The Attraction of Confederate Gents
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            All of this is a rough sketch of a book whose point is in the end mostly impossible to pin down, in part because even now, as its author admits, we cannot know what terms like romantic friendship, adhesiveness, or ingenuousness would have meant to people in the 19th century, or even their thoughts about the common practice of two men sleeping in the same bed, like Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed.

            Pelham was said to be shy about courting women, and lived with his commanding officer in the field. But the reader may feel that the effect his death had on people could be just as well explained by the fact that all societies are founded, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, on the blood of young men. And the creation of the Lost Cause after the war—the flipping of attitudes toward Southern men, mutating from evil slaveholders to noble martyrs—might simply show us how stubborn the romantic streak can be in people. The way the antebellum South became a place where novelists and literary critics could imagine a society that included the freedom for men to love other men is never quite explained. The title of Leslie Fiedler’s famous 1948 essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey” says a great deal about the subtext of Mark Twain’s classic, but only Walt Whitman and his “Calamus” poems seem explicitly homoerotic.

            Confederate Sympathies opens with the story of the day Whitman got on a streetcar in Washington, D.C., and was approached by a young Irish immigrant and Confederate Army veteran named Peter Doyle, who walked over to Whitman and put his hand on his knee. “We were familiar at once,” Doyle later said. “We both knew.” The story is famous, the words explicit, but no one knows what they did with one another in sexual terms, which points to the difficulty of assessing the material in this book.

            The modern reader, encountering the “Calamus” poems, is so struck by their homoerotic quality that one may well wonder how Whitman got away with publishing them at a time of prudery about heterosexual sex, much less another, yet unnamed, sexual orientation. It’s hard even today to interpret the famous photograph of Whitman and Doyle sitting in separate chairs, facing but looking past one another, Whitman’s hat high on his forehead, Doyle’s pushed down low. They look like card sharps on a Mississippi riverboat; there’s nothing romantic about it at all. And that may be said for much of the evidence in Donnelly’s book. It’s familiar enough to read that President Buchanan, the only president in history never to marry, was attacked by his opponents for being a bachelor, or that “the Bowery boys” were sailors who would walk around the bars of lower Manhattan with their pinkies linked. But almost everything else is in the eye of the beholder. Same-sex prostitution was obviously known about, but most other examples raise the question: did the ante- or post-bellum audience perceive the homoeroticism of the images and language that Donnelly argues for, or is this just a projection of Queer Theory?

            Confederate Sympathies is an academic book that may take for granted the reader’s familiarity with what is called “the Archive” of homoerotic imagery in this era—especially the novels with titles like The Thinking Bayonet that today are of interest only to scholars. Donnelly’s survey finds the homoerotic in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the film that romanticized the Ku Klux Klan, and novels by Albion Tourgée and William Gilmore Simms. It uses political cartoons by Thomas Nast. And it reproduces the illustration of a scene in a pro-slavery novel called Frank Freeman’s Barber Shop in which a Black man on his knees is begging a white man to “Buy me! Oh! buy me, Master Leamington!” to make its point. But many others seem to be examples of old-fashioned homophobia as much as they are of the homoerotic.

            Donnelly’s book also stresses the fact that post-Civil War America saw both the urbanization of the North and the rise of sexology as a discipline. The word “homosexuality” was coined in 1869, and soon thereafter it became associated with big Northern cities whose Bowery boys supposedly threatened the South. There is even a discussion of the way the Civil War was viewed by some literary critics as a stage in the country’s sexual maturation—that the idyll of same-sex friendship in the agrarian South had to be destroyed so that young men could move beyond same-sex romance and become heterosexuals capable of fathering children. But the view that the Civil War happened so that American boys could grow up to become heterosexual fathers and married men seems a bit much.

            But here is the frustrating thing about this: scattered in the stream of Queer Theory are old-fashioned historical facts that make one wish that historians would stop writing, as they say, for other historians. “This book is not about individual gay Confederates,” Donnelly writes. But one wishes it was—because the history, even viewed through the lens of Queer Theory, is fascinating. But then there are sentences like: “The very elasticity of any inquiry into the political meaning of same-sex romance … suggests a phenomenon whose boundaries may be coextensive with the imagination of white manhood itself.” Every time the book discloses something about someone in passing to make a point about politics and homosexuality, one perks right up.

