The Making of a Confederate

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William L. Barney. The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir’s Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. xv + 245. The development of Confederate identity is a question that has puzzled many historians. Scholars debate the extent of its existence, when it formed, and what comprised its key characteristics. Most approach this topic by looking at the South as a whole, a particular state, or a particular community. In The Making of a Confederate, however, William Barney approaches the topic through the examination of one man: Walter Lenoir, a member of a prominent western North Carolina family whose wealth rested on both landholding and slaveholding. Lenoir certainly was not a fire-eating secessionist. Instead, this introspective graduate of the University of North Carolina supported Whig Party programs, including a protective tariff and federal aid to railroad projects, expressed misgivings regarding slavery, and voted for Stephen Douglas in the 1860 presidential election. In fact, on the eve of the Civil War, Lenoir, who had lost his wife and only child in the preceding few years, contemplated moving from his native North Carolina to Minnesota. The start of the Civil War changed Walter Lenoir’s plans, and the rest of the war changed his view of the South. In the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s election, Lenoir joined his fellow Tarheels in rejecting secession from the Union, preferring instead that his home state pursue an armed neutrality. But when Lincoln called for troops after the firing on Fort Sumter, Lenoir was among the majority of North Carolinians who viewed this as a declaration of war on the South. From this moment, he began his conversion from southerner to Confederate. Convincing himself of the righteousness of the Confederate cause, Lenoir took up arms in January 1862 at the age of thirty-eight. After an uneventful stint in the North Carolina service, he saw his first combat at Cedar Mountain on 9 August 1862. Three weeks later, in the final battle of the Second Bull Run campaign, his John M. Sacher, review of The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir’s Civil War, by William L. Barney, Journal of Historical Biography 6 (Autumn 2009): 110-114, www.ufv.ca/jhb. © Journal of Historical Biography 2009. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

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unit fought at Ox Hill. Here, Lenoir suffered two leg wounds. He survived, but Confederate doctors amputated his right leg below the knee. Returning to North Carolina, Lenoir moved to an isolated farm in the backcountry where, according to Barney, “the more [Lenoir] thought, the holier the war became.”(108) In other words, Lenoir’s wartime experiences transformed this reluctant secessionist into a zealous Confederate. For the rest of the war, he remained optimistic about the prospect of a Confederate triumph, and in subsequent years, he became a staunch proponent of the Lost Cause, mentally erasing slavery as a cause of the conflict. He spent his postwar years frustrated at his inability to recoup some of his family’s wealth by selling his extensive landholdings; the few interested buyers offered prices that Lenoir considered too low. Unsurprisingly, he blamed Yankee rule and emancipation of the slaves for the South’s suffering. Nevertheless, by the time of his death in 1890, both his economic and religious prospects had brightened, and he joined the Episcopal Church in the spring of his last year. Barney’s fast-paced narrative captures the conflicting views of southerners in the Confederacy and demonstrates the complexity of the debate over Confederate identity. As Barney notes, the Lenoir family’s experience could be used to support both sides of the argument regarding the extent of Confederate identity and loyalty in the South. Despite their conservative Whig pedigree, two of the three Lenoir brothers fought for the Confederacy—though their age could have kept them out of the army—and the whole family was loyal to the Confederate cause. Many of their western North Carolina neighbours, however, lacked the Lenoirs’ fealty. They dodged the draft or deserted, enlisted in the Union army, supported William Holden’s 1864 anti-Confederate campaign for governor, or preyed on Confederate families. Ironically, by the end of the war, the Lenoirs feared their fellow southerners more than they did the Union army. This last contention brings forth another salient point that emerges from the Lenoirs’ story. While race and slavery played a key role in their region, so did class. The Lenoirs rented land to white tenants prior to the Civil War, and provided them with corn before

