The Violent Creation of Confederate Veteranhood

This paper argues that extralegal violence by Confederate veterans in the first year after the Civil War served not only to curtail the meaning of emancipation, but also to reconstruct former soldiers’ dominance of southern society at large.  The destruction of the Confederacy effectively abolished the meaning of Confederate soldierhood by dismantling the cultural foundations of Confederate military superiority as well as the functional relationship between the young men in the armies and those on whose behalf they claimed to fight.  In the wake of their defeat, veterans used violence against emancipated African Americans and their allies to make a series of claims about their continuing, exceptional relationship to their communities.  Violence allowed former Confederate soldiers to demonstrate that despite the destruction of their political and social worlds, they retained a surprising degree of autonomy within their immediate surroundings. Asserting their power and selfhood in this way also reinforced Confederate soldiers’ continued importance and influence in the postwar South by keeping “postwar” from becoming a reality at the ground level of society.  So long as force and not legal governance or a vestigial antebellum hierarchy ruled interactions in the war’s aftermath, former Confederate soldiers—and not emboldened freedmen, victorious northerners, or civilians who had not served the Confederacy—would remain the key actors in southern society.  By forestalling the establishment of civil society and the rule of law, Confederate veterans ensured for themselves a pivotal place in the South’s postwar politics on terms of their own choosing.