Jun 15, 2020
I
feel like a broken record, but what a great time I had inertviewing
Jim Broomall about his book "Private Confederacies". We met near
the monument of the 111th Pa on Culp's Hill, in the shade, with a
nice, gentle Pennsylvania breeze which seems to be a rarity for
these in-the-field recordings in 2020. Anyway...
How
did the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction shape the
masculinity of white Confederate veterans? As James J. Broomall
shows, the crisis of the war forced a reconfiguration of the
emotional worlds of the men who took up arms for the South. Raised
in an antebellum culture that demanded restraint and shaped white
men to embrace self-reliant masculinity, Confederate soldiers lived
and fought within military units where they experienced the
traumatic strain of combat and its privations together--all the
while being separated from suffering families. Military service
provoked changes that escalated with the end of slavery and the
Confederacy's military defeat. Returning to civilian life, Southern
veterans questioned themselves as never before, sometimes suffering
from terrible self-doubt.
Drawing on personal letters and diaries, Broomall
argues that the crisis of defeat ultimately necessitated new forms
of expression between veterans and among men and women. On the one
hand, war led men to express levels of emotionality and
vulnerability previously assumed the domain of women. On the other
hand, these men also embraced a virulent, martial masculinity that
they wielded during Reconstruction and beyond to suppress freed
peoples and restore white rule through paramilitary organizations
and the Ku Klux Klan.
James
J. Broomall is assistant professor of history at Shepherd
University and director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the
Study of the Civil War.
Get
Private Confederacies from UNC Press here