Gallagher, Becoming Confederates

Been looking through the advertisements of recent and forthcoming books in the OAH Program and I see that Gary Gallagher's 2011 Lamar lectures at Mercer University came out last year from the University of Georgia Press.  They're called Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty.  Somehow I missed this good news.  Cribbing now from the book's website:

In Becoming Confederates, Gary W. Gallagher explores loyalty in the era of the Civil War, focusing on Robert E. Lee, Stephen Dodson Ramseur, and Jubal A. Early—three prominent officers in the Army of Northern Virginia who became ardent Confederate nationalists. Loyalty was tested and proved in many ways leading up to and during the war. Looking at levels of allegiance to their native state, to the slaveholding South, to the United States, and to the Confederacy, Gallagher shows how these men represent responses to the mid-nineteenth-century crisis.

Lee traditionally has been presented as a reluctant convert to the Confederacy whose most powerful identification was with his home state of Virginia—an interpretation at odds with his far more complex range of loyalties. Ramseur, the youngest of the three, eagerly embraced a Confederate identity, highlighting generational differences in the equation of loyalty. Early combined elements of Lee's and Ramseur's reactions—a Unionist who grudgingly accepted Virginia's departure from the United States but later came to personify defiant Confederate nationalism.

The paths of these men toward Confederate loyalty help delineate important contours of American history. Gallagher shows that Americans juggled multiple, often conflicting, loyalties and that white southern identity was preoccupied with racial control transcending politics and class. Indeed, understanding these men's perspectives makes it difficult to argue that the Confederacy should not be deemed a nation. Perhaps most important, their experiences help us understand why Confederates waged a prodigiously bloody war and the manner in which they dealt with defeat.

I'm looking forward to reading this — all the more so because I'm increasingly interested in ways that public constitutional events (everything from graduation addresses at southern schools to cemetery dedication addresses in the North) expressed and tried to create national loyalties.  I want to see how I can use Gallagher's factors visible before the War that presage the development of a southern national identity to look at southern judges and lawyers, too.  I think his framework may be really useful for gauging the road to secession for the legal thinkers who were so often at the center of that move.

The illustration is the entrance to the Confederate cemetery in Petersburg.