| This dissertation examines Confederate cultural nationalism during the Civil War. It explores the rise and fall of a cultural movement among southerners dedicated to liberating the South from its intellectual "vassalage" to the North and creating an autonomous and distinctly Confederate national intellectual culture.; In the years leading up to the war, southern nationalists had continually decried the South's dependence on northern print culture, but they were unable to convince southern readers to shun northern importations and support their own native productions. Secession dramatically altered the situation, however. With the Confederate reading public shut off from northern publishers, the cultural nationalists found a receptive audience for their ideas and a captive market for their literature. As a result, the Confederacy witnessed a period of dramatically accelerated literary and cultural production during its short life, reaching its high-water mark during the middle years of the war when the creation of an impressive array of new and consciously Confederate periodicals, textbooks, belles-lettres, religious literature, historical works, children's literature, humor, and theatrical productions exceeded the expectations of even the most sanguine.; This was an explicitly nationalistic movement. Independence won on the battlefield would be meaningless so long as Confederates remained intellectually and culturally dependent upon the North. Guided by the romantic ideal that a nation is defined by the unique "character" of its people as expressed through their culture, Confederate writers, editors, publishers, educators, and clergymen sought to bolster the Confederacy's claim to legitimate nationhood by providing the intellectual and cultural supports necessary to sustain it.; The efforts of the Confederate cultural nationalists mark a dramatic and largely unexplored moment in southern intellectual and cultural development. Given the tremendous obstacles they faced and the short lifespan of the Confederacy, it is not surprising that southerners were unable to achieve their goal of cultural self-sufficiency. What is remarkable, however, is how much they did accomplish in such a short period of time operating under nearly insurmountable difficulties. To their credit, Confederate cultural nationalists not only alerted the southern people to the pressing need for an intellectual revolution as an essential step to true independence, but they also came remarkably close to fulfilling that need. |
