$39.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-2948-6

Published: Spring 2005

 Add to cart
 View cart
 Checkout

Copyright (c) 2005 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Introduction

In the 1966 classic "Mother's Little Helper," the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger belted out the verse: "Kids are different today, I hear every mother say." Although the Stones' young listeners probably thought these sentiments were uniquely suited to their generation, there is an unmistakable timelessness to Jagger's words. Throughout history adults have charged that young people have morphed into unrecognizable creatures who lack respect for traditions and authority. This has led some observers to conclude that generational tension does not originate in particular events or social movements but inheres instead in the universality of the youth experience. The turbulent "nature" of young people explains all. Contemporaries as well as scholars have portrayed young people as restless by nature, impetuous in their actions, predisposed to challenge authority, and eager to irritate their more conservative elders.

Although it is true that young people of different times and places exhibit similar behavior while making the transition to adult society, we should not conclude that the experience of coming-of-age is a universal one. Young people have not always confronted the same questions, the same problems, or the same obstacles in trying to become independent free thinkers. If anything, a generational approach should remind us that the experience of each group has a unique historical context specifically rooted in the political and material conditions of a particular time period.[1] Moreover, young people have usually reaffirmed their loyalty to long-standing traditions, mores, and institutions while criticizing those in power for the failings of the adult world. It cannot be emphasized enough that exceptionalism, whether in beliefs or actions, does not have to be present in every facet of young peoples' lives for a generational perspective to be valid. Indeed, it is not uncommon for younger people to express fidelity toward their families, to defend community traditions, and to uphold the dominant values of their society while at the same time condemning the older generation for its mismanagement of public affairs. Such was the case with the last generation of Virginians during the 1850s.[2]

Seeing the experience of Southern young men as a universal one surfaces with disturbing regularity in the historiography of the Old South. The popular, but one-dimensional image of Southern youth as lazy, immoral, and hotheaded overlooks the changing nature of what it meant to be a young man in the slave South.[3] Moreover, the scholarly perception that young Southern men could only bond by fighting, drinking, or gambling has made it difficult for us to take them on their own terms, to see them as political beings who could think as much as they could feel. Discounting the powerful impact of emotions would be a serious mistake, but the emotional history of Southern men must be understood within the context of the religious and intellectual life of the Old South. If that essential context is not considered, the stereotype of the Southern man as an unthinking brute will unfortunately prevail.

The issue of Southern manliness is central to this project, which began as an examination of Confederate nationalism among Virginia men born between 1830 and 1842. Members of this age group largely served as second-echelon officers in the Army of Northern Virginia. On the surface, they seemed to fit the stereotype of the warlike Southerner, for it appeared that the violence they craved during secession could not even be satisfied by a bloody civil war. I discovered instead that this age group and class of Southern men articulated a version of masculinity based on Christian gentility, not raw physical aggression; that they were highly ideological, not just men of feeling; and that they were remarkably savvy as the Confederacy's front-line negotiators, not the brutal enforcers of the slaveholders' political will.

A case study of this age group best explains how young Southerners of a certain class exerted authority during the Civil War and why they identified so strongly with the Confederacy. I turned to Virginia because it was considered the most important of the Confederate states and housed the nation's capital. The Commonwealth was also the most populous state; it contained impressive industrial resources; and it was arguably the decisive theater of the Civil War. To develop a sample of consequence, I selected 121 men who resided in the counties that represented the state in the Confederacy. These young men—the last generation to grow up with the institution of slavery—were highly educated, closely aligned with or part of the slaveholding class, and came of age in the 1850s. In that decade they formed their political identities as a group because they had the same experiences at the same historical moment. A "typical" member of the sample group in 1860 was a twenty-three-year old son of a slaveholder, had attended the University of Virginia, and stayed in the state upon graduation. Although he took a deep interest in national and state politics, his party allegiance could not be determined. Antebellum voting records reveal local patterns of group behavior rather than individual affiliation. In other words, it is very difficult to determine the party affiliation of these young men unless they were part of prominent Whig or Democratic families; they did not run for or hold office. The typical Virginian in the sample was single before the war and not considered a head of household. He was mostly likely a lawyer, teacher, or student. During the Civil War, he served in the Army of Northern Virginia as either a staff or a field officer. If he survived the war (28 percent of the sample did not), he married, became a head of household, and gravitated toward the fields of either law or education.[4]

