Browsing by Author "Ruminski, Jarret"

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    Southern Pride and Yankee Presence: The Limits of Confederate Loyalty in Civil War Mississippi, 1860-1865
    (2013-01-08) Ruminski, Jarret; Towers, Frank
    This study uses Mississippi from 1860 to 1865 as a case-study of Confederate nationalism. It employs interdisciplinary literature on the concept of loyalty to explore how multiple allegiances influenced people during the Civil War. Historians have generally viewed Confederate nationalism as weak or strong, with white southerners either united or divided in their desire for Confederate independence. This study breaks this impasse by viewing Mississippians through the lens of different, co-existing loyalties that in specific circumstances indicated neither popular support for nor rejection of the Confederacy. It focuses on wartime activities like swearing the Federal oath, illicit trade with the Union army, and Confederate desertion to show how Mississippians acted on co-existent loyalty layers to self, family, and friend-networks that were distinct from national allegiances. Although the Confederate government espoused an all-consuming nationalism, the evidence presented in this study demonstrates the limited control that the Confederacy, the Union, and, by implication, most modern nation states, exerted over their subjects. This study also explores the relationship between race and loyalty. It demonstrates how an internal war between slaveholders, who expected slaves to only express servile loyalty to their masters, and slaves, who resisted white authority by acting on loyalties to self, family, neighborhood, and nation, revealed a struggle over the racial hierarchy that demonstrated continuity between the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras.