Cox, Shae Smith.
The Fabric of Civil War Society: Uniforms, Badges, and Flags, 1859-1939. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War Series. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2024. Illustrations. 318 pp. $48.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780807181171.
Reviewed by Rachel Williams (University of Hull)
Published on H-CivWar (August, 2024)
Commissioned by Lindsay Rae Smith Privette (Anderson University)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60653
The Fabric of Civil War Society, Shae Smith Cox’s richly textured study of uniforms, flags, and badges during and after the Civil War, uses material culture to explore not only the contingency of citizenship and the tension between individual and collective identities during the sectional conflict but also the role of objects and performance in constructing and imposing potent collective memories decades after the war’s end. A highly readable and meticulously researched study, it joins recent work by Joan E. Cashin and Sarah Jones Weicksel in making a strident case for material objects as sites where the multiple and contradictory meanings of the war were played out.[1]
The first four chapters, which focus on the war years, explore the challenge of outfitting the armies, the practical problems of keeping the armies clothed on the march, the ambivalent emotions elicited by uniform and flags among their wearers and bearers, and the home front industry producing (by hand or by machine) these tangible symbols of the cause(s). Cox amply demonstrates not only that uniforms were far from uniform (despite the increasing codification of dress regulation and eventual streamlining of requisition processes) but also that their practical and symbolic functions did not always neatly align. As tools to condition individuals for battle readiness, uniforms frequently fell short; clothing allowances were insufficient, leaving men ragged, exposed, and uncomfortable, or else weighed down by heavy material in punishing conditions. Theft was a perennial solution: men stole constantly from each other and from their enemies. Yet uniforms performed complex symbolic functions that transcended these quotidian practical challenges. Take, for instance, the relationship between uniform and honor. Men frequently articulated their service as an aspiration to “live up to” the uniform they wore. Conversely, such actions as disguising oneself in enemy uniform, or seizing an enemy flag and desecrating it, or using it as a means of deception were considered beyond the pale and prompted censure and punishment up to and including execution.
In the remaining four chapters, Cox explains the rapidly changing meanings of Civil War uniforms between Appomattox and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1938 (the last major anniversary at which significant numbers of veterans were present), considering the role and regulation of uniforms and badges in postwar veterans’ organizations and the centrality of material items to reunions and anniversary gatherings. Again, the symbolic potency of uniforms is apparent in the postwar period; Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) badges made from melted-down Confederate cannons and Confederate uniforms being repurposed to clothe prisoners stick out as particularly pointed illustrations of the war’s unfinishedness. Moments of heightened patriotism and military mobilization—1898, 1917—often provided opportunities for Confederate veterans and their descendants to reimagine Confederate iconography and claim a space for Rebel badges, flags, and clothing in public pageantry. The material items that became fuel for postwar “memory machines” were less and less genuine relics of the war itself but, rather, newly minted objects that swiftly replaced their wartime equivalents in the public Civil War imaginary (p. 142). While organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy used the sale of badges to raise funds for their activities and assiduously policed their design, production, and sale, by the early twentieth century, the manufacture of ribbons, veterans’ uniforms, and other commemorative objects of varying quality increasingly fell to enterprising manufacturers whose profit motivation frequently took precedence over their political allegiances.
Public interest in Civil War uniforms and ephemera is hardly novel: Hollywood is replete with (as Cox indicates, often highly inaccurate and mythologized) depictions of the blue and gray, and antiquarian societies, reenactment circles, and certain strands of military history boast considerable expertise in the minutiae of Civil War uniforms and accoutrements. Cox moves beyond the descriptive, however, by mining the political and cultural meanings of these objects and exploring their powerful individual and collective resonances during and—perhaps even more so—after the war. To explore the multiple meanings and uses of these objects, she draws on an impressive array of written, visual, and material sources. Weaving together military orders, regimental ledgers, governmental records, newspaper accounts, minutes of veterans’ association meetings, soldiers’ papers, and industry reports, she surmounts a pressing challenge of material culture history: how do we recover objects’ meanings when those objects no longer exist (whether through destruction, misplacement, or decay)? Yet, where possible, Cox introduces us to extant objects, which she herself has painstakingly collected. There is scope here for even further engagement with the visual record of Civil War uniforms (for instance, the vivid depictions of regimental mustering in Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated), but the relatively modest list of figures here likely bespeaks the often prohibitive cost of image reproduction rather than any deficiency in Cox’s methods.
