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Examines the psychological impact of the Civil War on Confederate soldiers who suffered debilitating psychological and emotional wounds that sometimes resulted in institutionalization in insane asylums, or in suicidal behavior. Historians have not focused on Civil War participants as victims of war trauma until recently. This chapter deepens our understanding of these experiences by asserting that external war-related pressures like witnessing death and mayhem combined with internal pressures like fear of masculine failure or being called a coward heavily taxed soldiers and their psyches. Factors that contributed to psychological distress among Confederate servicemen include: exposure to battle, fear of being called a coward, fear of failure, youthfulness, homesickness, and depression.Suicide offered southern white men a way to maintain mastery and control over their deaths in war zones where chaos and disorder prevailed. Attitudes toward Confederates who killed themselves during the war were more supportive and less stigmatizing than one might think. Many soldiers also ended up institutionalized in asylums after being diagnosed as insane. Caregivers and family members rarely connected signs of mental distress with wartime experiences.

As the war drew to a close in Virginia, veterans from both armies collected relics to validate their service to their respective causes. They gathered many different objects, such as tree branches, paper currency, paper documents, army boots, battle flags, and jewelry. But the Confederate keepsakes could serve another, more dire purpose, by underscoring racial solidarity among whites in the postwar South.

This chapter describes the support for Irish Confederate soldiers. Support from home was vital both for encouraging Irish soldiers to stay in the army and to highlight to native white southerners that the entire Irish community was behind the Confederacy. Civilian leaders of the Irish in the South embraced the Confederate national project and most became advocates of a “hard-war” policy. However, as the war became increasingly costly, and Irish civilians began to suffer directly the deprivations and hardships of conflict, Irish support for the Confederacy waned.

This chapter discusses the series of Reconstruction Acts passed by Congress in March of 1867, prompted by former Confederate soldiers parading through the streets, the southern press's tirade against Reconstruction policies, southern whites' treatment of freedmen, and President Andrew Johnson's moderate policies toward the South. The first of the acts stipulated the terms by which the southern states might reenter the Union. Each of the eleven Confederate states, excluding Tennessee, would be required to write a new constitution that provided for manhood suffrage, to approve the new constitution by a majority of voters, and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Equally important, the act divided the region into five military districts, whose commanders could use the army to protect life and property.

As southern men transitioned to becoming soldiers in the Confederate Army, they increasingly began to identify as soldiers. Military attire distinguished soldiers from citizens and established visible bonds among troops. Military encampments similarly promoted a corporate identity but also allowed soldiers to bond in small, personalized space.

M. Keith Harris examines morale among Confederate soldiers in the trenches around Petersburg. Despite common perceptions among later historians that the siege marked the beginning of an inevitable slide toward Appomattox, Harris shows that many Rebels remained quite upbeat through the summer. Reading forward in evidence from 1864, rather than backward with full knowledge of the war’s outcome, reveals surprising optimism in Confederate accounts. Harris concedes a degree of war weariness but identifies countervailing forces that bolstered morale. Among these were a belief that soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia, under Lee’s leadership, could hold off the enemy at Petersburg, that Confederate armies in Georgia and the Shenandoah Valley could win victories, and that Union military failures could undo Lincoln and his party in November.

This essay contends that there are inconsistencies in the Freedom School's interpretation of the Civil War as simultaneously a redemptive national conflict and the first modern total war. Examining Confederate atrocities against Union soldiers, it argues that white southerners so passionately hated the North that they frequently disregarded the rules of war. He thinks that historians have avoided accounts of atrocities because they represent everything that the war was not supposed to be about: treachery, brutality, and killing without meaning. The unreasoning savagery made the conflict a total war, stripping the Civil War of its ideological and redemptive power.

This chapter examines Robert E. Lee's surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. It explores Lee's decision to surrender, their meeting at the McLean house, and the patrol of Confederate soldiers. It demonstrates how the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse built on earlier surrenders and set the stage for the surrenders that came afterwards.

This chapter discusses the mutiny of the troops stationed at Fort Jackson against their officers. The Confederate soldiers in Fort St. Philip may have sympathized with the mutineers, but even without them the revolt in Fort Jackson was the largest mutiny in the Civil War. Despite the mutiny's size and strategic importance, historians have not examined it in any detail. Thus the mutinous Confederates are still something of a mystery. The search for their motives will lead one to New Orleans and beyond. The chapter will reveal unpleasant truths about the Civil War but also uncover the hopes of the ordinary men and women who chose to embrace the United States as their best hope for happiness. A short history of the Union military campaign to recapture New Orleans will both clarify the importance of the Fort Jackson mutiny and offer some ideas about why the revolt occurred.

This chapter discusses Franny Jordan and how she followed a “squad of soldiers” who had seized her teenaged son with the intention of forcing him into the Confederate Army. Fearful of what lay ahead, she stopped at the home of a neighbor and enlisted the aid of two young women in retrieving her son. As the women approached the Confederate soldiers, the soldiers cursed them for daring to challenge their authority. When one of the women retorted that they intended to do “no such thing,” the soldiers surrounded her. Crying out “god dam her,” one man urged the others to “take her along too.”

This book focuses on one of the fundamental questions about the American Civil War: Why did nonslaveholders sacrifice so much to build a slave republic? Nonslaveholders' commitment was not marginal; they formed the vast majority of soldiers who fought on behalf of the Confederacy, nor was slavery a tangential concern to the conflict. The political debate over slavery and its expansion drove the North and South to arms, and the shift to emancipation by the North ensured a desolating war. Though relatively brief in comparison to other nineteenth-century wars, the Civil War generated catastrophic losses for both sides. In the book, the inspirations that compelled Confederate soldiers into the war and sustained them in the face of horrific losses are explored.

This chapter explores the cognitive dissonance that Civil War soldiers experienced as they left their ordinary lives, suffused with customary common-law understandings of property, and entered the military, where according to the laws of war they could appropriate personal property in a variety of circumstances. Back home, that appropriation might be called “stealing.” During wartime, however, such foraging was often legitimate and necessary. That it was “legal” did not, for many soldiers, lessen their unease. Instead, they felt compelled to explain their behavior to civilian correspondents back home—and to themselves. Examining rarely used personal correspondence by these soldiers, the chapter captures the lived experience of legal pluralism among ordinary Americans who found themselves pulled between two legal orders, civilian and military, in the extraordinary circumstance of a civil war fought at home.

This chapter shows how the percentage of personal and family slaveowners tells us much about their background and little of their motivations. However, if we accept the idea that individuals owned slaves because they believed in the merits and legitimacy of the institution, and that individuals seceded and fought at least in part to protect family, friends, property, and a way of life that they believed was threatened, then Confederate soldiers' personal attachment to slavery was a powerful motivation in their military service. It was a building block upon which they forged a sense of mission and a spirit of camaraderie. Among those who came from slaveholding families, larger slaveowners were overrepresented, and soldiers who did not own slaves tended to be older than their slaveholding comrades.

This chapter looks at the recent publication of data documenting the contributions of Hispanic Confederate soldiers to the war effort, which contradicts the Hispanic archive's self-image as it has sought to chronicle a history of anti-white-supremacist resistance. By addressing material that is seemingly undesirable, the chapter analyzes the ideological mandates that shape how and why archives are perceived and comprehended. The latter part looks at how contradictions in archival holdings can also incite renewed interest in an archive and support its ongoing development. The chapter's analysis circulates around artifacts such as Colonel Ambrosio José Gonzales' 1853 Manifesto on Cuban Affairs Addressed to the People of the United States and the sympathies of the Reconstruction-era novelist María Amparo Ruiz de Burton.