            How interesting it is, for instance, to learn that Charles Sumner had a very close friendship with a fellow Bostonian who founded the first school for the blind, and that he had a breakdown when his best friend married; or to come upon a doctor who was obsessed with wiping out masturbation among young American men, or upon a former Surgeon General of the Union Army who opened the first psychiatric practice in New York after the war and treated what he called pederasts; or to learn that no one paid any attention to Lincoln’s affection for other men when Lincoln was alive, only after his death; that Joshua Speed, the man whose bed he shared in Springfield before marrying Mary Todd, didn’t even vote for him; that Lincoln’s campaign manager detested him; and that one observer said of the President that he cared for no one. These are the life blood of popular history—but they are not why one keeps reading Confederate Sympathies. That would be to see what exactly the role of the homoerotic was during these times. And yet, that is never quite explained.

            When Donnelly writes that “This book argues that the meaning of the Civil War has shaped and been shaped by male same-sex romance and the history of homosexuality” and that “homoeroticism enlisted sympathies for slavery, the Confederacy, and the Lost Cause,” I’m still not sure what he means. To say that “same-sex romance held … specific and defined political meaning for imagining the bonds between white Northern and Southern men” illustrates the problem of defining what constituted same-sex romance. And to say that “This book … aims to add the experience of same sex desire to those explanations of why political history in the Civil War era took the direction it did” is to make a very dramatic claim. A literary critic Donnelly quotes claims that Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! “imagines that while there was a time when the southern plantation made it possible for white men to love each other openly and without challenge, one tragic outcome of the Civil War is that this queer possibility no longer exists.” But why was plantation life conducive to same-sex desire? More barns in which to hide, woods to get lost in?

     Whatever the reason, “the cultural tradition of male homoeroticism within Civil War narratives” with which Faulkner is engaging is, Donnelly claims, the subject of his own book—a cultural tradition of “arrested development” in which Faulkner’s characters were not the first young men to believe that “wars were sometimes created for the sole aim of settling youth’s private difficulties and discontents.” Accepting this possibility, it seems to me, depends on how psychoanalytic one tends to be in explaining human actions.

            Yet the photographs Mathew Brady took of soldiers in the Civil War haunt us still. And our own cultural and political situation contains so many echoes of the conflict that it’s hard to know where to start. There is obviously little to no friendship on Capitol Hill at the moment, and we are in the hands of a man who wants to return us to the Gilded Age, when Teddy Roosevelt was calling Henry James “a miserable little snob” for moving to Europe rather than participate in the rough-and-tumble of American life, preferring to live in Paris and write such novels as The Bostonians (1886), in which a handsome, virile Confederate hero vies for the love of the heroine with a woman whom today’s reader would call a lesbian. Who knew, as Donnelly writes, that “attractive white Southerners … offered a useful figure for postbellum politics,” and that “the white Southern aristocrat, the antebellum cavalier, and the Southern Confederate became, in postbellum culture, a distinctly usable type.” The fact that Henry James and Henry Adams became mugwumps—people so offended by the corruption of the Grant administration that they refused to vote for the Republican candidate—is another surprising fact.

            But the presence of homosexual desire in Civil War politics as presented in Confederate Sympathies does not seem that significant—except for that of Whitman, who sits with his “Calamus” poems in the center of all this like Poe’s purloined letter, so obvious no one could imagine that he really meant it. But they pertain to his personal vision, not to any movement in American history. The idea that the public was too romantic, or too genteel, to see their homoerotic quality points up the general problem that Donnelly admits at the start of his book—that we cannot know what people thought about them in 1860. The English writer John Addington Symonds thought he knew, though when he wrote to ask Whitman if he was “That Way,” Whitman not only denied it but claimed to have fathered several children. And when Whitman’s boss at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington discovered that his employee had written Leaves of Grass, he fired him.

            Donnelly cites the view that the Civil War was a “crisis in gender.” One may ask: what war is not, insofar as men are expected to serve during wartime? But when Stephen Crane called his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, the meaning was clear. What form the test of manhood will take in the digital age, who knows? Watching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth campaign in tan loafers and cutaway collar to get rid of trans people serving in the armed forces, or to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, we are certainly in the throes of some kind of sexual anxiety—and sorely lacking what Mark Twain said the country needed after the Civil War: not men with a political platform but “men with character.”