Andrew Donnelly, Confederate Sympathies, and the History of Same-Sex Romance during the Civil War Era

In today’s Muster, associate editor Robert Bland is joined by Andrew Donnelly to discuss his new book Confederate Sympathies: Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era. Professor Donnelly is an assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Boston Athenaeum, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Portions of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.

Robert Bland: Professor Donnelly, thank you for joining us today. I wonder if you could begin maybe talking about the origins of your book. It’s a really fascinating project. I’d like to begin by asking you to describe how you found your way to this particular book and the Civil War era.

Andrew Donnelly: Thanks for having me and for letting me talk a bit about the book today. I would say there are two big questions that I was after with this project. The first is one that Muster readers know well, which is a story of Civil War memory and the retreat from Reconstruction: the story from Nina Silber’s Romance of Reunion and David Blight’s Race and Reunion that narrates how a national reunion occurs in the United States at the expense of Black citizens and an emancipationist memory of the war. Silber made gender a crucial part of this story, and I wanted to explore added depths to the gendered aspects of this monumental episode.

The other question that I was after relates to another monumental story of the 19th century, one that gets the shorthand of ‘the birth of sexuality,’ or the transformation in epistemologies of sexuality, a reconceptualization of sexual behaviors not as something one did but who one was.   The rise of sexual science and racial science are essential to this development, which leads to a world of both heterosexual identity and homosexual identity.

So those are two really big stories of the 19th century that, to me, are often understood separately. One motivating impulse for this book project was to try to understand these two stories in relation to each other and ask about the story of the post-Civil War world, what does that have to do with the story of sexuality?

RB: That leads me to my next question. Nina Silber’s influence and framing of sectional reconciliation appears to be a large influence on your work. I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you think through Silber’s work. Here, I would be interested to hear some of your thinking about gender in both the postbellum period, which is the traditional domain of scholars of Civil War-era memory, as well as your own thinking of antebellum works of fiction, which your books spends a lot of time with and very thoughtfully engages.

AD: Silber’s argument, I think, for historians and for literary scholars, is such a touchstone that it’s hard to remember the moment when you first encountered these ideas. This project started for me originally as a dissertation project. I got the advice from my dissertation advisor to try to read across large sets of novels, to read both the canonical novels that have proved worthy of close-reading and rereading, as well as to read across larger sets of much lesser known novels and to keep track of the notable plots that are comparable across a defined set of novels. When you do that in Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, and Civil War memory literature, Silber’s story of cross-sectional romance keeps reemerging. She put her finger on something that’s really there beyond the specific novels she cites. It is the case across postbellum and even antebellum stories, that writers use heterosexual marriage as a way to think about national questions. That’s one of the central things that these novels do with their narratives.

At the same time, I also noticed this parallel set of stories of romantic friendship and the dissolution of romantic friendship between men. These stories are about two young men who are described as being deeply in love: they’re often college classmates, and they’re described as inseparable, intimate friends having a love for one another like Jonathan and David or other Classical or Biblical allusions. And the novels adhere to a similar plot where generally the two men end up on opposite sides of the Civil War. One dies and one survives.

And so that pattern, once it emerged for me across a set of several novels as a pattern, began to resemble, in some ways, Silber’s pattern of a romance of reunion, though with key differences. When we think about the romance-of-reunion plot, I think one of the things that it’s doing is leveraging heterosexuality or tropes about cross-gender romance to make a political argument. Ultimately that political argument is that the timeless love between men and women can transcend sectional differences and can transcend the violent differences that led us to the Civil War.

In these stories of same-sex romance, there’s a different political valence, and one of the things that I noticed across stories of same-sex romance across is the absence of that appeal to timeless, transcendent love. Instead, these love-plots are very much situated within a historical moment and referential to the past. These stories, rather than a forward-looking story of marriage and the formation of a new family, tend to be stories of a backward look at the romance that used to be possible in our youth, from which the men, and the nation, had to mature.

RB: Let’s pivot to how your book engages the state of discipline of Civil War history in the late nineteenth century. You spend a lot time thinking through the rise of the Dunning school, which you read alongside the rise of modern sexual science in the United States. And you’d have a really interesting vignette where you emphasize that the New York where Dunning and his students inhabited was also the New York that George Chauncey examines in Gay New York. I wonder if you could say a little bit the connection you see between the Dunning school and the rise of modern sexual science?