This book should be seen as a generational study, not as a group biography. This is a crucial distinction as I do not provide a detailed examination of a few individuals from cradle to grave. Rather, I have drawn from anything written about or by a member of the last generation. A random approach was necessary as sources from young people, regardless of their class standing, were difficult to locate. With a few exceptions, the research material did not permit me to follow an individual from his student days through Reconstruction. I had no choice but to collect a collage of snapshots—a master's thesis written at the University of Virginia, a single letter from the Petersburg trenches, or a postwar speech calling for reconciliation—with the idea that I could piece together a collective portrait of young Virginia. I should also add that I selected these men because I could explore their private lives through their letters, speeches, master's theses, and published writings.

My sample of the last generation decisively favors young people who attended Virginia universities, although I have included a smaller group of men who studied at Northern and European institutions. Although the more highly educated men tended to be part of or closely aligned with the state's slaveholding class, my study group was not exclusively affiliated with the planter elite or the state's wealthiest circles. Many of the young men in the sample did not come from privilege, and they struggled financially to remain in school. Despite economic differences among these educated men, they all looked at the world within the broad intellectual framework of the dominant slaveholding class. Whether a young Virginian's family owned two slaves or twenty did not matter. They grew up in a slave society, and this forged a consensus on vital political and social matters among whites of all classes and age groups. Some might question whether this book is a true generational study because my sample disproportionately favors elites. Limited manuscript material made it difficult to find suitable candidates from the largest component of the last generation—nonslaveholders. I did find a subgroup of nonelite young men who either came from nonslaveholding families or never entered Virginia universities. Within this smaller cohort, the prominent example of John Buchanan, a nonslaveholder from western Virginia, reveals the master class's influence during the antebellum period as well as the shared perspective of young people coming of age in the 1850s.

I have emphasized the points of generational agreement among young Virginians sometimes at the risk of creating a flat, homogeneous cohort. The use of the term "last generation" contributes to this problem as it creates the impression that I see complete unanimity among young people throughout the state. I use "last generation" and "young Virginians" knowing that there existed a variety of experiences and perspectives within the sample group as well as among other young people across the state. For the sake of style and readability, I employ these terms without always adding qualifiers such as "many" or "most." I have tried to acknowledge differences in outlook without obscuring the fundamental unity that young Virginians expressed in their views of progress, slavery, secession, and the Confederacy. Moreover, I have avoided any hint of generational determinism. Age does not become the universal explanation or the overriding factor that determines human motivation. I have tried to incorporate age as a category of analysis within the framework of race, class, and gender that has served historians so well.

The last generation's importance becomes apparent with Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election to the presidency. Young Virginians embraced secession against the wishes of their Unionist elders, but historians of the secession crisis have generally overlooked the role of young people in promoting the disunionist cause.[5] As secondary officers in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, members of the last generation earned a reputation as the Confederacy's most devoted sons. These young Southerners, even those who lived outside Virginia, were recognized as the most desperate class of Confederates. In 1863, Union general William T. Sherman described these "young Bloods of the South" as "bold to rashness, and dangerous subjects in every sense." "They hate Yankees 'Per se' and don't bother their brains about the Past, present or Future," he added. "This is a larger class than most men suppose, and are the most dangerous set of men which this war has turned loose upon the world." The tough-minded Sherman did not see how these young men could ever be subdued. He concluded that "they must all be killed, or employed by us before we can hope for Peace."[6]

