Here is a book likely to be set upon by the slings and arrows of modern historiography. "[C]ontrary to what we have thought," Anne Sarah Rubin writes in introducing A Shattered Nation, "the construction or creation of Confederate nationalism was not a difficult problem. The speed with which white Southerners, many of them staunch Unionists through the election of 1860, shed their American identity and picked up a sense of themselves as Confederates was startling" (p. 1). With that Rubin enters a debate studded with redoubts and entrenchments. A modern survey of the field might begin with Emory M. Thomas: "For four brief years Southerners took charge of their own destiny. In doing so they tested their institutions and sacred cows, found them wanting, and redefined them." Not so, comes the retort from Drew Gilpin Faust: Southern women tired of the war and eventually "undermined both objective and ideological foundations for the Confederate war effort; they directly subverted the South's military and economic effectiveness as well as civilian morale." Exactly right, say the authors of Why the Confederacy Lost the Civil War: "In basic terms, the Confederates lacked a feeling of oneness, that almost mystical sense of nationalism. They lacked a consensus on why they fought or what they stood for. The Confederate nation was created on paper, not in the hearts and minds of its would-be citizens." Wrong, says Gary W. Gallagher: "The Confederate populace waged a determined struggle for independence. No other segment of white American society has persisted in any endeavor so destructive of human and physical resources."¹

Such has been the way with Confederate nationalism. The argument has long since lost subtlety and nuance: to the blunting of professional categorization; to the infighting between social historians and military ones; to—if we are to be honest—ideological positioning on the memory, legacy, and importance of the Confederate experience. None are more aware of the latter than those who have been speaking daggers. "Any historian who argues that the [End Page 366] Confederate people demonstrated robust devotion to their slave-based republic, possessed feelings of national community, and sacrificed more than any other segment of white society in United States history," Gallagher has written, "runs the risk of being labeled a neo-Confederate."²

A Shattered Nation is first and foremost an exploration of Confederate identity, not primarily an argument for the wartime strength of Confederate nationalism. Unfortunately, given the nature of the current debate, more than a few readers will invert or confuse those priorities for their own—without, one hopes, accusing Rubin of a neo-Confederate sensibility. There is none of that here, even as Rubin attempts to go beyond the traditional argument to explore the contours of what it meant to be Confederate: what forces shaped identity, challenged it, and were redefined in the crucible of the war and its aftermath. Rubin is not the first modern historian to take Confederate identity on its own terms—years ago Thomas attempted to develop a useable Confederate past—but she is the first one to offer a deepening of what heretofore have been exploratory or piecemeal explanations of it. Indeed A Shattered Nation is in some ways a synthesis of concepts and arguments and forces that to this point have been loosely or even tangentially applied to Confederate nationalism. David Potter and other theorists of nationalism and identity—Alon Confino, Richard Handler, and Benedict Anderson among others—provide her framework; through diligent and often imaginative research in primary sources, Rubin herself broadens our awareness of the various ways that identity was disseminated. Songs, newspapers, sermons, pamphlets, and schoolbooks created a public culture that was reflected and reinforced in more intimate, personal sources such as diaries and letters. "Confederates sustained their nationalism in the face of challenges," she writes, "not through a centralized propaganda apparatus, but through countless personal exchanges" (p. 6).

