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.
General
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