Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861-1865.

Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861-1865. By Armstead L. Robinson. Carter G. Woodson Institute Series. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Pp. xx, 352. $34.95, ISBN 0-8139-2309-3.)

A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868. By Anne Sarah Rubin. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2005. Pp. xii, 319. $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-2928-5.)

There are times when a reviewer is called upon to discuss two books that are only loosely connected and others when the monographs mesh together so well that it makes for intriguing comparisons. This case is one of the latter occasions. Armstead L. Robinson and Anne Sarah Rubin represent both ends of the spectrum in Civil War historiography. Robinson's posthumous book, one that he began thirty years ago, anticipates many subsequent arguments with which modern scholars are now familiar, while Rubin's study represents the very best of new Civil War scholarship.

As the title Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861-1865 suggests, Robinson places slavery at the center of the collapse of the Confederacy. He argues that in order to stop the erosion of the peculiar institution, the Confederate government was forced to divert strength from its military effort. Thus the demise of slavery was decisive in southern defeat. Robinson's geographic focus is on the Mississippi River Valley, which, as he states, was a new, neglected area when he began his inquiry. In fact it is only in recent years that Civil War historians have begun to focus on the western campaigns as having fundamentally influenced the final war strategies. "The loss of the West had two major consequences ..." (p. x). The West was an important strategic gain for the Union, and its occupation revealed fundamental class tensions within southern society. According to Robinson, northern occupation exacerbated internal social tensions instead of raising resistance among southerners.

Areas of the Confederacy with heavy concentrations of slaveholders had to locus heavily on local defense, so from the beginning of the war nonslaveholders bore the brunt of the military burden. Although most nonslaveholders enlisted--seeing slavery as central to their way of life and conforming to the culture of (white) southern honor--secession disrupted an alleged racial consensus and revealed cracks and ruptures in the southern social system. Class tensions were exacerbated by an unequal treatment of southern citizens that consistently preferenced planters, and these tensions contributed to Confederate defeat as much as did an imbalance of resources. As the war progressed, the hypocrisy of southern rhetoric that claimed all white men were equal became increasingly obvious, illuminating the inequality of sacrifice and leading to a growth in class resentment.

The ultimate weakness of the Confederacy, according to Robinson, turns on a central paradox embedded in the rhetoric of secession. The ideology that purported the equality of all white men was in blatant contradiction to the nonegalitarianism that became evident in the Confederacy. The ultimate demise of the Confederacy could only have been averted by a speedy victory. Because Robinson displayed an uncanny anticipation of future arguments, there is little here that is new. Furthermore, his argument lacks the nuance that we have come to expect of new scholarship on Confederate nationalism, the connection between battlefront and home front, and the interrelationship of race and class. There is much repetition here, the narrative does not flow as smoothly as one would like, and there are several places where quotations lack citations. All this is very frustrating, but the greatest weakness is that, while Robinson insists upon the centrality of the "bitter fruits of bondage," the institution of slavery remains almost peripheral and African Americans are all but invisible. The final chapters of the book are heavily focused on military concerns and go beyond the author's stated geographical focus. Of course, it is probably unfair to criticize Robinson for these shortcomings, as this remains, in some sense, a work in progress. Nevertheless, this is a book that will only be read and appreciated by other scholars who can recognize that thirty years ago Robinson's work was clearly pathbreaking.

Both Robinson and Anne Rubin would agree that the Confederate nation could not withstand the challenges of politics, class, and military obstacles. But while Robinson sees a rapid disintegration of Confederate nationalism, Rubin argues that an attachment to a separate southern identity continued beyond 1865. Differentiating between nation and nationalism, Rubin seeks to demonstrate "the complexity and texture of a people's attachment to their nation as an ideal, a state, and a memory" (p. 1). The two authors also differ in terms of methodology and sources. Robinson's work is representative of the early social history of his time and shows a strong Marxist influence. Where he found contradictions in anecdotal evidence, Robinson used quantitative methodology and a computer model to trace race and class groups. Rubin concentrates on language. She examines public rhetoric and propaganda and seeks to find their reflections in private correspondence.

Rubin argues that early in the war there was a conscious effort toward cross-class appeal in Confederate rhetoric and that there was an intellectual, as well as a military, struggle for independence. "Because the Confederacy had no existence apart from the war, it became extremely sensitive to shifts in wartime fortunes" (p. 49). Rubin demonstrates how individual southerners struggled to reconcile theory with practice, revealing a dynamic component to wartime morale. Although Confederates could not always meet the demands put upon them as ideology and reality increasingly clashed, Rubin argues, "[e]ven as they acted in ways that hurt their new nation, Confederates professed their love for it" (p. 79).

Rubin deserves special acknowledgment for never shying away from difficult questions and offering plausible answers. For example, one could dismiss the mental meanderings of Confederate rhetoric as the ultimate exercise in self-denial. This would suggest that the Confederate nation was at best illusory or, at worst, nonexistent. But Rubin demonstrates that even self-denial can have real political consequences. Although the war ended in the spring of 1865, a sense of Confederate national identity lived on.

In the second part of her monograph Rubin traces the connection between personal recovery and politics as former Confederates struggled to balance strategies of defiance and accommodation. Southerners wanted to be Americans and to enjoy the full rights of citizenship, yet they clung to elements of southern distinctiveness. As supreme rhetorical jugglers they convinced themselves that these categories were not mutually exclusive. Rubin focuses her postwar analysis on the reconstruction of gender relations. Although there is nothing especially new about this argument, Rubin offers a sophisticated and detailed analysis of what she calls "political ventriloquism" (p. 218). This intriguing term conveys the way in which southern white women were given a voice, particulary in print, but simultaneously had their voices manipulated in such a way as to limit their roles and utterances.

Rubin concludes that by the end of 1868 former Confederates had succeeded in shaping a new southern white identity as Americans with full political and economic rights. Yet they also retained a distinctive emotional connection to the Confederacy. However, like Robinson's, Rubin's title may be somewhat misleading. The Confederate nation may well have been shattered, but having demonstrated that nationalism and a nation state are different things, she convincingly argues that Confederate nationalism had a life well beyond 1865. Had Armstead Robinson lived to read Anne Rubin's work, I believe, he would have been among the first to praise it. Robinson anticipated many of the most intriguing and complex Civil War questions currently under investigation, and Rubin's work is among the most skillful of these contemporary analyses.

JACQUELINE G. CAMPBELL

University of Connecticut, Storrs