GLR September-October 2025

ESSAY The Attraction of Confederate Gents A NDREW H OLLERAN

I T ALL BEGAN with the Founding Fathers’ belief that the success of the new nation depended on friendship between members of Congress, especially Northerners and Southerners divided by the subject of slavery. Leg islators in those days shared the same rooming houses and eating places in Washington while Congress was in session, rather than go back to their districts on weekends as they do now (one of the explanations given in our own time for the current gridlock). Friendship would facilitate making the compromises necessary to keep the country together. Such friendship was most likely platonic, though the feud over slavery always had sexual undercurrents. Southerners claimed that Abolitionists were out to destroy the (white) South ern family, while Abolitionists accused plantation owners of having sex with their slaves. When Charles Sumner gave his fa mous speech on the question of whether to admit Kansas to the Union as a slave or free state, he pointedly used the phrase “the harlot Slavery” because the Southern senator he was rebuking had a reputation for sleeping with his slaves. That accusation led the senator’s cousin to nearly beat Sumner to death with his cane a few days later on the Senate floor—an act of brutality that roused the North into battle fever. But amid the animosity and violence be feelings in novels, political cartoons, photographs, and other ephemera throughout this era. The introduction dealing with the importance of friendship, for instance, is followed by a chapter that examines novels written by Southerners to refute the view of slavery presented in Uncle Tom’s Cabin —novels that de picted same-sex masters and slaves bound together by love. The chapter on antebellum pro-slavery novels is succeeded by one about a young man whose death seems to have made him the Rupert Brooke of the Civil War. When Major John Pelham of the Confederate cavalry was killed in battle at age 24, his youth and beauty made him the poster boy for the human cost of a fratricidal war, one whose cruelty is examined in the next chapter, on Andersonville, the notorious prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia, where Union men paired up with one another simply to survive. Photographs of captured Union soldiers showed the terrible starvation, the ema ciated limbs, the amputated toes that shocked Northern readers when they saw them in magazines. In Andersonville, the only Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand . His other novels include Grief and The Beauty of Men . tween North and South, homosocial and even homoerotic elements endured. Confed erate Sympathies is the study of these ele ments in American literature and politics before, during, and after the Civil War. Au thor Andrew Donnelly finds homoerotic

way to survive was to find a buddy, someone with whom you could sleep at night to combat the cold. If, when you woke up, you found your companion was dead, you continued to snuggle with the corpse to retain the heat of his body—a sort of human blanket. That was friendship as well, the sort that kept the pris oners alive—by marrying, in a way, another man. But it would be a stretch to call it homoerotic. After Andersonville, we move on to Reconstruction, when the sympathy felt by Northern lib eral Abolitionists for the slaves shifted to the defeated Southern veteran and the Lost Cause. 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 com mon practice of two men sleeping in the same bed, like Abra ham 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 ists 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 “Cala mus” poems seem explicitly homoerotic. Confederate Sympathies opens with the story of the day Whitman got on a streetcar in Washington, D.C., and was ap proached 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 ex plicit, but no one knows what they did with one another in sex ual 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 prud ery 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, Wendell Holmes Jr. said, on the blood of young men. And the creation of the Lost Cause after the war—the flipping of atti tudes 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 ante bellum South became a place where novel

Amid the animosity and violence between North and South, homosocial and even homoero ti c elements endured.

TheG & LR

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