inadequacies of their daughters' educations. Most girls'
schools remained open during the war, and Confederate editors and
educators urged southem parents to keep their daughters in the classroom for as long as possible to compensate for the premature termination of their sons' educations. A "great and favorable change . . . has
taken place in public opinion, of late, on this subject," a contributor to
the North Carolina Presbyterian noted with satisfaction in August
1862. "The individual who has the means . . . will not now be
sustained in withholding from his daughters a liberal education."'*''
Female education, indeed a rigorous female education, had become a
patriotic imperative. Poet Henry Timrod, in his capacity as the associate editor of the Daily South Carolinian in Columbia, added his voice
to the growing choms demanding that Confederates "give particular
attention" to the "training" of women. "While our young men are
forgetting their HORACE in HARDEE'S tactics, while our boys . . . are
giving but a part of their energies to VIRGIL and HOMER, let us see
^' "Education of Southem Women," De Bow's Review, 31 (October-November 1861), 382.
^^ Hollins Institute, Education of Teachers in the South, 17.
''^ Ego, "Female Education," Fayetteville North Carolina Presbyterian, August 2, 1862, p. 1.
312
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
that the future mothers of the Confederacy do not lend themselves to
the growing barbarism of the times, by neglecting that intellectual
cultivation . . . without which they cannot exert . . . any widely or
profoundly benefic[i]al influence in society."** Reformers pledged to
convert this newfound public interest in female education into support
for meaningful change.
The departure of so many men for the battlefield had another, less
publicized, impact on female education, reformers observed quietly—
namely, preventing southem girls from marrying so early. Freed from
the distractions of courtship, girls finally could devote the time necessary to complete their educations. What was more, the war's terrible
toll meant that white southem women, in the future, would marry
later in life or perhaps not at all. Given these new demographic
realities, women would value their educations all the more highly,
reformers predicted.^^
In pushing women to demand their educational rights and the
Confederate public to grant them, women's advocates and educational
leaders developed novel wartime arguments for change. Recognizing
that abstract discourses on the equivalency of the male and female
mind would have little success in prompting Confederates to action,
reformers offered more immediate justifications. Women, they argued,
had eamed the right to a proper and well-supported (perhaps even
state-supported) education through their patriotic devotion to the Confederate cause. Southem women, commentators repeatedly emphasized,
had been enthusiastic champions of the secession movement from the
very beginning, far more so than many of their husbands. "We are in
the midst of a revolution in which the instinct of Southem women has
anticipated the logic of our statesmen and the ardor of our soldiers,"
William G. Shepperson declared in the preface to his 1862 Confederate poetry collection, War Songs of the South.'^^ "With a prescience
and a zeal surpassing that of men," southem women had "urged on the
present revolution," and political theorist George Fitzhugh nodded
with approval. "Virginia will owe her delivery from the vile and
vulgar despotism of Yankeedom almost entirely to her women," he
predicted of his home state. "The men of our State had neither the
•""Education," Columbia Daily South Carolinian, May 4, 1864, p. 2.
"' Hollins Institute, Education of Teachers in the South, 17-18; J. L. Kirkpatrick, "The Duty
of Females in Relation to the Future Educational Interests of Our Country," North-Carolina
Journal of Education, 1 (July 1864), 85-94, esp. 88-89.
46
I
•^ [William
G. Shepperson], ed.. War Songs of the South (Richmond, Va., 1862), 4.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
313
sense to understand the crisis nor the flrmness to meet and grapple
with it."^^ The Confederacy was indebted to its women, and reformers
pressed for repayment in the form of expanded educational opportunities. The writer in De Bow's even suggested that the nationalism of
Confederate women may very well have been rooted in "an instinctive
perception of the great advantages which would result to their sex from
Southem independence."^^ The argument that educational reform was a
right eamed through patriotism and sacrifice was both more conservative and more compelling to the general public than were discussions
about innate female capabilities, and women's advocates recognized
that the war had armed them with a valuable new justification.
But reformers had another, even stronger card to play. From the
beginning of its short life, the Confederacy suffered from a dire teacher
shortage. Secession had driven most northem-bom teachers from the
South, and with nearly all men of military age either serving in the
ranks or performing other vital duties, there were few southem men to
take their place in the classrooms. Only one option remained, the
weekly Southern Presbyterian observed matter-of-factly: "It is to our
daughters, therefore, we must look, and to them alone, as the future
instmctors of our youth."''^ The Reverend J. L. Kirkpatrick, in an
address at Concord Female College, came to the same conclusion:
"Our females must engage in the work of teaching. I say must; for
there is no other altemative."^*'
If women were to become this southem nation's teachers, however,
they first required a thorough education themselves. Setting aside
abstract questions of rights, reformers argued pragmatically that women
needed a different sort of education to fulfill the expanded role that
Confederate society demanded of them. As calls rang out for "the
ladies to come to the rescue" and "occupy our vacant school houses,"
educational reformers advised women to couple this public service
with demands for an education appropriate to their new duties. J. D.
Campbell, editor of the North-Carolina Journal of Education in
Greensboro, charged these would-be teachers "to look well to their
armor, to see that they spare no efforts to prepare and equip themselves thoroughly for the great work that is before them."^' J. M. M.
47,
Fitzhugh, "Women of the South," 147 (first and second quotations), 150 (third quotation).
^^ "Education of Southem Women," De Bow's Review, 31 (October-November 1861), 390.
"To the Ladies," Columbia (S.C.) Southern Presbyterian, June 25, 1863, p. I.
^° Kirkpatrick, "Duty of Females," 88.
' "Resident Editor's Department: Our Prospects," North-Carolina Journal of Education
5 (February 1862), 62.
314
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Caldwell, the president of Concord Female College, likewise seized
upon the shortage of teachers to advocate expanded and improved
female education. "Young ladies must be prepared to teach," he contended. "Special instruction must be given them by an enlarged course
of study."^^ The editor of the Southern Presbyterian agreed. In order
to produce "useful members of society," the methods and content of
female education must be changed drastically. As the editor insisted,
"'Tis not dolls and playthings we now need, but noble, eamest, working
women."^^ The Confederate nation required well-educated women to
keep its society functioning and its hopes for the future alive, and
educational reformers purposely yoked the adoption of their agenda to
the achievement of lasting Confederate independence.
Thus, the creation of the Confederacy "signalized" the beginning of
something new, "a nobler, loftier career for women," and these educational reformers called on southem women to assert themselves
while the war still raged. Relying on a combination of nationalism
and pragmatism, reformers pointedly asked how southem independence would beneflt women, and they challenged southem society at
large to answer. As the essayist in De Bow's Review exclaimed in
November 1861, the goal was to so transform southem society that
"in future ages it will be the proudest boast ever permitted a woman to
utter—that she is a citizen of the Southem Republic of America."^'* At
the same time, however, in agitating for expanded female educational
opportunities these writers kept their critiques of southem society
tightly focused, careful never to challenge the underlying gender and
class hierarchies on which that society was built. Indeed, they argued
that their reforms were necessary to buttress those hierarchies. The
proposed changes, which reformers believed Confederate independence
facilitated, were designed to perfect southem society, not to overthrow
it, and to enable white southem women to better perform their proper
roles. Thus, while secession and the war excited reformers' imaginations about the future of southem women and promised the possibility
of change, the bedrock assumptions of Confederate nationalism and
the desire to perpetuate the social order kept those imaginations
from running too wild.
Like women's education advocates, southem slavery reformers saw
the birth of the Confederacy as a moment for action. Given that the
'^ J. M. M. Caldwell, letter to the editor, Columbia Southern Presbyterian, April 9, 1863, p. 1.
^'"To the Ladies," Columbia Southern Presbyterian, June 25, 1863, p. 1.
'""Education of Southem Women," De Bow's Review, 31 (October-November 1861), 390.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
315
"comer-stone" of the Confederate nation rested on the righteousness
of slavery and that secession was primarily justified, at least by supporters in the Deep South, by the necessity of slavery's preservation, it
is ironic that the formation of the Confederacy allowed and even
encouraged white southemers to discuss slavery, admit its shortcomings, and debate its future in ways that had never been permitted
before.^^ While complaints about the practices of southem slavery
were hardly new. Confederate reformers believed that the war offered
a long-sought opportunity to make corrections, and they adapted their
arguments to fit new wartime realities. They rooted their critiques of
slavery and their calls for change within a Confederate nationalist
context and argued that the perfection of the South's slave system
was in fact the divine purpose of the Confederate nation.