Sherman saw these young Southern warriors as the children of war, their rage fueled by the killing and destruction of rampaging armies. Many historians have reached similar conclusions in their studies of Civil War soldiers because they fail to consider the life experiences of Americans prior to 1861. There were conversations, political acts, dramatic events, and cultural developments that influenced the last generation's reaction to Lincoln's call to arms and continued to shape their actions long after they entered Confederate ranks. In order to understand why young Virginians gave themselves so completely to the Confederacy, I needed to explore their formative years in the 1850s. I expected to find men who possessed a weaker attachment to Union than their elders. Unlike their parents' generation, they did not participate in a great national event like the Mexican War. They were also farther removed in time from the Revolutionary generation and most likely did not have contact with anyone associated with the struggle for independence. Young Virginians also became political beings in the 1850s, when discord over slavery destroyed the two-party system. No other period in American history witnessed such political divisiveness or extreme expressions of Southernism. It is tempting to assume that the decade of sectionalism weakened the bonds of Union to such an extent that my study group had no difficulty imagining an independent Southern nation.

Such an assumption is built on the premise that young Virginians saw themselves as Southerners first, Americans second. To test this hypothesis I set out to understand the origins of their Southern identity, a line of inquiry that could best explain their radical political action during the secession crisis and the Civil War. The antebellum sources, however, did not fully support this premise. Members of the last generation did not believe that they had to pick either the wardrobe of Americanism or that of Southernism. Rather, they felt comfortable putting together an eclectic outfit that reflected their diverse attachments to their local environs, the state, the region, and the nation. The central challenge of the book came to be that of explaining how the last generation assembled such a uniform.

Although events and cultural trends of the 1850s influenced their regional identity, members of my study group adopted a more Southern perspective in response to internal issues and debates relating exclusively to Virginia. These young men were not Southern radicals or rabid defenders of slavery. This was an important discovery, but it made it more difficult to explain why young people challenged their elders over secession. My desire to understand the secessionist impulse of young Virginians revealed a series of generational struggles that played out in 1850s Virginia. I should make it clear that the last generation's sense of mission did not lead to cultural warfare between young and old. The members of my study group upheld the dominant values and slaveholding ethic of their parents' generation, but they also believed that the legacy of the Revolutionary heroes had been betrayed and that their elders were responsible for Virginia's decline. This was not a new complaint. Since the 1830s, Virginians had lamented the Old Dominion's economic and political fall in the Union. Nonetheless, it became my belief that the last generation's critique of Virginia society deserved attention in its own right because of its implications for secession, Confederate loyalty, and, as I would discover later, even Reconstruction.

From these generational battles, a story line began to crystallize. It was centered on the problem of young Virginians' being caught between two competing cultural forces. A desire for membership in the slaveholding class pushed them inward toward a more traditional version of Southern culture—one that valued the ownership of land and slaves, community obligation, and a life of aristocratic ease. Surprisingly, many young people questioned this as the dominant ideal. Owning a handful of slaves while practicing law at the country courthouse or serving as the local doctor had once commanded a respectable financial reward and social recognition. This seemed unrealistic to the last generation in the 1850s, for there were too many physicians and lawyers. An entire generation of young Virginians came of age deeply troubled that they would never achieve the professional standing that would earn them community recognition as men. To make matters worse, members of the last generation believed that their elders had allowed the state to wallow in economic misery while they fancied themselves as grand cavaliers who lived off the glories of departed ancestors. These young men blamed their personal difficulties on the state, accusing their elders of falling under the sway of "old fogyism."[7] Such a philosophy, according to young Virginians, encouraged unthinking opposition to change, even at the expense of economic or educational reform.

The criticisms leveled at the older generation reveal the pressures of a transatlantic Victorian culture that pushed the last generation to look outward. Young Virginians were not a bunch of provincial sons of slaveholders whose view of the world never extended beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. Instead, they craved bourgeois respectability, hungered for professional success, followed personal ambition, and desired the material trappings of a middle-class lifestyle—all of which they believed could only come from a diversified state economy rather than from slavery alone. I doubt their aspirations were entirely unique, but what stands out is the last generation's perception that Virginia was being passed by as the rest of the world reaped the amazing material rewards of an age of progress. Personal frustrations intensified these fears about the Commonwealth's decline. Struggling for their livelihood left the young men wondering if society could accommodate their dreams.

