The Confederate Culture and Its Weakenesses

Jon P. Alston

Description

A DESCRIPTION OF THE CULTURAL ELEMENTS LEADING TO THE DECLINE AND DEFEAT OF THE CONFEDERACY.
SOUTHERN CULTURE CONTAINED ELEMENTS THAT PROVED DYSFUNCTIONAL TO WINNING A PRE-MODERN WAR FOR SECESSION. SOUTHERN CAVALIERS WERE OFTEN MORE CONCERNED WITH THEIR OWN AMBITIONS AND SEARCH FOR HONOR AND POPULARITY. ROBERT E. LEE LOST THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG BECAUSE JEB STUART WAS MORE CONCERNED WITH HIS HONOR THAN WITH FOLLOWING ORDERS. OTHER GENERALS REFUSED TO COOPERATE AND REFUSED TO PREVENT THE UNION CAPTURE OF NEW ORLEANS AND VICKSBURG.

Sujets

• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 26 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663251503
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE CONFEDERATE CULTURE AND ITS WEAKNESSES


HOW CULTURE CONTRIBUTED TO THE CONFEDERATE DEFEAT




JON P. ALSTON








THE CONFEDERATE CULTURE AND ITS WEAKNESSES
HOW CULTURE CONTRIBUTED TO THE CONFEDERATE DEFEAT

Copyright © 2023 Jon P. Alston.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.






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ISBN: 978-1-6632-5151-0 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-5150-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023904557



iUniverse rev. date: 05/25/2023



CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Chapter 1 The Culture Of The Confederacy
Chapter 2 The Slave-Based Culture Of The Confederacy
Chapter 3 The Alpha Complex
Chapter 4 The Cavalier Mindset
Chapter 5 Honor
Chapter 6 Five Blows To Southern Honor
Chapter 7 Individualism
Chapter 8 Localism
Chapter 9 The Culture Of Violence And Aggression

Afterword
Bibliography



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to many persons. My early career benefited from the friendship and advice of Arnie Vedlitz, Jane Sell, Charlie Peek, and George Lowe. I only wished I had made them my models for teaching and scholarship. These friends amazed me with their willingness to work hard and still find time to help students and colleagues. My good friend Thanh le showed me to persevere. My coauthor, Takei Isao, remains a respected author and friend. Other good friends, including Bruce Dickson, Wayne McCormack, Richard Startzman, and Dwight Bronnum, were always supportive. My wife endured years of Civil War talk and remains a valuable critic and editor. Both she and our daughter, Margaret, remain the loves of my life.



