GLR September-October 2025

Whatever the reason, “the cultural tradi tion of male homoeroticism within Civil War narratives” with which Faulkner is en gaging is, Donnelly claims, the subject of his own book—a cultural tradition of “arrested development” in which Faulkner’s charac ters were not the first young men to believe that “wars were sometimes created for the

rying Mary Todd, didn’t even vote for him; that Lincoln’s campaign manager detested him; and that one observer said of the Pres ident 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 ex actly 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 mean ing 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 Confeder acy, and the Lost Cause,” I’m still not sure what he means. To say that “same-sex romance held ... specific and defined polit ical meaning for imagining the bonds between white Northern and Southern men” illustrates the problem of defining what con stituted 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 Don nelly quotes claims that Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! “imagines that while there was a time when the southern plan tation 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 plan tation life conducive to same-sex desire? More barns in which to hide, woods to get lost in?

CONFEDERATE SYMPATHIES Same Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era by Andrew Donnelly Univ. of North Carolina Press 296 pages, $32.95

sole aim of settling youth’s private difficulties and discontents.” Accepting this possibility, it seems to me, depends on how psy choanalytic 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 sit uation 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 Roo sevelt was calling Henry James “a miserable little snob” for moving to Europe rather than participate in the rough-and-tum ble 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 Don nelly writes, that “attractive white Southerners ... offered a use ful figure for postbellum politics,” and that “the white Southern aristocrat, the antebellum cavalier, and the Southern Confeder ate 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 an other surprising fact. But the presence of homosexual desire in Civil War politics as presented in Confederate Sympathies does not seem that sig nificant—except for that of Whitman, who sits with his “Cala mus” 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 Eng lish 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 ex pected 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 digi tal 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 sex ual anxiety—and sorely lacking what Mark Twain said the country needed after the Civil War: not men with a political plat form but “men with character.”

TheG & LR

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