"One of the most original and important books on the
Confederacy ever published."
--William E. Gienapp, Harvard University
On the day Fort Sumter surrendered to Confederate
authorities, General Braxton Bragg reacted to a newspaper
report that might have revealed the position of gun
emplacements by placing the correspondent, a Southern
loyalist, under arrest. Thus the Confederate army's first
detention of a citizen occurred before President Lincoln had
even called out troops to suppress the rebellion. During the
civil war that followed, not a day would pass when
Confederate military prisons did not contain political
prisoners.
Based on the discovery of records of over four thousand
of these prisoners, Mark E. Neely Jr.'s new book undermines
the common understanding that Jefferson Davis and the
Confederates were scrupulous in their respect for
constitutional rights while Lincoln and the Unionists
regularly violated the rights of dissenters. Neely reveals
for the first time the extent of repression of Unionists and
other civilians in the Confederacy, and uncovers and
marshals convincing evidence that Southerners were as ready
as their Northern counterparts to give up civil liberties in
response to the real or imagined threats of wartime.
From the onset of hostilities, the exploits of drunken
recruits prompted communities from Selma to Lynchburg to beg
the Richmond government to impose martial law. Southern
citizens resigned themselves to a passport system for
domestic travel similar to the system of passes imposed on
enslaved and free blacks before the war. These restrictive
measures made commerce difficult and constrained religious
activity. As one Virginian complained, "This struggle was
begun in defence of Constitutional Liberty which we could
not get in the United States." The Davis administration
countered that the passport system was essential to prevent
desertion from the army, and most Southerners accepted the
passports as a necessary inconvenience, ignoring the irony
that the necessities of national mobilization had changed
their government from a states'-rights confederacy to a
powerful, centralized authority.
After the war the records of men imprisoned by this
authority were lost through a combination of happenstance
and deliberate obfuscation. Their discovery and subtle
interpretation by a Pulitzer Prize&emdash;winning historian
explodes one of the remaining myths of Lost Cause
historiography, revealing Jefferson Davis as a calculated
manipulator of the symbols of liberty.
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