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and during the conflict. Nevertheless, they feared the class-based inner civil war that came to the mountains in 1863, and they struggled with paid labourers during Reconstruction. After the war, the Lenoirs lived in constant fear of a class-based alliance between poor whites and former slaves or, as Walter Lenoir derisively termed it, an association of “whiskey and colored people.”(147) Lenoir came to distrust all labour and preferred to turn to stock raising and pasturage to reduce his dependence on paid workers. Similarly, one of his brothers-in-law annually alternated between white and AfricanAmerican hands, since he felt frustrated by both groups. Tellingly, while he rotated races, he never employed a labour cohort consisting of both races. Discussions about class, however, do not take away from the centrality of race and slavery in Barney’s discussion of the Lenoir family. Walter Lenoir struggled with slavery, and clearly he never adopted a view of slavery as a positive good. Instead, Barney portrays him in a manner analogous to Jeffersonian-era Virginians— paradoxically considering slavery “as both wrong and necessary.”(205) In this discussion, Barney might be guilty of giving Lenoir’s pre-war qualms about slaveholding too much credence. Lenoir’s conduct did not always match his antislavery rhetoric. In 1858, he announced that he wished to move to a free state, but when he visited the Midwest, he found the antislavery attitude there too “fanatical” for him.(41) And, as late as 1863, he was urging his brother to buy slaves. Nevertheless, his deeds and words serve as a valuable window into the way planters viewed their slaves. While Lenoir frequently disparaged the quality of his slaves’ work and their work ethic, he seemingly failed to recognize that, after his leg amputation, he was, as Barney points out, “utterly dependent on his slaves.”(110) After the war, the Lenoirs fully subscribed to the Lost Cause ideology that the conflict had not been about slavery and that antebellum southern society was beneficial for all involved, including slaves. To them, emancipation had come from Yankee hatred, rather than any concern for the slaves, and the Lenoirs believed that freed people would suffer from it.

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Readers might also wish that Barney had delved deeper into the question of masculinity, examining Lenoir’s words and deeds in the context of an analysis of gender. While Lenoir’s decisions connect to his struggle with his southern and Confederate identities, they also offer a valuable glimpse into ideas of antebellum southern manhood. Viewing men as providers, he never wanted to be a burden to others. He faced a problem similar to that of many southern sons— his supposed independence was not of his own making but, rather, rested upon the wealth and power of his family. Lenoir questioned the value of spending time in a university rather than at the family home, and worried about how he could repay his family for sacrificing for his education. Volunteering to fight and desiring to witness combat also connect to masculine ideals. When wounded, Walter Lenoir decided to live in an isolated cabin away from his family to avoid any display of dependence. During Reconstruction, he bought up his relatives’ share of the family land inheritance partially in order to demonstrate his ability to take care of the family. Additionally, Lenoir’s sense of honour and manhood was revealed when, at the age of fifty-nine, he made his first entry into politics in response to an accusation that he favoured the Republican Party. A greater effort to analyze these and other decisions within the context of southern masculinity would have strengthened Barney’s already forceful narrative. In the Making of a Southerner, William Barney demonstrates that he is a gifted storyteller. He has adroitly put Walter Lenoir in the context of his era and his region, skilfully balancing the story of one man’s life and his times. While many aspects of the story are compelling, Barney’s depiction of Lenoir’s wound and his recovery stand out as an excellent example of how the story of an individual can be the most captivating way to view a larger topic. This portion of the narrative provides a riveting glimpse into the treatment of the wounded in the Civil War that readers will long remember. This story will almost certainly become a staple of Civil War lectures. Barney vividly sketches Walter Lenoir lying on the field in the dark contemplating death, the ordeal of having soldiers repeatedly bump into his wounded leg, the forty-hour wait to get to a hospital, the amputation

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itself, the jarring carriage ride to Middleburg, and the frustrating search both for accommodations and restful sleep. Overall, through a combination of this high-quality story telling and trenchant analysis, Barney has succeeded in his goals of both sharing Walter Lenoir’s story and confronting the too-often forgotten ambiguities of southern and Confederate identity.

John M. Sacher University of Central Florida