Cox’s comparative approach is an ambitious and ultimately rewarding one. Evaluating the challenges both sections faced in clothing their armies appears largely to confirm the gulf in resources, industry, and infrastructure between North and South, yet also emphasizes the continuing ubiquity of handmaking, community labor, adaptation, and improvisation regardless of section. Moreover, in comparing how Union and Confederate veterans, their relations, and their descendants used material objects to maintain a visible demarcation between Confederate and Union veterans, assiduously policing in- and out-groups, Cox reveals the contingency and incompleteness of white reconciliation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Important, too, is Cox’s consideration of what uniforms meant to Black and Indigenous soldiers. As Frederick Douglass’s famous rallying cry—“let the black man get an eagle on his button”—signaled, uniform served to make African Americans legible as men deserving of the full benefits of American citizenship. Uniforms were frequent sources of pride and belonging for Black and Indigenous soldiers; Black communities, too, drew succor and encouragement from the sight of spick-and-span United States Colored Troops (USCT) regiments on parade. Yet uniforms provoked complex emotions for Black and Indigenous wearers. Upkeep exacerbated the existing pay inequality faced by Black troops. There is evidence that the sight of Black men in uniform, even as it visually refuted white supremacy, strengthened white Southern hostility and placed USCT regiments in heightened danger. Military authorities on both sides debated the merits of imposing uniform codes on Indigenous soldiers, and Indigenous soldiers struggled to reconcile tribal identities and sartorial traditions with sectional loyalties and aspirations. This ambivalence only deepened after the war. The often peripheral participation of Black and Indigenous people in veterans’ organizations revealed their precarious place in the postwar narratives of the war and the erosion of emancipationist memories of the conflict, despite the attempts of Black GAR members to keep alive their interpretation of the war as a new birth of freedom. Increasingly, by the end of the nineteenth century, people of color were deliberately incorporated into Confederate reunions and displays, used, Cox says, as “props” to shore up the Lost Cause by promoting the service of supposed “Black Confederates.”
Future scholars will no doubt build on Cox’s work to explore less fully developed themes: there is surprisingly little discussion of gender and masculinity here (a brief passage about women soldiers notwithstanding), and there is scope to probe the intersection of material and environmental histories to consider the haptic and emotional dimensions of dirt, discomfort, recycling, disposal, and destruction. The very good treatment of Black and Indigenous uniform wearers leaves comparatively untouched the role of material culture in constructing and legitimizing sectionally specific whiteness. These critiques should not take away, however, from Cox’s wide-ranging and thematically coherent work. The Fabric of Civil War Society firmly situates uniforms, badges, and flags as potent repositories of meaning and memory and will make valuable reading for scholars of the Civil War battlefront, the home front economy, and postwar memory making.
Note
[1]. Joan E. Cashin, “Trophies of War: Material Culture in the Civil War Era,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 3 (2011): 339-67; Joan E. Cashin, War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Sarah Jones Weicksel, “The Dress of the Enemy: Clothing and Disease in the Civil War Era,” Civil War History 63, no. 2 (2017): 133-50; and Sarah Jones Weicksel, “Cultures of Confederate Military Clothing Production,” in Clothing and Fashion in Southern History, ed. Ted Ownby and Becca Walton (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2020): 32-53.
Citation: Rachel Williams. Review of Cox, Shae Smith. The Fabric of Civil War Society: Uniforms, Badges, and Flags, 1859-1939. H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews. August, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60653
