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PC:    But what we’ve seen today supports your analysis.  The people who are critical of the war in Iraq are not renouncing the U.S. government and they certainly are not expressing support for the reactionary insurgents in Iraq.  While I appreciate your point that criticism of the Confederate government did not mean support for the Union, it seems to me that critics still hurt or undermined the Confederate war effort.  

JP:    Oh yeah. I’m not arguing at all that there isn’t this massive protest on the local level and that there isn’t disaffection within the army that weakens the Confederacy. I’m not arguing that it was external forces rather than internal factors that caused defeat. What I’m saying in my book is, there are thousands of Confederate soldiers who don’t fit this description of being the disaffected person of the yeoman class. And when we concentrate on “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” and this social disintegration within the Confederacy, we have yet to explain why the Confederacy lasted for so long after these great turning points in the summer of 1863. And so the more interesting question for me was, why, given all of this trouble on the home front and the major defeats that the army withstood, why did certain men—and I was finding thousands of them—still remain confident that they would win. And I think if we just shift the focus to them—not at all discounting or arguing with the folks who concentrate on the disaffected class that exists—but if we shift the focus and look at the other group that sort of bolsters and keeps the Confederacy going for two years, we’ll have a better appreciation for the momentum of war, why the war ended the way it did. And it’s this class of diehard rebels who shape reaction to defeat and post-war memory. It’s not the yeoman class. It’s not the deserters who then shape the history of the Civil War from the Southern perspective. It’s the people who withstood to the very end who become the Lost Cause of the South.

ASD:    I don’t know. In your analogy–I think doesn’t quite hold in the sense that most of today’s opponents of the war in Iraq actually want the war to end, whereas there are supporters that argue the war should continue. Even diehard rebels wanted the war to end immediately. You’re hard-pressed to find Confederates eager to fight on. They just want independence and the preservation of slavery. They don’t want to keep fighting to do that. This is of course Lee’s—the reason we have the invasion of the North in ’62 and ’63 is whatever we can do to make this war end as quickly as possible. And I find that all throughout the ranks people are horrified by what they’re having to do. So there’s plenty of war weariness, there’s no way around that. It’s clear there’s a great deal of hardship. But at least in Virginia I think most of that hardship is blamed on the North, so that it does not yield—the war weariness, in fact, doesn’t hinder the Confederate war effort. This is the way in which the hard war that Grant essentially designs wins. Logistically it’s effective, but I don’t think psychologically it is. People eventually do wear down and they can’t continue to function in the same way, so that’s going to be the Confederate war effort, but I don’t think it does much to convince people they should return to the Union or they should somehow love the Union again.

PC:    Then can you tell us, who are these people that are the diehard Confederates? Aaron focuses on Virginians and those who served in Lee’s army. Tell us, who are these people and then what did sustain them? What enabled them to deal with all these hardships, the violence, the dislocation of war?

ASD:    The argument that I make in my book and what I think sustains a lot of Virginians is precisely the hard war the Union brings in Virginia—invasion, occupation, widespread destruction—that Virginians respond to those by recognizing that this is now a war not for abstract principles. It’s the war that some of them may have feared would come, which is to say it’s fought in Virginia, and it compels—increasingly over the course of the war—a greater focus on preservation of family, and on the threat that’s posed, the very obvious physical threat, that’s posed to families as opposed to ’61 and even early ’62, when the threat was still quite vague. 

It’s important to recognize that there is a change, at least I think as I see it in Virginians, with the evidence that they—while nationalism and response to duty may have propelled people to enlist in ’61, most of them anticipated a reasonably short conflict. What sustains them through an increasingly bloody war is a real focus on their families and on the jeopardy in which those families are placed. They blame all of that on the Union. They’re going to blame Jefferson Davis for improperly managing the Confederate response, but they’re able to distinguish between that and the ultimate cause, and the ultimate cause is Lincoln’s army. 

Part of this transformation you can see in the correlation between places that have been vigorously Unionist in Virginia, they become the most pro-Confederate. It’s not the most pro-secessionist places that send the most soldiers, in fact, it’s places that experience the betrayal—this is why I think it’s important to note that Virginia’s commitment to the war doesn’t come with Fort Sumter, it comes with Lincoln’s calling up of troops, because for Virginia Unionists who had staked their own reputation on Lincoln’s promise not to raise up an army, are now left feeling betrayed. And they’re betrayed not just by the political act that he’s going to call up an army, but by the fact that maybe he’s been lying about emancipation the whole way along. Maybe that army really is going to come down, and then eventually it does, and so those people have—they are radically transformed in just a handful of days, in mid-April, in ways that they would never have been able to foresee.

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