The idea of the Christian gentleman helped young Virginians negotiate between the aristocratic traditions of Virginia's slaveholding class and the bourgeois spirit of the times. The Christian gentleman harkened back to an eighteenth-century code of behavior that slaveholders had tried to emulate, although often unsuccessfully, since William Byrd. He was to be pious, self-controlled, educated, and the master of his household. This version of manliness was central to the slaveholders' hierarchical worldview in which relations between men and women, rich and poor, and black and white were considered inherently unequal. Since young Virginians subscribed to the same ideas, I wondered if they were any different from their elders. The letters and diaries of these young men make clear that they too believed in Christian gentility, male dominance, and inequality. Despite such important similarities, they put their own spin on the eighteenth-century model of Christian manliness, which reveals that the last generation looked forward, not backward; that they wanted to transform their society into a progressive land of economic prosperity and intellectual vitality, not return to the "golden age" of Revolutionary Virginia; and that they wanted the Old Dominion to become a leader in the age of progress, not insulated from the Atlantic world.

The point of departure between young and old centered on the last generation's celebration of individual ambition as the distinguishing trait of a respectable man. In this, they were no different from their bourgeois counterparts above the Mason-Dixon Line. Although young people still emphasized the importance of duty to family and community, the last generation's model of the Christian gentleman shifted the scales in favor of individualism and away from communal obligations. Young people reshaped manhood and their relationship to society because they came of age when an aggressive market economy made impressive gains in the state.[8] This insight should not obscure the fundamental fact that members of the last generation were part of a slave society and consequently were committed to the idea of inequality as a guiding principle of society. But individualism no longer remained subservient to the household or community when young Virginians came of age in the 1850s.

The rise of individualism did not spark a reckless youth rebellion in the Old Dominion. In fact, an older generation of youth cultivators (religious leaders and educators) was quite successful in reaching the hearts and minds of young Virginians with their Christian message. Young people listened, and while not all became saints or even converted for that matter, a noticeable change in student behavior did occur. The epidemic of student rioting that began in the 1820s came to an end in the 1850s. Virginia campuses in the decade before the Civil War also witnessed a wave of revival activity and the rise of student-led religious organizations such as the Young Men's Christian Association.[9]

I needed to explain why generational tension flourished in Virginia at a time when young people acknowledged adult authority by trying to emulate the eighteenth-century idea of the Christian gentleman. From this perspective it became clear that young Virginians turned the message of the youth cultivators against the state's political class by connecting the problems of the day to the sins of their fathers.[10] What did the idea of the Christian gentleman and Virginia's decline have to do with the last generation's actions during the secession crisis and the Civil War? It was tempting to reduce my study group's eagerness for secession to youthful ardor or romantic visions of soldiering; many, but not all, young Virginians felt a powerful urge to prove their manhood on the battlefield. A more useful approach, however, would frame this historical moment as a convergence of the personal struggles of the last generation—their desire for reputation as full adults and their dream of returning Virginia to a position of leadership—with their ironclad political belief that the South must always have political equality in the nation. Although some of the most prominent advocates of disunion were "grey heads" such as Edmund Ruffin and Henry Wise, most of the state's elders preached moderation. Waiting for the Republicans to enact their policies ensured Virginia's eventual subjugation to Northern interests. Many of these young men did not understand why the state's leaders would allow the Northerners to light the fire first.

Young Virginians believed that their state was kept out of the Confederacy by decrepit leaders who were morally bankrupt and out of touch—the very men who were responsible for the state's decline in the Union. They argued that leaving the Union would not only free the Old Dominion from domination by an aggressive, abolitionist-led North, but would also serve as a moral cleansing agent at home, purging the Commonwealth of its dissolute class of leaders while elevating the state to a position of leadership in a new Southern nation. In their minds, entering the Confederacy would resolve many of the internal problems that had plagued the state since the Revolution. The last generation saw themselves as redeemers saving Virginia from the dishonor of living under an abolitionist regime produced by corrupt party politics. They did not imagine themselves as Southern radicals. Their public campaign for secession coincided with their private desire to satisfy personal aspirations. They hoped to secure positions of authority and prestige in the Confederacy that had eluded them during the 1850s because of their age and limited opportunities. The prospect of earning adult status by freeing Virginia from the grasp of the "Black Republicans" and thus returning the state to a position of uncontested leadership in a new Southern nation drew them to secession and war.[11]

