A Shattered Nation:  The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868.  By Anne Sarah Rubin.  (Chapel Hill:  The University of North Carolina Press, 2005.  Acknowledgements, introduction, illustrations, conclusions, notes, bibliography, index.  Pp. 319.  $34.95,c cloth.)

     Rubin presents a sophisticated explication of the creation, manifestation, adaptation, and persistence of Confederate nationalism from the outbreak of the Civil War until the end of Presidential Reconstruction among the Southern whites who supported the Confederacy.  Rubin employs a cultural, not an exclusively political approach, in identifying and describing the “emotional, ideological, and frequently sentimentalized construct” that underlay the Confederacy.  By drawing upon a plethora of written sources, including diaries, personal correspondence and even schoolbooks, Rubin presents an “expansive view, looking beyond the world of politics and opinion-makers to the broader population of soldiers and civilians.”

     Rubin contends that most historians of Confederate nationalism have undervalued its viability.  “If Confederate nationalism was too weak to exert a hold over its people, they would not have worried so much about remaining true to their new nation and their identities,” she writes.   Historians, Rubin asserts, have also misidentified the temporal parameters of Confederate nationalism, either by placing its roots within the nullification crisis of the 1830s or by making its supposed demise coterminous with that of the Confederacy.  Rubin argues that that there was no Confederate nationalism before secession and, even more importantly, that it mutated and persisted long after the Civil War.  “It sometimes seems,” writes Rubin, “that the Confederacy is more alive today than it was in the 1860s.”

      Rubin enumerates the myths, stories, legends, and icons from the “usable American past” that were employed to create a sense of attachment to the Confederacy.  The most fundamental was that secession was the second phase of the American Revolution and that the Confederates were undertaking a God-ordained mission, hopefully also assisted by foreign intervention, to rescue the true principles of the Constitution from “fanatical abolitionists.”  

      Rubin conceives Confederate nationalism as an evolutionary set of impulses that was “exquisitely sensitive to events.”  She divides the book into two parts, the first dealing with the Civil War and the second examining the years of Presidential Reconstruction. Four chapters describe Confederate responses to specific happenings -- the battle of Second Manassas, the re-election of Abraham Lincoln, the Federal Oath of Allegiance, and the arrest, imprisonment, and release of Jefferson Davis.  All chapters are extensively footnoted, and the book has a comprehensive index and bibliography but is modestly illustrated.

     Rubin insists that Southern whites after the Civil War “self-consciously held onto aspects of their Confederate past,” the most crucial being racial prejudice toward African Americans.  “White supremacy, whether implicitly or explicitly, drove much of the ways in which white Southerners negotiated the boundaries of identity,” Rubin declares.  Former Confederates also upheld a sense of regional distinctiveness, believed in the rectitude of their cause, and reacted with “bitterness, anger, and duplicity” toward the Yankee occupiers but sought above all else to retain local control of politics.

     The least convincing of Rubin’s assertions concerns the impact of gender. She contends that Southern white men, their sense of manhood compromised by defeat on the battlefield, “sought to reassert control over women, both at home and in public.”  One cannot help but ponder whether Rubin’s own gender prompted her to overemphasize the significance of this phenomenon, which, albeit unfortunate, was not unique to the Confederacy.