Civil War

The American Civil War (1861–65) between the North (the Union) and the South (the Confederacy) was a conflict over issues of national identity, economic development, western expansion, and slavery. With roughly 2 million soldiers fighting for the Union and about 800,000 for the Confederacy, the war wrought transformations in the lives of both black and white men and altered ideas about manhood in both the North and the South. It served as a juncture between two regional sets of ideals of manhood and highlighted the race, gender, and class hierarchies on which they were contingent.

For men on both sides, the Civil War accelerated processes of maturation and of male gender-identity formation. Loyalty to, and sacrifice for, community, region, and cause played a significant role. Most troops (94 percent of Union soldiers and 82 percent of Confederate soldiers) were volunteers, and in many cases entire communities of men formed into military companies. Losses of 20 percent in a single artillery charge were not uncommon.

The war was an especially formative experience for the 40 percent of the soldiers that were 21 years old or younger. The army imposed institutional discipline on soldiers, while at the same time promoting male bonding and competition and giving freer reign to the social impulses, such as sexuality and violence, that were a part of antebellum America. Sexuality was part of a military culture that consisted largely of single men, whereas violence was encouraged, and at times considered necessary, in conflicts between soldiers.

In the North, the war's demand for discipline, courage, and physical strength changed men's lives and notions of manliness. For middle-class men in particular, an emphasis on a “strenuous life” of struggle in overcoming obstacles replaced the idealism and transcendental intellectualism of antebellum reform causes. Wartime industrialization also affected constructions of middle-class and working-class manhood by emphasizing a class-based differentiation of manhood that had begun before the war. For middle-class men, wartime industrialization advanced an ideal of entrepreneurial self-made manhood based on marketplace competition, acquisition of property through work, and power over other men in the workplace. For working-class men industrialization further eroded a traditional ideal of artisanal manliness grounded in craftsmanship, autonomy, and workplace solidarity. The Republican Party slogan of the 1850s—“free soil, free labor, free men”—appealed to traditional republican conceptions of manhood grounded in Jeffersonian ideals of landownership and craftsmanship, but the wartime industrialization promoted by a Republican administration made such ideals increasingly difficult to realize.

For Southern white men, the Civil War represented a conflict between the ideal of the chivalrous Southern patriarch and the Yankee self-made man. Since the 1830s, Southern intellectuals and politicians had upheld ideals of patriarchy, honor, paternalism, morality, and community, while criticizing Northern ideas of liberty, entrepreneurial individualism, and self-made manhood. Although articulated by Southern elites, these ideals influenced Southern white men at all social levels, for in a society founded on slave labor, white men viewed unchallenged domestic patriarchy and personal independence as their right—and as the basis of their equality with other white men.

The defeat of the South also entailed a defeat of Southern ideals of manly honor and paternalism. Northern media now represented Southern planters as failed, effete dandies and as members of a quasi-feudal aristocracy out of step with Northern entrepreneurship and ideals of the strenuous life. For example, Northern newspapers generated the legend that Jefferson Davis, the president of the defeated Confederate [Page 95]States of America, was disguised in women's clothes when he was captured in Richmond, Virginia.

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