Lincoln's call for troops brought unity between young and old. Even though young Virginians had blamed the state's political leaders for allowing Virginia to decline, they followed their elders into a bloody civil war and willingly sacrificed themselves for the principles of a slave society. Explaining this paradox required that I return to the issue of manliness. Young Virginians felt the need to prove themselves in war, to show the older generation that they were worthy of being considered Southern men. During the secession crisis the state's Unionists had alleged that young Virginians were silly, emotional, and stunted sexually, all of which were metaphors for weakness. In the wake of these public attacks, young Virginians were in part motivated to join the Confederate war effort to prove that their generation possessed manly courage and self-discipline. Consequently, they saw war as an opportunity not only to redeem their native state but also to gain personally in self-improvement. Wartime journals were filled with rhetoric about the war as a means of maturing rather than as an aggressive response to an insult against honor. Ministers and politicians helped push this idea by depicting combat as a chance for young people to purge their internal weaknesses. By constructing the war as a path for achieving individual "manhood," young Virginians became eager to sacrifice themselves physically. The idea of the Christian gentleman coalesced into a new, wartime version of masculinity based on raw courage and heroism. The human consequences were tragic. This generation of young Virginians sustained horrific losses on the battlefields of its native state.

It was hardly surprising that young Virginians became devout Confederates. As members of the master class, they had everything to lose in a war over slavery. Consequently, my attention shifted to nonslaveholder allegiance and the role that members of the last generation played in promoting Confederate loyalty. Much of the secondary literature portrays the Confederate ruling class as insensitive to the demands from below, but the junior officers were far more responsive than has usually been thought.[12] As mediators between the rank-and-file and the Confederacy's top brass, they astutely diffused dissent by undercutting official military policy concerning leaves. Soldiers demanded brief visits home to care for families or handle urgent personal issues. Even in the most extreme cases of need, however, high-ranking officers generally refused permission. These restrictions created a volatile situation for men on the front lines. Secondary officers eased class tension by granting "French furlough," thus giving them tremendous power in determining the men's welfare. Private soldiers appreciated gestures made on their behalf and responded by doing their duty under fire. They also forged a bond with secondary officers in battle and in the shared religious experiences in camp, and by assisting in welfare relief efforts for the home front. In the end, the last generation successfully furthered the power of the Confederacy's ruling class by representing themselves as the guardians of nonslaveholder interests. My intention is not to vindicate the actions of the last generation, but rather to show how effective they were in representing their class interests in a war over slavery. It would be a mistake to conclude that young Virginia officers manipulated enlisted men. There was a give-and-take relationship between the two groups in which members of the last generation almost always had to compromise in order to earn the consent of those below.

How these young officers understood themselves as Confederates, the gateway question to this project, still remained unanswered. Whether or not young Virginians possessed a strong sense of Confederate nationalism has been answered by Gary W. Gallagher and William A. Blair.[13] Both scholars have demonstrated that Virginians of all ages might have been some of the Confederacy's most loyal subjects, even though the Old Dominion was one of the last states to secede. I thought it would be more fruitful to try to understand the nature of their loyalties and how they changed over the course of the war. The letters and diaries from my study group reveal that Virginians displayed a remarkable capacity to channel cultural upheaval into familiar patterns of beliefs. The war, in their minds, merely confirmed antebellum assumptions about the inherent differences between Northerners and Southerners. Union depredations, civilian sacrifices, and the symbolic image of Robert E. Lee erased any fears that God would forsake Southerners. Regardless of the military situation or the immense suffering and dislocation on the home front, the thought of God's siding with the enemy seemed ludicrous to the last generation. Even when Southern speculating and other moral crimes suggested cause for divine wrath, these men found ample reasons to expect divine favor. Losing faith in the Confederacy or rejecting the worldview of the planter class constituted a direct challenge to God's will—a step most Southerners refused to take. By 1864, members of the last generation were unable to distinguish between their religious beliefs and their political nationalism. A spirit of vengeance, a blinding trust in Providence, and a controlling sense of honor transformed these young men into fanatics. Throughout the 1850s and even during the secession crisis, they were thoughtful, deliberate, and self-critical, but war narrowed their perspective and caused them to lose touch with the military reality of the Confederacy.

