Booknotes: The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship

New Arrival:

• The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship: The Civil War Correspondence of Alabama's Pickens Family edited, with commentary and notes, by Henry M. McKiven Jr. (LSU Press, 2025).

The material found in The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship: The Civil War Correspondence of Alabama's Pickens Family is different from most Civil War letter collections in that it is not a one-way street when it comes to the source(s) of the surviving documents passed between the home and fighting fronts. From the description: "Unlike nearly all published letter collections from the era, the Pickens family correspondence includes letters written on the home front as well as those penned by family members serving in the Army of Northern Virginia. The correspondence provides rare insight into the mutual dependence of family on the home front and kin at war to sustain morale and foster the formation of Confederate national identity."

More from the description: The edited collection consists of "the correspondence between Mary Gaillard Pickens, a widow, and her two sons in Lee’s army reveals the challenges she faced managing three plantations with at least two hundred enslaved people while struggling with anxiety and despondency brought on by fear that her sons would die in the war. The dispatches from Sam and James Pickens reveal much about their emotional struggle to maintain a commitment to the Confederacy, while their sister Mary’s letters show how she grappled with the emotionally devastating impact of her fiancé dying in battle."

At the front end, editor Henry McKiven adds a general introduction as well as a full chapter recounting the Greene County, Alabama family's pre-Civil War activities. The eight following chapters organize the material in chronological bunches, those periods ranging from a few months to half a year. Each of those is given a brief introduction and the letter material within is footnoted. The family's postwar lives are discussed in an epilogue.

Finally: "As the letters attest, apprehension, dread, and despair were constants in the lives of the Pickens family. That emotional burden only served to bind the family together in defense of a way of life dependent upon the labor of enslaved people. The Pickens clan continued to grasp flickering hopes for victory until the bitter end, believing that somehow the Confederacy and the world they had known before the war would survive and ultimately flourish."