That insight, which might be associated with nationalism from the bottom up, is the bedrock of the book's theoretical and interpretative premise. Revealed not in propaganda but in common primary sources, it illustrates Rubin's method as well as the full spectrum of the Confederate experience. In arguing that "the connection between politics and religion in the Confederacy turned the Confederacy into the culmination of the Puritan city on a hill," for instance, Rubin connects religion to Confederate identity in a fresh way: one that borrows from studies of antebellum and postwar Southern religious experience, expands the exploratory ideas set forth by Faust and others, and, teased out of primary sources, reaches across a spectrum of different demands and loyalties to tie Confederate hopes to a broader notion of American exceptionalism (p. 38). And it reveals, more fully than heretofore, the anxious ways by which everyday Confederates balanced that hope against fear and pragmatic self-interest. For Rubin, identity is not merely an adjunct to the war [End Page 367] effort, to be measured solely as an investment deposited or withdrawn from the nation; it is not a merely means of understanding the strength or weakness of Confederate will to win the war; and most importantly, it is not an identity that lives or dies at the expense of other loyalties. The latter point, one that most modern historians can trace to Potter's seminal essay, "The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice-Versa," is what allows her the flexibility to argue that internal dissension did not translate to lack or even loss of will.³ Dissension over the draft, arming slaves, or the ever-shifting realties of gender, class, and race relations, simply brought sets of interests into conflict—with Confederates hoping those collisions could be reconciled within an independent Southern nation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Rubin's sensitive handling of oath taking, "the hardest decisions Confederates within enemy lines were forced to make" (p. 95). Taking the oath of allegiance, she argues, was a far starker choice from the perspective of ultra-nationalists, Unionists, and even later historians than it was for everyday Confederates. Because they understood that unusual events introduced unusual circumstances, and because they understood that events and circumstances could very well be different in a week, a month, or a year, those who swore false oaths did not see themselves as abandoning the cause or their Confederate identity. Or, as she puts it, "Confederate oath-takers held their breath and put thoughts of perjury and dishonor out of their heads in order to tolerate an intolerable predicament" (p. 95).

More importantly, Rubin's use of nationalism creates the opportunity to extend its reach into the Reconstruction era. The current furious arguments over Confederate nationalism have a fixed endpoint; by tying its strength or weakness to the outcome of the war, the debate's starting point—why did the Confederacy lose?—begins at Appomattox and moves backwards. Rubin moves in the opposite direction: "The shards of the shattered nation," she writes, "would remain sharp for generations" (p. 247). She shifts the ground to look forward from Confederate defeat. For her, the Confederate nation died, but the nationalism associated with it did not.

As in the debate over wartime nationalism, the general idea of extending Confederate sensibility into the postwar period is not new. One thinks here of the opening line of Charles Reagan Wilson's book on religion and the Lost Cause: "This is a study of the afterlife of a Redeemer Nation that died."⁴ A careful reader will note, however, that Rubin uses that term—the Lost Cause—only rarely, for it does not fully apply to her analysis. Other historians of the Lost Cause would agree that the sentiments associated with the Lost Cause produced a separate cultural identity while acquiescing in the loss of political independence. But for Rubin, the Lost Cause as both analytical tool and historical phenomena is not satisfactory. It seems both too broad and too narrow an explanation. While it contains the mythical, mystic elements of [End Page 368] identification, it does not embrace the political and social institutions that the Confederate nation was created to protect. It does not touch hard, fast realities—particularly if one views it as a creation of the post-Reconstruction era and thus not an immediate or even essential extension of Confederate nationalism. "The willingness of so many people to return to the bosom of the Union need not be seen as evidence of weak Confederate . . . nationalism; rather, it appears as a self-conscious attempt to manipulate Northerners," she writes. "What white southerners wanted after the war was local control—how they got that control mattered less" (p. 163). Put another way, secession, war, and the Confederate nation itself were instruments in the service of larger goals. Neither the goals themselves nor the allegiance to them fundamentally changed, even if the tools and institutions for achieving them were destroyed between 1861 and 1865. Reconstruction saw an abandonment of the institutions—mainly the Confederate government and its army—only to produce the new tool of accommodation. And because Southern whites viewed the struggle as ongoing after the war, the forces shaping and fashioning a separate identity in the aftermath continued to have everyday vitality and resonance. Rather than folding itself into a Lost Cause memory fashioned after the stabilization of political, social, and economic relationships that white Southerners insisted upon as they plied accommodation, Reconstruction becomes the crucible in which this identity was structured. This identity shaped the Southern response to Reconstruction and was not created in its aftermath.