Ending the story at Appomattox would miss a rich opportunity to understand the impact of the Civil War on a group of men who figured prominently in the development of a Lost Cause mythology and the New South creed. Much of the secondary literature on Reconstruction posits that a Southerner could either be a modernizer or a reactionary Lost Cause fanatic. The veterans of the last generation created a hybrid ideology combining both types. Their antebellum campaign to bring economic diversity to Virginia largely provided the intellectual punch to their postwar message. Ironically, the war interrupted the last generation's progressive plans for the Old Dominion. The industrial might of Northern armies did not suddenly awaken the last generation to the ideas of economic innovation and development; they had advocated an energizing of the state before Fort Sumter. As Paul Gaston has argued, a white Southerner could be both a Lost Cause champion and a New South booster.[14]

Reconstruction provided a second chance to instill into Virginia a spirit of innovation, reform, and prosperity. Although most of the last generation had been unyielding Confederates during the war, they reconfigured their identities as Americans with remarkable ease. A desire for home rule goes a long way toward explaining this transformation, yet more than power was at stake. The last generation's postwar vision cannot be fully understood without an examination of the intellectual connections to the 1850s. In the end, I argue that the last generation's antebellum mission to modernize Virginia might explain why many of these young men had minimal difficulty in accepting the realities of reunion and industrial capitalism. Rather than seeking refuge in the "moonlight and magnolias" view of the Old South or a strident defense of Confederate principles, the last generation's Lost Cause message revived their antebellum dream of bourgeois progress.

To tell this story required that I employ a chronological narrative, but within this structure I also found it necessary to examine my subject topically. The hybrid approach allowed me to look at the last generation's experience from a more analytical perspective. At the same time, I thought it was important for me to broadly describe their inner thoughts, emotions, public behavior, and personal relationships. I decided that a series of narratives within this analytical framework would humanize my subject matter by providing a more holistic view of individual lives while conveying change over time. I realize that this approach came at the expense of tightly argued chapters. If my method of exposition succeeds, however, the complex relationship between the ideas and actions of my study group will become clearer as I move the last generation forward toward Civil War and Reconstruction. Chapter 1 explores the attitudes of these young men toward the "age of progress" and why they did not share the concerns of many slaveholders who worried about a world moving toward free-labor capitalism. Chapter 2 shows how the last generation's desire for progress encouraged many young men to believe that a spirit of "old fogydom" prevented Virginia from advancing materially or intellectually. The perception that Virginia was in decline intersected with the personal struggles of these young men. Many complained that the road to respectability through landownership and slavery was no longer possible for young Virginians. Professional frustrations reinforced their belief that something had gone wrong in the Commonwealth, and generational tensions consequently intensified. Chapter 3 examines the last generation's solution to Virginia's decline. They called for reforms in Virginia character based on the model of the Christian gentleman, and in trying to live up to this ideal they engaged in benevolent campaigns across the state. Chapter 4 builds upon the previous chapters by focusing on how young Virginians could simultaneously see themselves as Virginians, Southerners, and Americans. Their disunionist activities are detailed in chapter 5. I also use this chapter as an opportunity to explain how the secessionist campaign resolved many of the internal dilemmas that had confronted the last generation in the 1850s. The next two chapters deal with the Civil War years. Chapter 6 discusses how young Virginians exercised authority as subordinate officers, and chapter 7 explains their transformation into Confederate zealots. In the final chapter, I analyze how these men drew from their antebellum experiences and reconstructed their identities as Americans.

