Peter S. Carmichael, The
Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion.
Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press,
2005. 343 pages. ISBN 0–8078–2948–X. Reviewed by Luke E. Harlow, For the Journal of Southern Religion.
Peter S. Carmichael’s The
Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion is a
“generational study” of a group of 121 Virginia
men who, born between 1830 and 1843, came of age in the 1850s. These “young
Virginians” tended to be college educated and, if not all from elite, wealthy families,
they “all looked at the world through the broad intellectual framework of the
dominant slaveholding class” (7). They were the last of the antebellum
generation, many served as junior officers in the Confederate Army of Northern
Virginia, and most lived on through Reconstruction—though more than a quarter
of Carmichael’s sample died during the war. In studying such a group, Carmichael
resists the periodization prevalent in many histories of nineteenth-century America, which
either end or begin with the Civil War. Carmichael
mines the public and private writings of his actors to determine how they
justified secession, came to terms with defeat, and ultimately embraced
national reunion. With lively and skillful prose, The Last Generation brings questions about age to bear upon matters
of broad interest to historians of the Civil War era—especially economy,
gender, religion, and sectional nationalism—and is a welcome addition to
literature on the period.
The ideology of the young Virginians coalesced around their
belief in the benefits of social and economic progress and notions of Christian
manhood. For a previous age group, referred to by the last generation as “old
fogies,” social status was achieved by ascending the ranks of the planter
aristocracy. Members of Carmichael’s sample were
desperate to prove their worth as capable men, but they largely believed the
opportunities available to their elders no longer existed. The doors to the
upper reaches of the planter class had closed and, in the face of advancing
northern industrial and free labor economies, an order solely based upon
slavery seemed outmoded. Desperate to climb the social hierarchy, “Young
Virginians shared with free-labor societies a belief that progress represented
an increase in material prosperity, individualism, and bourgeois liberalism”
(21). Such ideas did not cause the last generation to change their view of slavery
as a divinely sanctioned, central institution. But different than elite
proslavery intellectuals in the late antebellum period, none in Carmichael’s “sample group expressed concern about
slavery’s future in a world driven by free-labor capitalism” (19). While
maintaining that slavery should remain intact, the last generation argued that
economic diversification and development—especially in the opening of
professions that might clear the way for the rise of a middle class—would facilitate
their rise to social respectability.
Not only had the old fogies’ economic narrow-mindedness hurt
the last generation’s hopes for social advancement, the young Virginians also felt
strongly that their forebears had also allowed their home state to decline. Carmichael’s group believed old fogydom’s excessive
dependence upon slavery and their sense of entitlement to a planter class life
of leisure prompted the Commonwealth’s slide from its early national place of
prominence. It was this desire to reclaim Virginia’s noted reputation that led young
Virginians to embrace secession. The last generation felt that the Commonwealth
had been affronted by northern agitators—particularly in the form of
abolitionists and Republicans, who were wedded to the “evil forces” of
“Northern Unitarianism and Universalism” (180)—and saw their state’s honor in
need of defending.
Drawing on a conception of “muscular Christianity,” Carmichael’s group firmly supported the war effort and
did not lose hope even when, by 1865, it was clear the cause had failed. This
sustained energy was due in large part to the fact that the last generation firmly
believed that God was on their side: “To them, the Confederacy was the
realization of the abstract notion of a Southern Christian community. Within
this framework, their commitment to Christ flowed into their commitment to the
Confederacy” (180). For at least some of Carmichael’s
subjects, such opinions were the result of serious, developed reflection. Hugh
White, for example, a Confederate Captain who gave his life for the South in
1862, worried, “like many Southern clergymen, about the popular idea that
wearing the Confederate gray was an act of salvation that could replace
conversion. Fighting was not, he believed, synonymous with being saved” (183). Yet,
as other studies of southern nationalism in the period have often demonstrated,
the war was a matter of utmost religious significance to Carmichael’s
last generation.
Even as the Civil War smashed to pieces the slave system, it
did not completely destroy the young Virginians’ progress-oriented outlook. While
they temporarily hoped for retribution against Yankees, the last generation ultimately,
by about 1880, opted for reunion and embraced the New South with few
reservations. As Carmichael succinctly
explains, “There was no cynical capitulation to New South propaganda” (236).
Because Carmichael’s group had always embraced
progress, they had little trouble initially reconciling themselves to the new
order. Yet as the years went on and the last generation aged, they grew increasingly
uneasy about material extravagance brought by an advancing market economy. Carmichael concludes his study by showing how his sample in
fact became anxious “old fogies” themselves, personifying a mentality they
spent many of their younger years working against.
Carmichael’s analysis is
cogent and compelling, but it does raise further questions. Most obviously,
some might question how applicable the conclusions of The Last Generation might be for the rest of the South in the
period. Carmichael could only ascertain the religious affiliation of 35 of his
young Virginians—just more than a quarter of his sample—but the majority of
that number (sixty percent) were Episcopalians, with only one Baptist, three
Methodists, and one Methodist/Episcopal. Perhaps this imbalance in favor of
Episcopalians occurs because—as Carmichael admits—he
draws mostly on the writings of elites. Carmichael
does not offer a deep probing of the relationship between denominational
affiliation and ideas about southern identity, but one wonders if a more
evangelical sample, more representative of broad southern religious opinion,
would have thought differently about southern identity and what it meant to be
a Christian gentleman. To be sure, The
Last Generation documents an attitude toward progress similar to that
exhibited by contemporary Methodists and Baptists, as Beth Barton Schweiger
explored in The Gospel Working Up:
Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia (2000). Yet in the
absence of such well-researched studies for other southern states, it is
difficult to determine how far the implications of Carmichael’s
work might reach. Though more Civil War battles were fought in Virginia than any other state and it held the
Confederacy’s capital in Richmond, the
Commonwealth was the only Confederate state to avoid Radical Reconstruction and
thus, as Carmichael explains, it took a more
direct path to national reunion.
If Virginia might have been
somewhat singular, for Carmichael’s part, he
does not claim more than his study warrants. He does not suggest that the young
Virginians necessarily spoke for the Confederate South. As such, The Last Generation is a model study
that paves the way for further exploration of questions about the role of
generational identity, ideology, and sectional nationalism in other locations
in the Civil War-era South.
Luke E. Harlow, Rice
University