The Paradox of Loyalty

Woodward begins by examining northerners’ obsession with the question of southern loyalty in the wake of Confederate defeat. But, as he observed, the verdict was unclear in part because no knew what post-Confederate southern loyalty looked like. Some northern journalists who toured the South offered one assessment. U.S. Senator and former Union General Carl Schurz offered a different interpretation. