Beyond the Confederacy - A Review of Patriots Twice

Stephen M. Hood, Patriots Twice: Former Confederates and the Building of America after the Civil War (Savas Beatie, 2020).

There’s no missing this rather salient point: those who threw in their lot with the Rebels and fought to secure Confederate independence did not get their way. I am quite certain that if you could travel back in time and ask them, they would have wanted things to turn out differently…but alas. Those who had donned the gray and survived the war got to go home without facing retribution - thanks to a rather magnanimous gesture by the United States government. Most would eventually regain their status as United States citizens and get on with their lives. Some would rise to prominence in the post-war world…and though we may know them primarily for their exploits in the Civil War, many Confederate veterans made significant contributions to all sorts of fields: politics, military, diplomacy, education, medicine, and philanthropy to name a few.

Stephen Hood’s new book, Patriots Twice, catalogues dozens of former Confederates who rose to prominence in the latter third of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth. The chapters are conveniently arranged in categories including presidential administrations, federal, state, and local government, professions, and so on. There is a handy appendix that lists names by state and occupation, and the book is thoroughly well indexed. Those of you familiar with Ezra J. Warner’s Generals in Blue and Generals in Gray will most certainly be familiar with the formatting and structure of this volume, which I am finding particularly useful as I embark upon some local research on former Confederates in Los Angeles such as Joseph LeConte and Cameron E. Thom.

The books’ primary purpose leans more on descriptive information rather than analytical. Each entry provides biographical context, some details about their Confederate service including rank and regiment, and most importantly what they did after the war. Honestly, I would be interested to know if “Confederateness” played any significant role in their post-war work, or if they carried any remnants of their Confederate sensibility with them as they forged new relationships, often with their former enemies. A story for another day, perhaps.

Hood does bring up a couple of things in the introductory passages that merit analytical attention. First, he attributes the post-war prominence of these men to national reconciliation and a willingness to let bygones be bygones. Well, I suppose he is not wrong here, but one might also note that reconciliation was a somewhat tenuous experience for many, and downright cold political calculation for others. Many veterans, as I have noted in my own work, Across the Bloody Chasm, welcomed reconciliation so long as veterans from the other side admitted they were wrong (which didn’t happen, of course). And scholars such as Carrie Janney have pointed out that reconciliation had its limits. Recently, I hosted Paul Quigley and James Hawdon on The Rogue Historian, and we problematized reconciliation further by looking at civil wars in a global context. Suffice it to say taking on reconciliation at face value brings up more questions than it answers.

Hood also implies that we should carefully consider whether or not we should be so quick to remove monuments or change the names of buildings and institutions dedicated to former Confederates who made so many contributions beyond their military service. Hood notes that changes are the result of “ever-changing standards of worthiness….[and] fluid values” Questions concerning our commemorative landscape are ones worth asking, and ones that I think reveal the complexity of the issue. My immediate thoughts are these: monuments dedicated to the memory of Confederate soldiers that project service to the Confederate government (in uniform, for example) commemorating a bid for independence from the United States undertaken explicitly to maintain the institution of slavery have no place in a public setting, funded and maintained by American citizens’ tax dollars. Full stop. And further, opposition to commemorative efforts honoring Confederate soldiers is nothing new. Black Americans who were stripped of their political voices when most of these monuments and buildings went up had no official say in the matter - and made note of it in their press. I discussed this topic with Hilary Green a while back - what she had to say was very insightful. One might also consider how Union veterans often balked at honoring those who supported treason and slavery - speeches at Union commemorations alone would attest to this. So relocate the Rebel Monuments to museums or some other private institution, keep them in their appropriate places on battlefields and cemeteries, and contextualize them as historical artifacts.

Now…if an individual served in the Confederate army and went on later in life to make other significant contributions to society in general, and that person is memorialized in some way for those other contributions - well then that’s a different story. But even here historical context in some form or another would be worthwhile, noting that individuals are multi-faceted and that historical actors seldom meet our standards of morality. What immediately comes to mind is Joseph LeConte Junior High School, right down the street from my house in Hollywood. These days I suspect that most Los Angeles residents have no idea who Joesph LeConte is, much less how he spent his time during the Civil War. Of course, a little digging will reveal his connections to the slave-holding South and his troubling racist views that persisted after the war. The thing is, he is best known for his worthy post-war contributions to education, as well as the advancement of science, geology, and conservation. I’ll be discussing LeConte on this website soon…but for now I think that despite his Confederate connections, changing the name of the school would do little to further the cause of reckoning with our past. That reckoning is necessary, but could be done in ways that force us to confront history and understand context. Either way you slice this issue…it is a worthwhile conversation (when done in a civil and reasonable manner) and I bring it up for class discussion all the time.

So in short, I would say the book has absolutely inspired me to do some further digging and see what other former Rebels were doing in my own city - perhaps you could do the same. It seems they wound up all over the place.

With compliments,

Keith