With secession, would-be slavery reformers felt a great stifling
weight had been lifted. "So long as we were under one government,
with ignorant and self-righteous meddlers, . . . there was a natural
disposition to yield in nothing to them, which prevented the amelioration, in certain respects, of the slave's condition," the Southern
Presbyterian of Columbia, South Carolina, candidly admitted in
February 1861.^^ Charles Wallace Howard, coeditor of the Augusta,
Georgia, monthly, the Southern Cultivator, also sensed a change in
the air. In an April 1861 article responding to a recent pamphlet
probing the "true" nature of southem slavery, he observed, "We are
^^ The activities of Confederate slavery reformers are familiar to scholars, who have analyzed
reformers' motivations, charted their accomplishments, and assessed the role they played within
Confederate history as well as within the history of slavery and southem religion. These historians
describe how calls for slavery's reform intensified as the war progressed and the Confederacy's
military fortunes declined. Seeking to explain why God would punish the South with defeats and
setbacks. Confederate clergymen argued that southern violations of the divine institution invited
these chastisements. Only once the practices of southem slavery conformed precisely to scriptural
guidelines would God permit Confederates to prevail. These developments fit well within the
"Confederacy as a revolutionary experience" thesis. The purposes here are more modest. Rather
than survey the entirety of wartime efforts to reform slavery, this section examines why hopeful
southem reformers believed secession and the creation of the Confederacy presented an opportunity
to enact significant changes and why those changes to the slave system were perceived to be both
more imperative and more possible than they had been before. On Confederate slavery reform
see Bell Irvin Wiley, "The Movement to Humanize the Institution of Slavery During the
Confederacy," Emory University Quarterly, 5 (December 1949), 207-20; Clarence L. Mohr,
On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1986),
235-71; Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the
Civil War South (Baton Rouge, 1988), 58-81; Eugene D. Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall
of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens, Ga., 1998); and Thomas,
Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, 127-28.
The Abuse of Slavery," Columbia Southern Presbyterian, February 16, 1861, p. 3.
316
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
now in a position to examine this matter. Prior to our separation
from the North, such an inquiry might not have been prudent."^'
Southem independence facilitated more than just breathing room.
Not only could Confederates now freely "examine" their slave system,
but also they could change it. "[R]elieved from every obstacle and
embarrassment that has hitherto stood in our way," southemers "shall
be no longer hindered in the faithful and efficient discharge of the
duty, and the enjoyment of the privilege, of ameliorating and elevating the condition of the slave population," the Reverend James A.
Lyon of Columbus, Mississippi, rejoiced in 1863.^^ Taking advantage
of the new intellectual environment afforded by the region's new
political status, one writer in the Southern Presbyterian Review urged
his fellow Confederates to "subject our slave codes to a rigid inspection; criticism must be free and bold; abuses must be exposed; and
the inner life of slavery reformed and restored."^^ "[N]ow, now, NOW,
is the time for you to act," the superintendent of North Carolina
public schools, Calvin Henderson Wiley, demanded of Confederate
religious leaders and would-be reformers. He believed that "our circumstances are now more favorable to reforms than they will probably
ever be again."^°
Before secession, northem meddling and abolitionist propaganda
had inhibited slavery reform in two ways, reformers noted. First, with
the South's way of life under constant attack, white southemers had
felt compelled to present a united front against the abolitionist onslaught,
and those southemers who had misgivings about the practices, if not
the existence, of slavery held their tongues for fear of providing
their enemies with fresh ammunition. As the Southern Presbyterian
complained in December 1860, "the infatuated interference" of the
North had made it "impossible for the Southem people to do all they
will to do, and all they would have done . . . to beneflt their slaves."^^
In his travels throughout the Confederacy during the summer of 1862,
William Wyndham Malet, an Englishman and Anglican minister.
^' [Charles Wallace Howard], "Serfs, Not Slaves; or. The Relation Between the Races at the
South," Southern Cultivator, 19 (April 1861), 105-11 (quotation on 108).
^^ James A. Lyon, "Slavery, and the Duties Growing Out of the Relation," Southern
Presbyterian Review, 16 (July 1863), 1-37 (quotations on 2).
^'"A Slave Mardage Law," Southern Presbyterian Review, 16 (October 1863), 145-62
(quotation on 145). As will be shown, however, this writer did not believe that those reforms
should include the legal recognition of slave marriages.
^''C. H. Wiley, Scriptural Views of National Trials: or. The True Road to the Independence
and Peace of the Confederate States of America (Greensboro, N.C, 1863), 163 (first quotation),
162 (second quotation).
*' "Religion and Slavery," Columbia Southern Presbyterian, December 1, 1860, p. 2.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
317
encountered many who echoed the Southern Presbyterian'i, gripes.
"From all I hear," he wrote sympathetically, "I have no doubt that if
the South were 'let alone,'. . . there would be schools for the negro
children, marriages would be held binding, and children would not be
sold away from parents."^^
Not only had the abolitionists prevented the improvement of
slavery's conditions, but their activities had also forced white southemers to take away slaves' privileges, or so Confederate writers
charged. Laws prohibiting teaching slaves to read and placing additional restrictions on travel, employment, residency, and property
ownership had been implemented as direct responses to the perceived
abolitionist threat. Thus, northem meddling was simultaneously the
cause of slavery's shortcomings and the barrier to their elimination.^^
Within these accusations lurked an important admission—one that
white southemers would have been loath to make before secession—
namely, that they had cared and, in tmth, cared deeply about what the
abolitionists thought. Confederate commentators quickly tumed this
embarrassing realization into biting self-criticism. A failure of "moral
courage" by southemers in general and by religious leaders in particular had "permitted a foreign faction of bigoted traducers . . . and
perverters of Divine Truth, to control [their] action!" What was worse,
by abdicating their sacred responsibilities and surrendering the field
to their northem enemies, southem "ambassadors of God" had
"fumished a pretence, to such [southem slaveholders] as did not want
to know or to do their duty." The more Calvin Wiley thought about
these southem excuses for inaction, this blaming of the North for
failing to perform slaveholders' own "obvious duties," "the more
ridiculous and shameful it seems." Southemers had somehow forgotten that they were the ones on the side of tmth and God in this debate,
and "it was certainly a very false inference to suppose that the full
enforcement of Bible doctrines would be a triumph to the enemies
of the Bible [the abolitionists]." In any case, what did it say about
southem character and honor that "while we could face the sneers
^^ William Wyndham Malet, An Errand to the South in the Summer of 1862 (London,
1863), 134.
^^For instance, see "Religion and Slavery," Columbia Southern Presbyterian, December 1,
1860, p. 2; "The Abuse of Slavery," ibid., February 16, 1861, p. 3; Lyon, "Slavery, and the
Duties Growing Out of the Relation," 12-15, 19—20; "A Slave Marriage Law," Southern
Presbyterian Review, 16 (October 1863), 145; J. Leighton Wilson, "Report of the Committee
on the Religious Instruction of the Colored People," Southern Presbyterian Review, 16 (October
1863), 190-98, esp. 191; C. H. Wiley, Scriptural Views of National Trials, 187-91; and Harrison
Berry, Slavery and Abolitionism, as Viewed by a Georgia Slave (Atlanta, 1861), 13-15, 29—30.
318
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
of the whole world in defending our interests, we could not endure the
gibes of fanatics in the prosecution of our duties"!^
The "present revolution" had freed southemers from any further
obligation to placate northem critics. Instead, Confederates could
take advantage of the complete isolation afforded by the war. "[N]ever
again," Wiley prodded, "can we legislate or labor in Society with
such perfect exemption from the out side pressure. "^^ Now was the
time, the only time, to act; Confederates must boldly take control of
their national future at its outset and reshape their society as they,
with only the guidance of God, saw fit. "There never was a more
suitable time, or convenient season, to move and take a step upward
on this subject.... Let us not sit still," James Lyon called.^^
Under the old Union, southem thinkers and religious leaders had
devoted their efforts to defending the "claims of the goveming class,"
but no longer. Now that separation from the North had been achieved,
the salient issue became the "obligations" of slaveholders to their
bondpeople and to God.^^ As Episcopal bishop Stephen Elliott explained
in a November 1862 pastoral letter, "The time has come when the
Church should press more urgently than she has hitherto done upon
her laity, the solemn fact, that the slaves of the South are not merely so
much property: but are a sacred trust committed to us, as a people."
