David J. Bodenhamer | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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David J. Bodenhamer | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism. By Mark E. Neely Jr. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. viii, 212 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8139-1894-4.)

Master historians have the ability to provide new perspective on a shopworn subject. They also call attention to significant information other scholars have failed to note or pursue in areas seemingly exhausted by previous studies. On both counts, Mark E. Neely Jr. demonstrates why he is considered among the nation's top Civil War and legal historians. 1

Neely became interested in the question of individual rights in the Confederacy when he painstakingly traced records of over 4,100 civilian prisoners held by military authorities from 1861 to 1865. (He claims far more prisoners than those sources admit, but the information was too scattered to be easily reconstructed. Indeed, it took five years to piece together the evidence for this book.) Those records, he argues, reverse our understanding of the Confederacy: instead of protecting southern rights and liberty as politicians pledged before the war, the Confederate government curtailed civil liberties, and many white citizens daily and docilely submitted to this sacrifice of their freedom. . . .

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