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The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion (Civil War America)

Amazon.com Price:  $14.23 (as of 20/04/2019 10:45 PST- Details)

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Description

Challenging the preferred conception of Southern youth at the eve of the Civil War as intellectually lazy, violent, and dissipated, Peter S. Carmichael looks closely at the lives of multiple hundred young white men from Virginia’s last generation to grow up with the institution of slavery. He finds them deeply engaged in the political, economic, and cultural forces of their time. Age, he concludes, created special concerns for young men who spent their formative years in the 1850s.

Before the Civil War, these young men thought hard and long about Virginia’s place as a progressive slave society. They vigorously lobbied for disunion regardless of opposition from their elders, then served as officers in the Army of Northern Virginia as frontline negotiators with the nonslaveholding rank and file. After the war, then again, they quickly shed their Confederate radicalism to pursue the political goals of home rule and New South economic development and reconciliation. Not until the turn of the century, when these men were nearing the ends of their lives, did the mythmaking and storytelling begin, and members of the last generation recast themselves over again as unreconstructed Rebels.

By examining the lives of members of this generation on personal in addition to generational and cultural levels, Carmichael sheds new light at the formation and reformation of Southern identity throughout the turbulent last half of the nineteenth century.

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