Thus, even as they battled their northem foes in the field, an even
greater test awaited Confederates at home—this one administered
by God himself. "Noble Confederate brethren!" Wiley cried, "you are
meeting with steadfast courage many dangers which might appal [sic]
less constant and heroic spirits: let us crown our deeds by conquering
our own prejudices, BY DARING TO DO WHAT IS RIGHT[!]"^^
While secession made slavery reform imperative, the disruptions of
separation and war made it possible, or so these writers argued. With
southemers now forced to consider the future of the Confederate
nation and God's divine plan for it, slavery reformers believed they
detected a new receptivity among the general populace, and they
consciously used the language of nationalism to link their project to
"Slavery, and the Duties Growing Out of the Relation," 12 (first, third, and
fourth quotations); C. H. Wiley, Scriptural Views of National Trials, 189 (second, seventh, and
eighth quotations), 191 (fifth and sixth quotations).
*^C. H. Wiley, Scriptural Views of National Trials, lyi (first quotation), 162 (second and
third quotations).
^*Lyon, "Slavery, and the Duties Growing Out of the Relation," 36.
" C. H. Wiley, Scriptural Views of National Trials, 188.
*^ Stephen Elliott, "Pastoral Letter," in [John Henry Hopkins Jr.], ed.. Sermons by the Right
Reverend Stephen Elliott. . . (New York, 1867), 567-80 (quotation on 575).
*' C. H. Wiley, Scriptural Views of National Trials, 200.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
319
the achievement of lasting Confederate independence. Stephen Elliott
noted with satisfaction in November 1862 that "the public sentiment is
rapidly becoming sound upon this subject."^" Fellow Episcopal bishop
George Foster Pierce likewise seized this unique moment, "while
the public mind is loosened from old ideas and broken up by the
ploughshare of war," to demand that Georgia's legislature rewrite the
state's slavery laws.^' The reluctance and indifference encountered in
the past would melt away in the fires of war, these religious leaders
assured themselves, and leave southemers primed, even eager, to
embrace the changes that would perfect their society and bring their
nation in line with God's divine purposes.
Southemers had committed sins of both omission and commission
when it came to the treatment of their slaves, and reformers advocated
changes to rectify both. Sins of omission stemmed from a failure to
attend adequately to slaves' spiritual needs. The "evangelization" of
slaves was "the great duty of the church in this Confederacy," the
Reverend A. W. Miller of Petersburg, Virginia, exhorted his fellow
Presbyterians in October 1862. "Their destiny for etemity is dependent, to a great extent, upon us."^^ While slaves were under white
"tutelage," God "freely gives to us their labor, but expects us to give
back to them that religious and moral instruction which is to elevate
them in the scale of being," Stephen Elliott likewise reminded Episcopalians.^^ To bring the enslaved closer to God and to ensure the
salvation of their immortal souls, reformers called for an expansion
of integrated church services (with the master's family in attendance),
the adoption of a plain preaching style among ministers, the erection
of chapels on every plantation, the introduction and enforcement of
mandatory daily prayer services, the official recording of slave baptisms, and strict observance of the Sabbath.^'*
It was the abuses, however—the sins of commission, the positive
violations of God's law—that these reformers found most offensive
and that, they argued, did the most damage to the institution domestically and intemationally. As textbook author Marinda Branson Moore
™ Elliott, "Pastoral Letter," 576.
^' George F. Pierce, "Sermon of Bishop Pierce Before the General Assembly of Georgia,
March 27, 1863," in George G. Smith, The Life and Times of George Foster Pierce . . . (Sparta,
Ga., 1888), 465-77 (quotation on 470).
'^A. W. Miller, "Report on the State of the Church," Southern Presbyterian Review,
15 (January 1863), 405-47 (quotations on 447). .
'^Elliott, "Pastoral Letter," 575.
'" For instance, see Lyon, "Slavery, and the Duties Growing Out of the Relation," 19; and
Wilson, "Report of the Committee on the Religious Instruction of the Colored People," 194-98.
320
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
taught in her 1863 Geographical Reader, for the Dixie Children,
"The sin of the South lies not in holding slaves, but [in that] they are
sometimes mistreated."'^ "There are evils and abuses connected with
slavery, as it exists in this country . . . known to aU, acknowledged by
all, and regretted by all good men," James Lyon confessed. "But we can
not defend its abuses. We can not defend it in those features where it is
against the Bible."^^ To admit that abuses did occur and that reforms
were required did not prove the abolitionists' point or betray the
Confederacy's commitment to slavery's preservation. "[I]t is no argument against slavery to say that the law has to protect the slave against
the violence of the master," Wiley counseled his southem countrymen.
"The argument might lie more plainly the other way—that slavery is an
evil when there is no human power to regulate the conduct of the
proprietor."'' The abuses of slaveholding must end immediately, and
penance had to be made for the sins committed. The stakes could not be
higher. Their own souls, those of their slaves, and the future of the
nation hung in the balance. In this war, "a righteous cause" alone was
insufficient to win divine favor, James Thomwell explained. Confederates also needed to become "a righteous people" by "removing from
the midst of us whatever is offensive to a holy God."'^
To combat physical cruelty, these reformers demanded that state
govemments take legal action to ensure "sufficient protection . . . to
the persons and lives of the slaves." They wanted the courts to allow
limited slave testimony against overly harsh and especially murderous
masters. They also called for ending "extra-legal proceedings" against
enslaved offenders.'^ Calvin Wiley brushed aside objections that such
changes violated the rights of masters and extended the reach of
govemment into areas where it had no authority. "There ever will be
men who will be prompted by their passions to abuse any and every
tmst," he argued; "and for this reason it is that the Govemment was
ordained of God, that it might repress the development of such passions into acts of injustice and cmelty."^°
As important as these protections were to reformers' plans, the most
pressing needs, in their eyes, were the elimination of slave antiliteracy
laws and the recognition of slave marriages. Reform-minded southem
" M. B. Moore, The Geographical Reader, for the Dixie Children (Raleigh, 1863), 14.
'* Lyon, "Slavery, and the Duties Growing Out of the Relation," 14.
" C . H. Wiley, Scriptural Views of National Trials, 196.
'* Thomwell, Our Danger and Our Duty, 11.
" Lyon, "Slavery, and the Duties Growing Out of the Relation," 22-25 (first quotation on 22;
second quotation on 25).
^''C. H. Wiley, Scriptural Views of National Trials, 197.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
321
clergymen had long lamented that slaves were denied the ability to
read and to legally marry, but with secession and the coming of the
war such complaints gained added force and urgency. Especially now
that the abolitionist threat had been removed by separation and its
literature forever banished from the South, there could be no justiflcation for keeping slaves in legally mandated mental and spiritual darkness. The rationale behind these laws. Bishop George Foster Pierce
explained, "was partly retaliatory, in rebuke of the incendiary publications of the North, and partly precautionary, on prudential grounds.
But the logic of the law is as bad as the law itself. To make the negro
suffer for the sins of the Yankee is the grossest injustice."^' The
notion that reading the Bible might be dangerous for slaves "is not
only contrary to reason and experience, but is exceedingly dishonoring
to the Gospel of Jesus Christ itself," Presbyterian minister J. Leighton
Wilson of Columbia, South Carolina, snorted. "Besides which," he
continued, "it is simply absurd in men to go to the Bible to find a
sanction for the institution of slavery, and yet be unwilling for the
minds of their slaves to be imbued with its teachings."^^ Rather than
imperiling the stability of the institution, placing "[a] Bible in every
[slave] cabin will be the best police of the country," Bishop Pierce
argued. In any case, he thundered (in a much quoted warning to the
Georgia legislature), "The negro is an immortal being and it is his
right, by the law of creation and the purchase of redemption, to read
for himself the epistles of his Redeemer's love. If the institution of
slavery cannot be maintained except at the expense of the black man's
immortal interests, in the name of heaven, I say—let it perish."
The case for immediate reform could scarcely be put in starker terms.
The greatest sin of the South, however, was the flagrant and forcible
sundering of slave marriages. Though joined in the eyes of God,
enslaved couples and their families could be separated at the whim of
the master, and enslaved women were afforded little protection against
the "contaminating influence of beastly white men."^'* For such violations, there could be no excuse, as slaveholders alone were responsible.
