‘Christian Patriots’: The Intersection Between Proto-fascism and Clerical Fascism in the Antebellum South

This article examines the convergence between clerical fascism and proto-fascism in the Antebellum South of the United States. The author employs Roger Griffin’s theories of palingenetic ultranationalism and clerical fascism to understand the worldviews of Southern intellectuals. The author argues that a cadre of Southern theologians rejected the liberal heritage of the United States and redefined the relationship between the individual and state. Southern clerical fascists reconceived of an alternative modernity that reflected God’s precepts. Slaves, laborers, and slave masters all had a mandate to guide secular and spiritual progress. Furthermore, these Southern clerics believed the best hope for securing God’s order was to be found in the birth of a new Southern society – the Confederate States of America. This study builds upon the works of other historians who discerned the illiberal and authoritarian qualities of the American South while also contributing to delineation of the protean qualities of clerical fascism.

Reimagining “Defeat” in the Transnational West: John Newman Edwards, Mexican Exile, and the Confederate Experiment 2.0

Rather than surrendering to Union forces in 1865, various bands of ex-Confederates chose Mexican exile. From generals and elite politicians to rank-and-file soldiers, the majority of these “Confederados” journeyed to French-controlled Mexico to escape punishment, to tap financial opportunities, and to observe how southern society would function post-emancipation. Still others, as represented by the cavalry officer and Quixotic newspaper editor John Newman Edwards, understood the U.S. Civil War on more international terms. To these men, Mexico constituted a new, imperially subsidized laboratory to continue the Confederate Experiment and recreate a mythic version of the Old South. Although cut short by the violent death of Emperor Maximilian I, their saga reveals not only how adaptation to Confederate defeat took different forms in the immediate postbellum period, but also the extent to which conceptions of defeat and even the purpose of the Confederacy itself had never been monolithic in the first place.

10 “She takes up music as a profession”

Women had to rethink and rebuild themselves during the Reconstruction, a period when ideas of gender and class were in flux, and professionals challenged antebellum strictures about the public gaze by embracing career women and musical directors. Reconstructed spaces allowed for new realizations of gentility, and the networks of meanings surrounding musical performance evoked power in ways hitherto unavailable to women. At Fisk University, Ella Sheppard and other women of color crafted careers as professional musicians, on the stage or in their own communities. Women began to perform Beethoven’s works in public, and this shift coincided with striking alterations in southern society that are best explained by new ideas of what they could and should do after the war.

An Intimate Economy

Alexandra Finley adds crucial new dimensions to the boisterous debate over the relationship between slavery and capitalism by placing women's labor at the center of the antebellum slave trade, focusing particularly on slave traders' ability to profit from enslaved women's domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor. The slave market infiltrated every aspect of southern society, including the most personal spaces of the household, the body, and the self. Finley shows how women’s work was necessary to the functioning of the slave trade, and thus to the spread of slavery to the Lower South, the expansion of cotton production, and the profits accompanying both of these markets. Through the personal histories of four enslaved women, Finley explores the intangible costs of the slave market, moving beyond ledgers, bills of sales, and statements of profit and loss to consider the often incalculable but nevertheless invaluable place of women's emotional, sexual, and domestic labor in the economy. The details of these women's lives reveal the complex intersections of economy, race, and family at the heart of antebellum society.