Confederate Sympathies

Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era

Andrew Donnelly

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781469685595, 9781469685588
• eBook ISBN: 9781469685601
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: Social Sciences

The archive of the Civil War era is filled with depictions of men’s same-sex affections and intimacies. Across antebellum campaign biographies, proslavery fiction, published memoirs of Confederate veterans and Union prisoners of war, Civil War novels, newspaper accounts, and the war’s historiography, homoerotic symbolism and narratives shaped the era’s politics, as well as the meaning and memory of the war. The Civil War, in turn, shaped the development of homosexuality in the United States. In a book full of surprising insights, Andrew Donnelly uncovers this deeply consequential queer history at the heart of nineteenth-century national culture.

Donnelly’s sharp analytical eye particularly focuses on the ways Northern white men imagined their relationship with white Southerners through narratives of same-sex affection. Assessing the cultural work of these narratives, Donnelly argues that male homoeroticism enabled proslavery coalition building among antebellum Democrats, fostered sympathy for the national retreat from Reconstruction, and contributed to the victories of Lost Cause ideology. Linking the era’s political and cultural history to the history of homosexuality, Donnelly reveals that male homoeroticism was not inherently radical but rather cultivated political sympathy for slavery, the Confederacy, and white supremacy.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Halftitle Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Conservative, Cross-Sectional Symbol of Intimate Male Friendship in Antebellum Politics
• Chapter 2 The Propaganda of Male Intimacy in the Proslavery Novel
• Chapter 3 Pretty, Dead, Young Confederates as Erotic Emblems of the Lost Cause
• Chapter 4 Andersonville Prisoners of War and the Racial Competition of Victimhood
• Chapter 5 Chums before the War How Two Versions of Homosexuality Made Meaning of Civil War History
• Chapter 6 Corruption, Ingenuousness, and Manly Honesty Henry James’s Attractive White Southerners
• Conclusion The Sexuality of Historiography and the Premodern South
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index