*' Pierce, "Sermon of Bishop Pierce Before the General Assembly of Georgia," 474.
'^ Wilson, "Report of the Committee on the Religious Instruction of the Colored People," 192.
'^ Pierce, "Sermon of Bishop Pierce Before the General Assembly of Georgia," 475
(first quotation), 474 (second quotation).
^ Lyon, "Slavery, and the Duties Growing Out of the Relation," 31. During the year leading
up to secession, both Mississippi and Georgia passed laws granting enslaved women (at least
girls under the age of twelve in Mississippi's case) some legal protection from sexual violence,
though the statutes were not enforced. Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the
Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, 2004), 66.
322
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
and all in the name of their own economic self-interest. As Pierce
cried, "It is all wrong—a stigma upon our civilization and an offence
to our Christianity."^^ Confederate reformers called on the churches to
"exercise all the influence they can to render sacred and permanent the
marriage relation between our colored people" by stressing the religious obligation of masters to protect slave families and by condemning those congregants who failed to do so.^^ From the state they
demanded that "all laws and parts of laws which authorize or allow
arbitrary interference with the connubial relations of slaves . . . be
rescinded" and that legal protections for slave families be established
in their place.*' As Stephen Elliott promised, "a very little care upon
our part would rid the system, upon which we are about to plant our
national life, of these un-Christian features"; churches and the legislatures must undertake immediate reform to "prove to the world that we
are faithful to our tmst."**
In making these proposals, slavery reform advocates took great
pains to stress their moderation, indeed their conservatism, as well
as their southem patriotism. Reformers only wanted to strengthen
slavery and ensure its preservation, they reassured wary Confederates.
The changes they sought would place the institution, and with it the new
nation, on the proper scriptural basis and certainly would not alter the
relation between master and slave. These were not new ideas, proponents emphasized. For example, Calvin Wiley, in the preface to Scriptural Views of National Trials, recoiled at the very suggestion that he
might be viewed as "'a setter forth' of new and strange doctrines."*^
Most important, these were authentically southem ideas, voiced by
tmehearted native southemers who had the best interests of the Confederate nation at heart and bearing no resemblance to the "foreign" and
"fanatical" notions of the Confederacy's northem enemies.
Despite such professions, reformers' demands faced staunch public
opposition. Given how closely, albeit haltingly and carefully, slavery
reform advocates treaded to values at the core of Confederate nationalism, it is no coincidence that though they proposed the least sweeping changes of the groups discussed in this article, they met with the
most active resistance. Southem ideologues, of course, had long been
*^ Pierce, "Sermon of Bishop Pierce Before the General Assembly of Georgia," 475.
*' Wilson, "Report of the Committee on the Religious Instruction of the Colored People,"
197-98.
" Pierce, "Sermon of Bishop Pierce Before the General Assembly of Georgia," 475.
^' Elliott, "Pastoral Letter," 576 (first quotation), 577 (second quotation).
^' C. H. Wiley, Scriptural Views of National Trials, v.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
323
adept at fending off critiques of the region's institutions, but those
attacks had almost always come from outside. In countering the wartime
calls for change, defenders of slavery's status quo rightly recognized the
intensiñed push for reform as a new intemal development unleashed by
secession. Fiery Georgia editor Joseph Addison Tumer was aghast to
find that in the absence of the abolitionist threat "some of our own
people are beginning to get very tender on the subject" of slavery.
Like the reformers, Tumer and others saw the revolutionary possibilities
of the Confederate moment, even as they drew opposite conclusions.
The Confederate Baptist in Columbia, South Carolina, urged "all good
and patriotic citizens [to] keep aloof from this untimely agitation . . . .
When the war is over, and we are able to surround ourselves with the
requisite safeguards, it will be time enough to decide whether a sound,
religious policy demands any change in our slave laws."^' In the
Countryman, Tumer agreed that this "agitation" had "been gotten up
at a very unfortunate time. It will divide and distract the attention of
our people upon a subject upon which their minds should be a unit."
Now was not the time to act, reform critics argued, precisely because
the unsettled state of southem society made change so possible.
Reform opponents defended with remarkable candor both antihteracy
laws and the master's right to separate slave families. Tumer, as
always, refused to equivocate. Literacy laws were required precisely
because slaves always must be kept ignorant. "[I]f the negro is capable
of education, he is also capable of freedom," and Tumer had no
interest in putting the matter to the test. Make no mistake, he wamed,
these "tender" reformers were dangerous, perhaps in ways they themselves failed to recognize. For "though they don't strike at the root of
slavery, they propose to lop off one of its twigs—ignorance."^^ In
equally frank terms a writer in the Southern Presbyterian Review
refuted James Lyon's call for the legal and religious recognition of
slave marriages. "But the tmth is," he wrote, "this evil of separating
families is greatly overrated." The legal protection of slave marriages
would "prevent the mthless separation of husband and wife," he
conceded, but "it would also ruthlessly fasten upon many a family
and plantation the intolerable curse of an incorrigibly bad negro."
' " J. A. Tumer, "Educated Negroes," Tumwold, Putnam County (Ga.) Countryman, November
17, 1862, pp. 57-58 (quotation on 58).
" "Philnigrists," Columbia (S.C.) Confederate Baptist, April 29, 1863, p. 2.
'^ Tumer, "Educated Negroes," 57.
^^ Ibid., 57 (first quotation), 58 (second and third quotations). See also J. A. Tumer, "Teaching
Negroes to Read," Tumwold, Putnam County Countryman, December 1, 1862, pp. 16-11.
324
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Blurring the line between God's and the master's authority in ways
that should have made his religiously minded readers uncomfortable,
he further asserted that it was "the duty of the master, who is the civil
law-giver of his slaves, some times to sunder the marriage relation
between those unequally yoked."^'* It is unlikely that such arguments
would have been aired publicly while the old Union was still intact.
As opponents wamed, the real danger of these proposed reforms lay
in what they portended. "The door once opened—the threshold once
passed—where do you purpose to stop? where can you stop, consistently with your premises?" the critic in the Southern Presbyterian
Review queried. Be wamed, he prophesied, the legal recognition of
slave marriage "would snap at once the tie that binds the slave to
the family, and place him, as the subject of civil legislation, under the
dominion of the State. From that unlucky moment we may date the
decay of domestic slavery, until the whole fabric would totter to its
base."^^ Joseph Tumer foresaw a similar trajectory if the reformers
succeeded. He described an inevitable progression: "Negroes must be
educated, at least to a degree. Then they must be allowed to intermarry, when, how, and where they please: then they must be allowed
to vote: then to bear arms: then to do this thing: then the other: and so
on, until they would be slaves no more."^^ In their opposition, as these
writers wamed of the dangers, they also revealed the novelty and,
more terrifying for them, the perceived possibility for change that the
reformers represented. As critics ratcheted up their rhetoric to meet
this unanticipated intemal threat, they emphasized just how potentially
revolutionary the reformers' vision of the Confederacy was. When it
came to slavery, even the "twigs" had to be defended to the last.
Nevertheless, southem slavery reformers believed that the birth of
the Confederacy provided an opportunity as well as a divine duty to
transform the practices of southem slavery. Freed from northem criticism and imbued with a new sense of national purpose and possibility,
slavery reformers pursued an agenda for change with unprecedented
openness and assertiveness. Their vision of the Confederacy was not
simply a perpetuation of antebellum southem life. Instead, they seized
on the war years as their chance to shape the new nation into what
they believed it should be, and they called on their countrymen to join
'""A Slave Marriage Law," Southern Presbyterian Review, 16 (October 1863), 153-54
(fu-st and second quotations on 154; third quotation on 153; fourth quotation on 153-54), 157
(fifth quotation).
^^ Ibid., 147-49 (first quotation on 147-48; second quotation on 149).
Tumer, "Educated Negroes," 58.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
325
in the perfection of their slave society. At the same time, the vehement
opposition that met their moderate proposals spoke both to the perceived possibilities for change resulting from separation and war and
to the ways the need to defend slavery and uphold white supremacy
imposed ever-present constraints on those possibilities—constraints
intrinsic and unique to the Confederate nationalist project.