The many accomplishments in A Shattered Nation will not keep some readers from fits of frustration. An occasional looseness of phrasing and interpretative double-tracking becomes distracting and confusing. After emphasizing the "startling" nature of the transformation from American to Confederate, for instance, Rubin correctly assesses the dynamic of secession by pointing out that Confederates saw themselves as the real Americans: "Thus, the Confederate nation was not created out of whole cloth but rather represented a perfection of America; Confederates were not abandoning their old country so much as they were renewing it" (p. 18). Put that way, they did not shed their American identity so much as they reshaped it, and the speed with which they became Confederate becomes far less startling. So does the relative speed with which former Confederates reattached themselves to the Union. Or, on other occasions: "[P]rivate expressions of national identity, as well as public exhortations aimed at nation-building, all but ignored the question of racial slavery," but the "proslavery argument permeated all aspects of Confederate culture" (pp. 3, 33). A distinction does indeed exist. Confederates, as Rubin argues, took slavery as a given; they attempted to frame their national identity in principles, sentiment, history, and symbolism, all the while assuming the material interests that produced secession and war. [End Page 369] But phrased this way, even the sympathetic reader often has to work hard to maintain the very distinction Rubin is exploring.

Further, to say that Confederates had "no vocabulary for defeat, no way to fit it into their ideology of God-sanctioned nationhood, and at no time was this dissonance more visible than in the final months of the war," is to emphasize the power of hope and faith and optimism in the cause (p. 112). But the statement sacrifices accuracy for argument. Dissonance surely existed between the reality of defeat and God-sanctioned nationhood; but the relationship between the rhetoric of victory and defeat was, on the contrary, vitally symbiotic. Confederates saw themselves as living an epic, re-creating a heroic age even as they were creating a nation. They saw themselves as the classical lyricists of a new nation. For ultimate success to mean anything to them—and nationalists believed in ultimate success—defeat had to be possible and perhaps, ironically, a probability. The entire vocabulary of Confederate success and the heroic age was laced with the possibility of tragedy. Indeed, Rubin seems to recognize this by stressing that "Confederates created their identity under constant assault, and that identity was ever changing" (p. 86). Refusing to go further costs her an important chance to explore the relationship between romanticism, honor, and identity. One need not accept the postwar "history" of John Esten Cooke to accept that its tragic romanticism was birthed with secession itself. "If I get thro' this war," Cooke wrote early in the conflict, "I will have much to write of—if." And, in keeping with Rubin's own view that popular Confederate culture permeated private Confederate lives, one need not take the unreliable and oft-quoted Cooke alone as a source. One cavalry officer thought his experience was "full of the spirit of wild adventure and will no doubt if the war continues long furnish food for . . . novels."⁵

Missing, too, is the deeply related idea of the hero in Confederate culture. It is perhaps an unfair criticism, especially when Rubin deliberately avoids military events, armies, and leaders in general because she wishes to stress ordinary men and women to "emphasize the larger culture of nationalism and patriotism created by Confederates themselves" (p. 6). Through heroes, Confederate identity was disseminated in the same way that it was disseminated through papers and songs and diaries; heroes—and even the changing nature of heroism—symbolized Confederate identity. To be fair, if Rubin were to address either criticism she would have had to make a far greater concession to a Lost Cause approach than she wants to take. Still, the Lost Cause might be seen as the Janus face of Confederate nationalism. Far from being a simple linear reaction to defeat or a lineal descendant of Confederate identity, its impulses were present even as Confederate nationalism was present; they were was birthed by the war, lived through it, and came to embody the nationalism of a failed independent Confederate state. It could [End Page 370] not have been otherwise. An iconic but catalytic element in the Confederate nationalism—its Janus face—sought justification if not anchorage in the past, even as the experiences of modern war and state creation were new.

So much for my own slings and arrows. One might close by observing that A Shattered Nation is also—in historiographical terms, anyway—somewhat Janus-faced. Finding a mooring in an argument that began before she was privy to it, Rubin deftly moves it in a new direction for scholars of her generation. I remember my own introduction to the matter almost fifteen years ago. When I was just starting out in graduate school—in other words, before I knew any better—a friend who was also my senior by a generation put the issue in stark terms over a beer and a cheese steak. "Well, there's the rub," he said, both of us ignoring the collision between cheese steaks and Shakespearean idiom. "You've got to think they were pretty committed if they were willing to break up the Union and throw themselves into an all-consuming war." Then a sip from the mug. "But then you've got to wonder how committed they were, since they rejoined the Union pretty quickly after it was over." More fully and completely than any historian to date, Rubin has gripped that conundrum with both hands. To be or not to be? The answer, Rubin argues, was to be—first by taking arms against what Confederates viewed as a sea of troubles, and then, in the aftermath of failure, to manipulate in Reconstruction the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.