AD: I would say, first, Dunning to me exemplifies an interpretation that maps well onto that lost romance story I just described because so much of Dunning’s interpretation is about nation building, using the language of maturation, the framework of a crucible out of which develops national maturation. So, there’s a way that Dunning’s interpretation aligns with these narratives of individual male development.

Dunning’s students, on the other hand, much more than him, focused on a sense of antebellum nostalgia, the distinction between a postbellum modernity and antebellum past, which captures more of the story of sexuality’s development. For example, James W. Garner is at the intersection of both of these worlds. He is a Dunning-School Reconstruction historian who writes Reconstruction in Mississippi. He’s also the editor of the American Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, which is a journal that’s doing the kind of cutting-edge social science of identifying criminal types, especially of sexualized and racialized types. So, what I wanted to do in that chapter or that part of the chapter is to try to situate that historiography in a world in which these ideas in social science of sexual of sexology and sexual science are understood alongside history writing about the Civil War’s social change.

I think the broader historiographic argument is that historians in their history writing are bringing to bear ideas about sexuality as part of both their interpretation of the archive they’re examining and as part of their writing itself.

RB: What sort of broad myths do you think students might come into an undergraduate course on the Civil War regarding sex and sexuality? For example, around the debates of Lincoln’s sexuality or more broadly the homoerotic valence of male friendships during the nineteenth century.

AD: I think it’s to our benefit to always push students to think in more complicated ways about the pat questions that appear settled. We could go back in time see many seemingly settled questions, you know, that have been dug up and re-opened. I think it is the case right now that students can come into the classroom sometimes with a sort of shrug of the shoulders at a claim they’ve heard elsewhere about Lincoln’s homosexuality. And I mean, there’s nothing about Lincoln we should probably shrug our shoulders about, but certainly think more deeply about what historical meaning has been made through such suggestiveness with respect to Lincoln.

I think that we should, on the one hand, embrace what many undergraduates see today as the normal aspects of queer sexuality in society as being in some ways similar to 19^th-century life, where elements of homoeroticism may have been more deeply entwined with mainstream cultural forces and mainstream society than they were in the 20th century, especially in the late 20th century. On the other hand, the crucial thing about teaching and studying sexuality is that there are nearly always these boundary lines being drawn between the normative and the anti-normative. Where those boundary lines fall is changing throughout history in subtle and drastic ways. Those boundary lines also appear to be changing very much in the world today making the examination of the construction of these boundary lines endlessly fascinating questions to try to destabilize in the past and present.

RB: In closing, I’d like to ask you about how Civil War-era historians have engaged with questions of sexuality? What are models that you would herald? What are the questions you think historians should be asking? Where do you think the field is broadly with interpreting themes of sexuality?

AD: On the scholarly side of things, my hope is that this book introduces some new ways of thinking about sexuality and homoeroticism in the past. One of the interventions I’m trying to make is to show how homoeroticism can be ingrained with normativity in the past. Part of my argument here is in showing how homoerotic narratives get deployed in cultivating sympathy for slavery, sympathy for the Confederacy, and sympathy for the Lost Cause. It makes a great deal of sense coming out of the 20th century and into the 21st, that we’re looking into the past for queer stories that are emancipatory because they advance LGBTQ liberation at a moment when the status of these identities was such an open question. I think right now we’re in a moment where we’re seeing some fracture of these coalitions, and alignments between LGBT identity and progressive politics, so one lesson is to see in the past the instability of coalitions and to see homoeroticism as more politically pliable than we might think.

Another aim of the book is not to treat the story of same-sex eroticism as particular to the experience of a same-sex desiring minority. By that I don’t mean to make this claim of universal homosexuality in the past, but that same-sex eroticism and same-sex desire is a phenomenon shaping aspects of culture broadly, shaping the contours of political discourse broadly. Therefore, our understanding of political history, broadly, requires understanding how sexuality and same-sex desire operate and are conceptualized.

RB: I appreciate your kind of willingness to share some time and share some of your thoughts on your important and insightful book.