Tuming from women's education advocates and slavery reformers
to Confederate antidemocratic political theorists, as this article now
does, might seem odd. After all, thinkers in this third group were not
interested in extending rights and privileges—just the opposite. Their
objective was to find a means by which rights could be safely taken
away from the masses. What they shared with proponents of women's
education and slavery reform, however, was a belief in the necessity
for change rooted in a Confederate nationalist outlook and a conviction that the war years presented the sole opportunity to enact the
transformation they sought. While their proposals and agenda were
quite different from—and even contradictory to—those of the education and slavery reformers, all saw the present as a moment of malleability that must not be squandered.
Like those who argued that separation was necessary to protect the
South from the radical excesses of the North, these Confederate political theorists thought that the North was sick, fatally so. Where they
differed was in their belief that the surgery of secession had been performed too late. In their eyes, the slave states akeady had been infected
by the same corrupting democratic tendencies that engulfed the North.
Ever since the United States' founding, poHtical power had been too
widely and unnaturally dispersed, the franchise had been too liberally
extended, and the southem people as a whole had become too accustomed to "rights" to which they were not entitled. The Confederacy
would surely follow the North into mob mle and anarchy, these thinkers
argued, unless immediate steps were taken. Secession marked the
beginning of what they hoped would be a "reactionary" revolution to
correct the fatal mistakes of the Founding Fathers, to undo the damage
done by decades of insufficiently fettered democracy, to retum power
to those who by virtue of birth, wealth, and education deserved it, and
to make the new southem nation into a true "Patrician Republic."
"George Fitzhugh, "The Revolutions of 1776 and 1861 Contrasted," Southern Literary
Messenger, 37 (November-December 1863), 718-26 (first quotation on 722); [William Falconer],
"The Tme Question: A Contest for the Supremacy of Race, as between the Saxon Puritan of the
North, and the Norman of the South," ibid., 33 (July 1861), 19-27 (second quotation on 24).
Historians have not ignored the reactionary tendencies in Confederate political thought. Many
326
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Such ideas were not new, but these hitherto fmstrated antidemocratic thinkers embraced the war years as a moment when the course
of history could be changed and the future of a new nation charted.
"While the nation is in a plastic state," Confederate editors invited
"thinking minds" to make their columns a "medium of swaying the
intellects of men and the destinies of the country."^^ Answering the
call, southem political writers took up their pens with vigor and fllled
the pages of highbrow joumals like the Southern Literary Messenger,
De Bow's Review, and Southern Presbyterian Review, as well as their
own pamphlets, with an altemative vision of the future.
In the eyes of these writers, the most fundamental threat the Confederate nation faced was not the Union army. Rather, they feared an
enemy within. The South, they argued, was an organic aristocratic
society onto which a democratic political system had been grafted.
Such an artificial system threatened to topple the social order, subvert
the natural and necessary inequality between men, destroy the institution of slavery, and eventuate in mob rule, as was the fate of the North.
While the conservative influences of slavery and the natural inclinations of the southem character had slowed the poison, they had not
prevented its spread in the slave states. Southemers had been "fearfully contaminated by association with the Yankees," one essayist
in the Southern Literary Messenger lamented.^^ What South Carolina
scholars have examined how such ideas surfaced dudng the antebellum pedod and culminated in
secession and the drafting of the new state and Confederate constitutions. Robert E. Bonner,
Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (New York,
2009), provides the most extensive study of antebellum and wartime articulations of southem
antidemocratic thought and their intellectual roots. Rather than retread the same ground, the
purpose here is to explain why these particular Confederate thinkers believed that the creation of
the Confederacy would facilitate this reactionary revolution; and while it will be necessary to
bdefly examine their cdtique of democracy, the focus will be on how the war, in their view,
would serve as the ideal vehicle to bdng about such sweeping changes. See Michael P. Johnson!
Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge, 1977); Manisha Sinha!
The Counterrevolution of" Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel
Hill, 2000); George C Rabie, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics (Chapel
Hill, 1994); Rabie, "Rebels and Patdots in the Confederate 'Revolution,'" in Wüliam J. Cooper Jr.
and John M. McCardell Jr., eds.. In the Cause of Liberty: How the Civil War Redefined American
Ideals (Baton Rouge, 2009), 63-86; Faust, Creation of Confederate Nationalism, 32-40; McCurry,
Confederate Reckoning, 11-84; and Robert E. Bonner, "Proslavery Extremism Goes to War;'
The Counterrevolutionary Confederacy and Reactionary Militadsm," Modern Intellectual History,
6 (August 2009), 261-85. See also O'Bden, Conjectures of Order, Fox-Genovese and Genovese!
Mind of the Master Class, James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders
(New York, 1982), 192-224; and Adam L. Täte, Conservatism and Southern Intellectuals,
1789-1861: Liberty, Tradition, and the Good Society (Columbia, Mo., 2005).
'^"Editor's Table," Southern Literary Messenger, 33 (September 1861), 237-40 (first and
second quotations on 238); ibid., 32 (Apdl 1861), 317-23 (third quotation on 322).
"The Philosophy of Secession," Southern Literary Messenger, 36 (September-October
1862), 550-58 (quotation on 553).
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
327
editor Leónidas W. Spratt dubbed the "canker of democracy" was
already eating away at southem society from within.*
Thus, it was naive to think that secession alone could save the
South from the evils of democracy. Throughout the nineteenth century, the South, like the North, had witnessed the democratization of
its politics. Universal white manhood suffrage, a dramatic expansion
in the number of elective offices, and political pandering to the masses
had come to the South as well. Indeed, "There is not one feature in the
political organization of the South protecting her from the vandalic
inundation of Agrarian Democracy which has swept away every vestige of established order and regulated liberty in the United States,"
Frank H. Alfriend, the future and, as it tumed out, final editor of the
Southern Literary Messenger, warned in May 1863. A "dangerous
tendency" toward democracy remained firmly implanted within southem politics, and even as Confederates congratulated themselves on
the "perpetuity of slavery" in their new nation, they unwittingly had
"prepare[d] its speedy overthrow, by incorporating features which
must inevitably undermine it."'°'
Universal suffrage was particularly galling. "Where is tbe thinking
man, who now believes that universal suffrage is not subversive of all
free institutions?" one writer demanded in January 1861.'°^ After all,
the franchise placed power in the hands of those who had no business
wielding it, namely, the lower orders of non-slave-owning whites—
the "inorganic masses" as Mississippian J. Quitman Moore called
them—and it encouraged the growth of free labor in the heart of a slave
society. Having interests in conflict with the established social order
and easily manipulated by demagogues, such voters were unfit to
select their leaders. As a result, these critics griped, the "smockfrock"
had replaced the "imperial purple" in the halls of govemment as the
South's rightful leaders either were voted from office or bowed out
of politics, refusing to sully themselves by catering to the mob.^"''
"Radical, levelling, and revolutionary—intolerant, proscriptive, and
arbitrary—violent, remorseless, and sanguinary," the "democratic
' " " L . W . Spratt, The Philosophy of Secession: A Southern View . . . ([Charleston, S.C],
1861), 5.
Frank H. Alfriend, "A Southem Republic and a Northem Democracy," Southern Literary
Messenger, 37 (May 1863), 283-90 (first, third, and fourth quotations on 288); Frank H. Alfriend,
"The Great Danger of the Confederacy," ibid., yi (January 1863), 39-43 (second quotation
on 40).
102 „rpi^g Union: Its Benefits and Dangers," Southern Literary Messenger, 32 (January 1861), 3.
'"^J. Quitman Moore, "Southem Civilization: or. The Norman in America," De Bow's
Review, 32 (January-Febmary 1862), 1-19 (first quotation on 12); [J. Quitman Moore], "'Eikon
Basilike'—Now as Then," ibid., 30 (March 1861), 275-87 (second and third quotations on 277).
328
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
principle" had quietly seeped into every aspect of American governance, hatching such ridiculous heresies as "'natural rights' and the
theory of social and political equality," universal suffrage, and popu104
lar sovereignty.
