Editors
Henry Steele Commager and Richard Morris note below the advantages held
by the new American Confederacy in 1861, the most important of which
was “that the South did not have to win on the field of battle in order
to achieve independence, for it could afford to lose all the battles and
all the campaigns and still triumph as long as it was prepared to
settle simply for independence with no demands on the Union except the
elementary one that it let the Sisters depart in peace.”
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Southern Old World Nationalism
“Nationalism
has been a perennial theme in American historiography, but surprisingly
enough historians have devoted but scant attention to the analysis of
Southern nationalism. Yet the brief and tragic experiment of the
Confederate States of America with nationalism provides a laboratory
scarcely less interesting than that provided by the American States
between 1774 and 1789.
Because
historians are camp followers of victorious armies, most of them take
for granted the triumph of the first American bid for nationalism and
the failure of the Southern. Yet on the surface at least, the Old South
of the fifties and sixties boasted more and more persuasive ingredients
of national unity than had the American States in 1774.
For
the South – and the Confederacy – had, among whites at least, far
greater ethnic homogeneity than had the United States of the 1770s, for
less than one percent of the population of the Confederate States was
foreign born. It acknowledged a greater degree of religious unity than
could be found in the original States – for outside Maryland and
Louisiana the whole of the Southern population was not only Protestant
but evangelical.
By
modern standards it confessed pronounced class differences, but by its
own standards it could boast that it was a classless society, for all
whites could claim membership in an upper class: here was a principle of
social philosophy which speedily took on the authority of a moral and a
religious principle and provided the South with one of the most
powerful of all the forces making for national unity – a common
ideology.
Nor,
for all its inferiority in population and resources, was the
Confederacy without military advantages: a territory more extensive than
any which had ever been conquered in the whole of modern history;
interior lines of communication; a long military tradition and superior
military leaders; and a not unreasonable expectation of a foreign
intervention which could rescue the South as French and Dutch
intervention had rescued the new United States during the Revolutionary
war.”
(The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865, Emory M. Thomas, Harper & Row, 1979, pp. xi-xii)
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