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The Lost Boys: Citizen-Soldiers, Disabled Veterans, and Confederate Nationalism in the Age of People's War

The Lost Boys: Citizen-Soldiers, Disabled Veterans, and Confederate Nationalism in the Age of... susan-mary grant Once you erect a statue, you have belittled and defeated yourself. You cannot compete with it. --Corra Harris, The Recording Angel (1912) The death by his own hand of Edmund Ruffin, slaveholder and secessionist, is well known. By taking his own life upon learning of the Confederacy's defeat, Ruffin epitomized southern defiance in a gesture often interpreted, as he intended it to be, as the ultimate rejection of Yankee rule. Yet Ruffin's decision to choose death over dishonor can only be understood, his biographer David F. Allmendinger Jr. has argued, if placed in the broader context of a society predicated on the elusive concept of honor, on a form of white masculine selfhood that stressed individual agency and independence. In such a society, the transition from self-definition to self-destruction may not have been as unusual as the popular fascination with Ruffin sometimes makes it seem. Ruffin was hardly the sole southerner unable to envisage a future for himself in the defeated South, and he was certainly not the only one whose thoughts turned to suicide in response. Edmund Ruffin acted alone in June 1865, but he was far from alone in the trajectory of his thinking; http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Journal of the Civil War Era University of North Carolina Press

The Lost Boys: Citizen-Soldiers, Disabled Veterans, and Confederate Nationalism in the Age of People's War

Grant, Susan-Mary.
The Journal of the Civil War Era , Volume 2 (2) – May 19, 2012
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
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Copyright @ The University of North Carolina Press
ISSN
2159-9807
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Abstract

susan-mary grant Once you erect a statue, you have belittled and defeated yourself. You cannot compete with it. --Corra Harris, The Recording Angel (1912) The death by his own hand of Edmund Ruffin, slaveholder and secessionist, is well known. By taking his own life upon learning of the Confederacy's defeat, Ruffin epitomized southern defiance in a gesture often interpreted, as he intended it to be, as the ultimate rejection of Yankee rule. Yet Ruffin's decision to choose death over dishonor can only be understood, his biographer David F. Allmendinger Jr. has argued, if placed in the broader context of a society predicated on the elusive concept of honor, on a form of white masculine selfhood that stressed individual agency and independence. In such a society, the transition from self-definition to self-destruction may not have been as unusual as the popular fascination with Ruffin sometimes makes it seem. Ruffin was hardly the sole southerner unable to envisage a future for himself in the defeated South, and he was certainly not the only one whose thoughts turned to suicide in response. Edmund Ruffin acted alone in June 1865, but he was far from alone in the trajectory of his thinking;

Journal

The Journal of the Civil War Era – University of North Carolina Press

Published: May 19, 2012

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