That this system and its ideals had been bequeathed by the
Founding Fathers carried little weight for these thinkers. The Founders
quite simply had been wrong, dead wrong, and it had become the
"melancholy privilege of those upon whom the shipwreck has fallen"
to clean up the mess.^°^ In the attempt to demystify the Founders,
these Confederate thinkers did not direct their attack solely at Thomas
Jefferson, "that visionary, theoretical, and fanatical political monomaniac," as Moore called him.^°^ The Declaration of Independence, with
its talk of inalienable rights and manhood equality, had long been
denounced in conservative southem circles as both palpably false and
irresponsibly dangerous, and so it was again; however, these writers
broadened their indictment to include the whole of the Revolutionary
generation. They argued that the Founders had been exactly the wrong
sort of men to establish a stable government. "Revolutionary statesmanship can never found other than revolutionary government," Moore
explained, and could never be "tmsted" to erect permanent "political
structures."'"' When viewed correctly, George Fitzhugh argued, the
American Revolution was "an exceedingly natural and conservative
affair," to which the misguided Founders unfortunately had attached
"false and unnecessary theories" and "powder-cask abstractions."'"^
As one writer in the final wartime issue of De Bow's Review in 1864
neatly summed up this strain of argument, '"Our ancestors never did a
weak thing, and never said a wise one.'"'"^
There was little about the late United States worth preserving. There
was nothing sacred about its Constitution. It had "lasted only as long
as nobody cared to puU it down," declared Henry St. Paul in Mobile,
Alabama, in 1863."° Fitzhugh, who thought the very idea of written
constitutions to be ridiculous, found the U.S. Constitution to be "by far
'"^[J. Quitman Moore], "National Characteristics—^The Issues of the Day," De Bow's
Review, 30 (January 1861), 42-53 (first and second quotations on 49; third quotation on 50).
' ^ John Scott, Letters to an Officer in the Army; Proposing Constitutional Reform in the
Confederate Government after the Close of the Present War (Richmond, Va., 1864), 11.
'°* [J. Quitman Moore], "The Past and Present," De Bow's Review, 30 (February 1861), 187-98
(quotation on 189).
""Moore, "National Characteristics," 45.
'"* Fitzhugh, "Revolutions of 1776 and 1861 Contrasted," 722.
" " "State Rights Among the Yankees—Political Anatomy," De Bow's Review, 34 (JulyAugust 1864), 92-95 (quotation on 93).
""Henry St. Paul, Our Home and Foreign Policy (Mobile, 1863), 12.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
329
the most absurd and contradictory paper ever penned by practical
m e n . " " ' Among other foundational American documents best never
written were "such absurdities" as the Virginia Bill of Rights, the Act
of Religious Toleration, and the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions."^
The purpose of this assault on the American political tradition
was clear. Southemers had been brainwashed into believing that the
United States, as originally conceived, was "'the most perfect government the world ever saw,'" and before any sort of true reactionary
revolution could proceed, the "public mind" had to be "disabused of
such notions.""^ Highlighting their distance from mainstream Confederate society, these critics maintained that there was no glorious
legacy to protect, no inherited rights to cherish, no sacred model to
uphold.""* Look not to the Revolutionary forefathers for guidance
and wish not for a restoration of old forms, these thinkers told
southemers, for, as the Reverend Thomas Smyth of Charleston,
South Carolina, lamented in the Southern Presbyterian
Review,
"[t]he temple of our liberty" had been "sacrilegiously polluted, while
yet fresh from the hands of its architects.""^
What was needed instead was a system of govemance that reinforced, not that conflicted with, the South's natural social order. As
Frank Alfriend exclaimed, "The South has now within her grasp, the
most splendid opportunity presented in all history . . . . Her social
system is complete, and she needs only such reformation of her political character, as shall render perfect the harmony of her Patrician
society with a Patrician government."^^^ According to some commentators, now that the southem states had separated themselves from the
troublesome North, slavery would maintain the necessary aristocracy
' ' ' [George Fitzhugh], "The Message, the Constitution, and the Times," De Bow's Review,
30 (February 1861), 156-67 (quotation on 157). See also Scott, Letters to an Officer in the Army,
9-10.
"^ "State Rights Among the Yankees," De Bow's Review, 34 (July-August 1864), 93
(quotation); Fitzhugh, "Revolutions of 1776 and 1861 Contrasted," 719.
' " S t . Paul, Our Home and Foreign Policy, 12 (first quotation); [George Fitzhugh], "The
Perils of Peace," De Bow's Review, 31 (October-November 1861), 395-400 (second and
third quotations on 398).
' '" On Confederate interpretations of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers,
see Paul Quigley, "Independence Day Dilemmas in the American South, 1848-1865," Journal of
Southern History, 75 (May 2009), 235-66; Anne Sarah Rubin, "Seventy-six and Sixty-one;
Confederates Remember the American Revolution," in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed.. Where
These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill, 2000), 85-105;
and Robert F. Durden, "The American Revolution as Seen by Southemers in 1861," Louisiana
History, 19 (Winter 1978), 3 3 ^ 2 .
'"Thomas Smyth, "The Character and Conditions of Liberty," Southern Presbyterian
Review, 16 (April 1864), 201-36 (quotations on 227).
"* Alfriend, "Southem Republic and a Northem Democracy," 290.
330
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
and suppress democracy. So long as the institution of slavery upheld
an aristocracy of race, there could never be true universal suffrage,
and the real underclass, the slaves, would be permanently disenfranchised. Democracy would thus be thwarted by the formation of what
Leónidas Spratt called a southem "Slave Republic.""' Provided that
slavery was rigidly protected, foreign immigration blocked, and citizenship restricted to native-bom white southemers, the proper balance
between society and govemment would be achieved.
But for the most extreme Confederate theorists, these protections
were hardly sufficient. With secession, a "Slave Republic" was "an
already accomplished fact," Alabama planter William Falconer pointed
out in the Southern Literary Messenger, and yet political power
remained too widely dispersed."^ An aristocracy of race was too
broad to be an aristocracy at all. What critics like Falconer envisioned
was far more radical: a strong, centralized "Patrician Republic" dedicated to removing power from the people and placing it in the hands
of the privileged few fit to wield it."^
A strong govemment, even an absolute govemment, was nothing to
fear so long as it was controlled by the right sort of men. Indeed, the
Confederacy needed precisely such a govemment, one "responsible to
God only for the abuse or misuse of [its] power."'^" All tme govemments, J. Quitman Moore instructed his readers, were predicated on
two "fundamental" principles: "force and inequality." Cherished platitudes about the sovereignty of the people and consent of the govemed
were nothing but "groundless and delusive" illusions. "Those who
consent are not govemed," George Fitzhugh declared. "[T]o constitute
govemment at all, the mlers must think for those who are ruled," he
maintained, and have the power, "the whole unrestricted power," to
compel the govemed to act against their natural inclinations.'^^ As
Henry St. Paul argued, the people needed to "feel the hand that steers
their ship," and effective govemance required the unchecked authority
to make that hand
'^'
"^Spratt, Philosophy of Secession, 1. See also "The Union: Its Benefits and Dangers,"
Southern Literary Messenger, 32 (January 1861), 4.
' '* [William Falconer], "The African Slave Trade," Southern Literary Messenger, 33 (August
1861). 105-13 (quotations on 105).
' " [Falconer], "True Question," 24.
'^^ St. Paul, Our Home and Foreign Policy, 12.
'^' Moore, "'Eikon Basilike,'" 282 (first and second quotations), 278 (third quotation).
'^^ Fitzhugh, "Revolutions of 1776 and 1861 Contrasted," 721 (first and second quotations);
[George Fitzhugh], "Conduct of the War and Reflections on the Times," De Bow's Review,
33 (May-August 1862), 33-42 (third quotation on 34).