INTRODUCTION
To understand today, you have to search yesterday.
—Pearl S. Buck
A significant portion of Civil War literature focuses on the question of whether the South might have avoided the Civil War or ultimately won it. While the Union won the Civil War by winning battles and destroying Confederate military and civilian resources, Northern victory was facilitated by the dysfunctional cultural aspects of the Confederacy. Southern culture(s) resulted in white Southerners making military, financial, economic, ideological, personal, and political mistakes that led to war and eventual defeat. The culture of the Confederacy was indeed a culture of defeat.
By 1861, the South and North had developed fundamental cultural differences, in large part derived from the South’s near-total economic and social reliance on the institution of slavery. The South’s relative lack of industrial capacity, for example, was due to the Southern elite’s preference for investments in agricultural land and in enslaved persons rather than in factories and commerce. More prestige was given in the Southern culture to plantation owners than to factory owners and merchants.
The result was a more static agricultural society led by slaveholders who grew cotton and other crops by enslaved labor. Nor did the South contain a large enough number of those whose business organizational skills could be transferred to a military context. The South also lacked an adequate number of skilled craftsmen to maintain the machinery to support millions of soldiers. Corps and army commanders could not requisition enough shoes for their command throughout the war or adequately feed their rank-and-file soldiers.
James M. McPherson (Boritt 1992, 18–19) divided historians’, generals’, apologists’, and autobiographers’ Civil War analyses, explanations, and personal defenses of their positions into two types. The first explanation, defined as external , deals with the Union’s ability to win battles based on such elements as better railroad networks, larger armies, better financial policies, better generals after 1862, and better military material and logistics (see also Donald 1996). This orientation focuses on how the North won the Civil War.
The second general category of explanation proposed by McPherson is defined as internal. This perspective focuses on Confederate weaknesses, such as weak leadership, inadequate food distribution, interpersonal and ideological conflicts, lack of dedication to the Confederacy, and political decentralization (see also Beringer et al. 1986). This position focuses on how the Confederacy lost the war.
The cultural approach of the present book reflects an internal orientation that maintains that the culture of Southern society contained characteristics unfitted to successfully fight a prolonged semimodern war. This perspective is similar to that of David Hackett Fischer (1989) who urged historians to adopt a more comprehensive cultural approach in their studies.
Note on Monetary Values
I follow Paul Starobin’s (Starobin 2017) computation of multiplying 1860 prices by twenty-eight to compare with current prices. A bale of cotton weighing 450–500 pounds was worth $49–55 in 1860 or $1,272–$1,540 in today’s currency. The original amount may seem small by modern standards, but in 1860 a loaf of bread cost one penny. An unskilled worker earned up to thirty-five dollars a month.
A Confederate private was first paid $11 a month or $308 in current dollars. A Confederate general’s monthly basic pay was $301 ($8,418 in current dollars). Robert E. Lee’s monthly pay in 1864 was $604, which included bonuses for fuel, extra rations, horse feed, being commander of an army, being in the field, and years in the Old Army with a current value of $16,912 (Nofi 1995, 382). Ulysses S. Grant, during 1862, received $220 per month plus a $52 bonus for servants. Confederate General Braxton Bragg earned $401 per month because he was both commander of the Department of Tennessee and the commander of the Army of Tennessee. All officers received bonuses, including extra food rations, a clothing allowance, and hay for their horses.
Presidents Abraham Lincoln’s and Jefferson Davis’s annual base salaries were $25,000, or $700,000 in current dollars, but both received extra bonuses.
Officers on both sides were paid the same basic amount, but Union officers did not suffer as large a decrease in the value of their pay through inflation during the war. Confederate officers received special bonuses for years served in the antebellum “Old” US Army. At first, Confederate cavalry troopers brought their own horses and were paid rental fees of fifty cents a day in addition to bonuses based on their horses’ war-related wounds or death.



CHAPTER 1
THE CULTURE OF THE CONFEDERACY
The past is never dead; in fact, it’s not even past.
—William Faulkner
Definition of Culture
The term culture as defined by social scientists is socially transmitted information or models on how to behave from one generation to the next (Cronk 1999, 12). The fact that culture is absorbed by the young, taught to new members of groups, and defended against other models of behavior contributes to the stability of societies.
Members learn how to conform and are also taught to want to conform, though the latter is seldom completely achieved. This process of socialization results in cultural patterns that are maintained without much change for generations because they become ritualized. Language, standards of morality, religious beliefs, and political ideologies are stable cultural items from one generation to the next.
Culture changes slowly and is a process in which one or more parts change more quickly than others. External events, including war, force cultures to change to one degree or another. Generational changes are also influenced by both internal and external events.
A position in society is called a status and includes a person’s gender, age, and occupation. Sociologists do not use this term to denote social rank. Instead, they use the phrases “high status” or “low status” to denote the relative prestige and hierarchical positions in a society. Of major importance is the fact an individual always holds many statuses at the same time and throughout a lifetime (or even beyond death, such as saints, ancestors, founding fathers, or heroic figures). Some statuses will be more relevant than others for an individual, and some may conflict with one another.
Statuses are attached to specific types of behavior, called status roles , which describe how norms or rituals are to be performed. These roles offer social stability and standards of behavior. While not all members consistently conform to cultural expectations, norms are standards of behavior, and roles are the specific ways norms are to be followed. Norms tell us to be honest, but roles tell us how to be honest.
Norms and Cultural Standards
Norms define specific standards of behavior, such as those found in a legal system, a military code, or the Ten Commandments. Norms also include less precise descriptions of a variety of protocols and social