It is important to clarify that this is a study about identity formation within the context of power relations in Virginia and the nation as a whole, but it is not intended to be a political history of Virginia. Members of the last generation were not prominent in partisan politics until Reconstruction. For most of their lives they were critical observers who often felt alienated from sources of power and authority. Therefore, throughout the book I move beyond the culturally descriptive to reveal how these young men challenged, accepted, or asserted authority within the grand political events of secession, Civil War, and reunion. The book, moreover, is deeply concerned about how power operated at a variety of levels—generational, gender, class, military, state, and national. I also make no pretense that the last generation's experience speaks for young people throughout the South. Coming of age in Virginia meant something special in the 1850s, when a remarkable market and transportation revolution altered the household economy. Market forces gradually shifted economic and political power away from small rural communities led by a slaveowning elite. In other words, structural changes in the economy weakened the ability of households to restrict labor and its attendant social relations to the private sphere. This initiated sweeping social changes that reconfigured gender, class, slave, and age relations in the state. Many white males believed that slaves, free blacks, and women had become unruly, and older Virginians were particularly incensed by the "fastness" of young people.[15] The ensuing debate regarding the last generation's proper place tells us a great deal about Southern identity, secession, the Civil War, and Reconstruction in the Old Dominion.

The changes in the self-identities of the last generation cannot be understood in isolation from power relations inside Virginia and within the nation at large. In fact, their sense of being Virginian and Southern did not dictate the political action of these men. They constructed and remodeled ideas about what it meant to be a man, a Virginian, a Southerner, and a citizen of the United States in relationship to their membership in the South's ruling class and that class's struggle to maintain economic and political power. The case study of the last generation demonstrates that the search for a Southern identity can become a pointless endeavor if one is simply trying to locate a distinctive set of traits, habits, and values, or a mystical feeling of Southernness. Culture, as David Potter rightly warns, does not equal nationality, nor can it offer a comprehensive answer to a critical line of historical inquiry: what has compelled some groups of people to form a nation and then to go to war and die for that abstraction? The experience of the last generation reaffirms Potter's indispensable argument that a feeling of oneness or imagining a shared identity within a larger group is not sufficient reason for people to risk their lives for a political cause or entity. Shared political and economic interests must be present, for they knit together a wide array of local, regional, and national attachments into a powerful expression of group loyalty. The experience of young Virginians further supports Potter's important observation that loyalties and interests are constantly in motion, ebbing and flowing in relationship to the political currents and material conditions within a specific time and place.[16]

Any cultural identification that the last generation might have felt with the South in the 1850s did not well up inside of them and turn members of this age group into fiery radicals. In other words, a mystical feeling of Southernness did not animate their political acts. Only when the institution of slavery came under Republican attack did they call for Southern unity to defend the region's "institutions." It took an unmercifully bloody Civil War to transform young Virginians into Southern nationalists—not because honor, manliness, race, or Christianity triggered such a response, but because they recognized that the very existence of the slaveholders' world was at stake. They explained secession and their extreme political devotion to the Confederacy through the language of honor, manliness, and Christianity.[17]

A generational approach also reveals how specific classes and age groups adopted their own particular ideas of Southernness to advance a variety of political and social goals. Because young Virginians came of age in the 1850s when the state underwent seismic market changes, their expressions of Southern identity originated within a slave society moving toward a bourgeois vision of progress. They called for an alliance with the rest of the South in the 1850s as a means of bringing intellectual and material improvement at home. For the state to gain recognition, young Virginians emphasized Southern interests and adopted a more extreme Southern point of view, especially when it came to educational and economic reform. This interpretation departs from most studies of Southern identity and nationalism, which focus almost exclusively on sectional issues or slavery.

In the end, the last generation's claims of being Southern should remind us that when looking across Dixie, the cry of Southern rights and Southern distinctiveness has had various meanings and political purposes. The story of the last generation demonstrates that the rhetorical shield of Southern unity encompasses a wide range of political interests, sentiments, and motivations. It also can be as much an offensive weapon as a defensive one to preserve and protect. In the case of the Virginians of the last generation, the language of Southernism simultaneously inspired admirable acts of progressive reforms and self-improvement and spurred them to fight to the death for a cause that was inescapably devoted to human bondage.