'^' St. Paul, Our Home and Foreign Policy, 13.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
331
The theory of states' rights was equally misguided, according to
many of these writers.'^'* True sovereignty could never be divided, and
the arguments of some states' rights advocates that the state govemments were both more representative and more responsive to the will
of the people were completely backward. What the South needed was
a govemment further removed from the people and less responsive to
their will. Such ideas, such "popular heresies" (as William Falconer
called states' rights), were unfortunate carryovers from the old Union,
when southemers had been forced to defend themselves against northem aggression. While admittedly useful in facilitating secession, states'
rights was "a destmctive principle in the science of govemment," and
in "the future time, it must be ignored."'^^
The first order of business of this planned patrician republic was
"to remove the people farther from the direct exercise of power"
by suppressing the democratic element.''^^ "There has been too much
individual freedom, license rather, conferred upon the masses," William
Falconer complained, and now ways needed to be found to quietly
remove that freedom. "Our business is, to watch and control them,"
to permit the masses "to have as little political liberty as we can,
without degrading them."^^^ To that end, under the "new system"
voting would "be made synonymous with the capacity to think."'^^ In
time, as Frank Alfriend hoped, the wielding of political power would
be restricted to "those who, from education, can appreciate the blessings of liberty, who, from virtue, can be entrusted with its guardianship, and those who, from the possession of property, and an interest
in the maintenance of order, will be equally vigilant against popular
'^''George Fitzhugh's position on this point requires qualification. Unlike some of the other
wdters, Fitzhugh maintained a purportedly states' dghts stance, though his vision of states' dghts
and his rationale for it were quite unusual. Fitzhugh was not worded about the possibility of a
strong central govemment tyrannizing southemers. Rather, he feared that the national govemment
would never be strong enough to adequately enforce its will on the citizenry. The state
governments, in his view, were the tme "governments of force" with the power to "compel
obedience, and punish disobedience," while the national govemment "rests on public opinion, and
relies for enforcement on 'moral suasion' and 'strong language.'" He thought that each state should
keep a standing army, "a military police," to ensure this force over its citizens. Thus, Fitzhugh's
support for states' dghts ironically stemmed from his desire to prevent southemers from having
too much liberty. Fitzhugh, "Message, the Constitution, and the Times," 159 (first, second, and
third quotations), 166 (fourth quotation). See also [George Fitzhugh], "Thoughts Suggested by
the War—The Past and the Future," De Bow's Review, 31 (September 1861), 296-305.
'^'[Falconer], "Afdcan Slave Trade," 113 (first quotation); [Falconer], "True Question,"
26 (second and third quotations).
'^*Fitzhugh, "Message, the Constitution, and the Times," 163.
' " [Falconer], "True Question," 25 (first quotation); [Falconer], "Afdcan Slave Trade,"
109 (second and third quotations).
'^* [Falconer], "True Question," 26 (first quotation); Moore, "National Charactedstics," 47-48
(second quotation).
332
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
excesses, and the usurpations of tyrants." By property, of course, he
meant slaves.
As to what this patrician form of govemment might actually look
like, these critics had a number of suggestions. They called for a
general rollback of the democratic reforms of the previous eighty
years, including a retum of property qualifications for voting, the
passage of restrictive immigration and citizenship laws, the erection
of prohibitive barriers for officeholders, a sharp reduction in the number of elective offices, and an end to the election of electors for
president. To ensure tbe independence of those few remaining elected
officials from the "hasty, capricious impulses and seditious spirit" of
the mob, these writers proposed dramatically lengthening terms of
office to the point where elections became rare events.^^^
Central to this vision of a Confederate patrician republic was the
"permanent representation of the landed interest in tbe national legislature." The Senate would be a hereditary body composed only of
members of the South's finest families, completely independent of
the whims of the masses and endowed with the power to suppress
any threat of popular excess.'^^ To ensure the Senate's stability and
"give it a deep root," senators would enjoy terms of office "approaching
the ordinary term of human life."'^^ Moreover, "the unity of State
authority" would be vested "in the person of an independent, hereditary, executive cbief."'^^ This president would be drawn from and
beholden to the same landed class and would hold office for an
extended tenure, perhaps for life. These theorists generally stopped
short of calling for a Confederate king, though they often expressed
their admiration for monarchies in the abstract. Still, the difference
between an independent, hereditary president for life and a king was
not always clear.'^'^
d, "Southem Republic and a Northem Democracy," 285.
'^"Fitzhugh, "Message, the Constitution, and the Times," 163. On the dangers of frequent
elections, see An Alabamian, "The One Great Cause of the Failure of the Federal Govemment,"
Southern Literary Messenger, 32 (May 1861), 329-34, esp. 331-33; Scott, Letters to an Officer
in the Army, 55—56; and "Humbug of Frequent Elections," Southern Cultivator, 19 (April 1861), 134.
'^' Moore, "Past and Present," 197.
'^^ Scott, Letters to an Officer in the Army, 53.
' " Moore, "'Eikon Basilike,'" 284.
'•'''writing in the Countryman, William W. Tumer reported that yeaming for an American
monarchy was more widespread than it appeared, at least among a certain set of southemers.
"We are aware that very little of this found its way into the newspapers, but we know it was
much talked of, in private . . . and occasionally, a faint, whispering breeze, indicative of the
heavy ground-swell, did find its way, through the press, to the people." W. W. T., "Republics vs.
.Monarchies," Tumwold, Putnam County Countryman, December 1, 1863, pp. 1—2 (quotation on 1).
See also Moore, '"Eikon Basilike,"' 280-81; and Alfriend, "Great Danger of the Confederacy," 42.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
333
These antidemocratic thinkers had no illusions that the southem
people would willingly accept such radical changes. Hence, they were
not surprised when the framers in Montgomery, Alabama, produced a
Confederate constitution so closely modeled on the old United States
Constitution; nevertheless, they castigated political leaders for their
lack of courage and vision. Southemers "have been so long in the
enjoyment of the privileges of an almost unqualified liberty, both
personal and political, that we would scarcely have consented to their
abridgment for any cause," Falconer observed practically.'''^ Nor
would the individual states, "so long as [they] retain the attribute of
independent sovereignty," consent to an all-powerful central government over which they would have no check.'•'^ But this vision of a
reactionary revolution leading to a patrician republic was no idle
fantasy, these thinkers assured themselves. While such fundamental
changes would be impossible during normal times, these were not
normal times.
The war itself, they hoped, would force these changes on the southem people. Indeed, such proponents saw "[t]he laws, exigenci[e]s and
vicissitudes of war" as "not merely the last, but the only channel
through which, and by which, the required and proper changes can be
effected." "Our people will require a preparatory training, before they
can be brought to consent to them," Falconer explained. "Nothing will
contribute so much to this end as the presence and consequences of a
state of war."'^'
The war would advance the cause of reaction on several fronts simultaneously. Military life would expose men in the ranks, in J. Quitman
Moore's words, to "an organized system of subordination, resting
primarily on conquest, and accepting the principle oí force, as the
necessary basis of social organization."'''^ Stripped of many of their
accustomed liberties. Confederate soldiers would leam the value of
discipline, deference, and proper leadership, thus preparing them to
accept future patrician rule. By joining the ranks, soldiers had '"aliened
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,'" George Fitzhugh wrote
approvingly. "Their slaves are ten times freer than themselves. Yet
everybody feels that all this is eminently right."'''^ Given the extent
[Falconer], "True Question," 24.
'•**Moore, "Past and Present," 197.
'•'^ [Falconer], "True Question," 26.
'^*J. Quitman Moore, "The Belligerents," De Bow's Review, 31 (July 1861), 69-77
(quotation on 71).
'^'Fitzhugh, "Conduct of the War and Reflections on the Times," 33.
334
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
of Confederate mobilization and the sheer number of southem men
brought under military control. Confederate reactionary thitikers
placed great hopes in the transformative effects of army life.''*"
But even more vital to these plans was the tremendous suffering
caused by the war. Indeed, in July 1861 William Falconer expressed
his desire for a painful, difficult, and "prolonged war." Whereas a
"prosperous war . . . . would add much to the present arrogance
of the masses," a "difficult war" would put them in their proper place.
As Falconer reasoned, "That war has brought us national poverty;
poverty . . . brings difficult war: a difficult war, to argue its final
success, argues protracted hostilities; well directed and protracted war
results in an abridgement of the personal and political liberty of the
masses, and that results in the establishment of a strong govemment,
and a strong govemment is essential to the future object of the
South."''*' Faced with both intemal hardships and invading foes,
southemers would willingly surrender their rights for the sake of
security. Military necessity and martial law would sweep away "those
playthings of peacetimes" like constitutions, habeas corpus, freedom
of speech, and other civil liberties. The southem people must leam to
look to their govemment "with hope, confidence and dread," as pamphlet writer Henry St. Paul advised the new Confederate Congress,
"and if the constitution is either silent or adverse, let [Congress] ignore
or set it aside."'"*^ "[T]he nation was sick of too much liberty," but
"[n]ow martial law has corrected all that," George Fitzhugh noted with
glee during the summer of 1862. "[A]rmed men" stood on every street
comer to "preserve order" and dispense "summary punishment." "This
is not liberty, but the reverse of it, yet none but the cormpt and
criminal object," Fitzhugh concluded.'''^
Implicit in these arguments was the expectation that war would thin
out the ranks of the lower orders and thus reduce the democratic
element through attrition. Such sentiments were dangerous to express
publicly, and even these outspoken reactionaries generally refrained
from spelling out precisely what a "difficult" war would mean in
terms of body count. Still, hints of this assumption were evident especially in the calls for the South's educated elite to resist the temptation
'""For a more thorough discussion of this "reactionary militarism," see Bonner, "Proslavery
Extremism Goes to War."
'"' [Falconer], "True Question," 22 (first quotation), 26 (second, third, and fourth quotations).
'"^St. Paul, Our Home and Foreign Policy, 12-13 (fu^t quotation on 12; second and
third quotations on 13).
'"^ Fitzhugh, "Conduct of the War and Refiections on the Times," 33-34 (first, third, fourth,
fifth, and sixth quotations on 34; second quotation on 33).
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
335
of the battlefield. For instance, William H. McGuffey and Robert
Lewis Dabney issued a much reprinted appeal to "our educated young
men" in the summer of 1861, urging them not to make the "unnecessary and irreparable sacrifice by deserting their education for the
camp." "Let others render the requisite military service, who can do
it without so minous a cost to themselves and the public," they
argued.''*^ While McGuffey and Dabney's stated purpose was to
ensure that the Confederacy emerged from the war with an adequate
supply of professional men, ministers, and teachers, these were precisely the sort of well-bom educated southemers that antidemocratic
thinkers had in mind to wield political power. It should be noted that
such appeals for the better sort to stay at home proved largely unsuccessful, and even Dabney failed to follow his own advice. '"^^ It should
also be noted that this early yearning for a difficult war faded in the
face of the real thing.
For southem antidemocratic thinkers, the creation of the Confederacy was a moment of optimism, a chance to shape the future of this
new nation and to put things right. Indeed, they hoped that the war
would enable southemers to break free from the American political
tradition itself and introduce a radically different form of govemance.
Theirs was the most extreme vision for change articulated by the
groups discussed in this essay, but their belief in the possibilities of
the moment was the same, even if their agenda was not. Unlike the
female education advocates and slavery reformers, these writers did
not attempt to enlist the sympathies of the southem public for their
cause; after all, how could they? Rather, they attempted to use their
influence to shape the war into the reactionary experience they
believed their new nation needed. Like the other groups, these thinkers
were driven by nationalist impulses. Of course, their restrictive version of Confederate nationalism, if widely disseminated, would have
undercut the nation's popular appeal and endangered southem unity,
but they did not see such risks. They believed that their vision for
the future was the true national destiny of the Confederacy and that
the changes they advocated were required to implement it.
'"^"Resident Editor's Department: Our Educational Interests," North-Carolina Journal of
Education, 4 (July 1861), 223-24 (quotations on 223). See also William H. McGuffey and
Robert Lewis Dabney, "The Interest of Education," Columbia Southern Presbyterian, October
19, 1861, p. 1.
'""^ Sean Michael Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney: A Southern Presbyterian Life (Phillipsburg,
N.J., 2005), 110-17.
336
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
For most white southemers, secession and the formation of the
Confederacy was a conservative revolution—preemptive action to
prevent unwanted change. For some, however, the new southem
nation represented something very different. To these individuals,
southem independence opened a momentary window of opportunity
to enact long-desired reforms. Emboldened by the uncertainty of the
times, they embraced secession and even the war itself as transformative vehicles, and they attempted to make their own causes intrinsic to
Confederate independence. They wanted the war to be revolutionary,
albeit in carefully controlled ways.
In terms of achieving their goals, none of these groups could be
considered very successful. Thanks to women's education advocates,
efforts were underway to improve female education and even to create
specialized normal schools for women teachers when defeat overtook
the Confederacy, but few of these fledging projects survived into
Reconstruction. Although an increasing number of white southem
women did teach after the war, this move into the workforce had much
more to do with economic necessity than with furthering the cause of
female education.'''^
The labors of Confederate slavery reformers yielded even fewer
concrete results. Outright opposition and legislative inertia combined
to prevent significant statutory changes during the Confederacy's
short life. Historian Bell Irvin Wiley could credit reformers with just
two small legislative victories: the repeal of a Georgia law forbidding
the licensing of black preachers and the passage of an Alabama law
requiring that masters provide legal counsel for indicted slaves.'''^
Efforts to advance the core of the reformers' agenda—the elimination
of antiliteracy laws and the protection of slave marriages—were
defeated or postponed indefinitely, if they made it to the legislative
floor at all.'''*
For their part. Confederate reactionary thinkers remained active
throughout the conflict, issuing their diatribes against democracy so
long as there were southem publishers to print them. These writers
continued to rest their hopes on the war to bring Confederate independence and the radical political changes they sought. In the end, it
failed them on both counts. The Confederate govemment did become
'"^ On the recruitment of Confederate female teachers and efforts to train them, see Bemath,
Confederate Minds, 144-45, 242-43, 280.
•"Bell Irvin Wiley, "Movement to Humanize the Institution of Slavery Dudng the
Confederacy," 219.
'"* See Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom, 253-62.
A MOMENT OF POSSIBILITY
337
increasingly centralized as tbe war progressed, and Confederate liberties were restricted in the name of military necessity; bowever, tbe
patrician republic tbe reactionaries envisioned remained only on paper,
and defeat put an end to tbeir dreams of escaping American democracy.
While some Confederate politicians were clearly influenced by tbese
ideas, tbe realities of sustaining the war effort and the need to bolster
public support meant that those in power never dared to enact tbe
changes these reactionaries demanded.
Tbe point, bowever, is not what these groups accomplished or
failed to accomplish. Rather, it is what tbey thought tbey could accomplish, and their activities underscore tbe perceived range of possibilities tbat secession and tbe formation of the soutbem nation opened.
Tbe common perception of those possibilities and a sbared sense of
immediacy connected all tbese Confederate visionaries.
Examining tbe demands articulated by tbese different groups
helps recapture how white southemers at tbe time viewed their
Confederacy—as a nation with a future, and not simply as tbe tragic
mistake we know it will be. Confederates did not know tbeir nation was
doomed. Tbey were embarking on an uncertain but hopeful future—
a future tbat required planning. Secession forced them to imagine
that future, to envision what this soutbem nation would be and wbat
independence would require. For some, the realization of that vision
meant that soutbem society needed significant transformation.
These advocates for change also remind us that southemers bad
different, and sometimes competing and contradictory, visions of tbe
Confederate nation. Nationalists all, these Confederates were selfconsciously engaged in tbe work of imagining their nation, and tbey
attempted to excite the imaginations of others by using the language of
nationalism to advance their causes. Tbat their visions of the nation
were not unified is not surprising, nor does such disparity suggest tbe
weakness of Confederate nationalism. Indeed, their public discourse,
tbeir agitation, was the very process and substance of nationalism itself.
Confederate nationalism was not an either-or proposition, a set program that all had to march in lockstep toward to be counted as nationalists. Instead, witbin tbese debates over tbe future shape and nature of
the Confederacy, Confederates worked out for themselves wbat their
nation might be and wbat it sbould represent. While these three groups
of white southemers placed their hopes in the Confederacy for different reasons, it is significant tbat tbey all tbougbt nationally, seeking
national solutions to national problems in order to secure a national
future. Tbey all defined tbeir projects in opposition to tbe Nortb,
338
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
always emphasizing the southemness of both themselves and their
ideas. They embraced the formation of the Confederate nation as the
beginning of something truly new—a unique historical moment full of
power and possibility.
While the ideas of these southem advocates for change reveal the
unexpected paths that Confederate nationalism could take, they also
point to the constraints imposed by that nationalism and to the underlying class, gender, and racial assumptions of its proponents. There
were limits to the perceived possibilities of the moment and areas into
which their imaginations did not stray. Secession awakened reformist
hopes within these southem writers, yet the need to uphold slavery,
white supremacy, and the existing class stmcture ensured that these
hopes would be channeled in certain directions and away from others,
and their thinking was always circumscribed as to what could be
changed and what could not. Consequently, their critiques of southem
society and their demands for reform never challenged the fundamental social, racial, and gender hierarchies of the Old South. Indeed,
they argued their proposed changes were essential to perpetuate such
"natural" order. Confederate nationalism was a bigger tent than is
sometimes assumed, encompassing a surprising variety of views and
ideas, but it was still a tent with definite sides. Confederate advocates
for change touched those sides and tested those limits, but they never
crossed them, and in so doing they demonstrated both the flexibility
and the restrictions of the Confederate nationalist project.
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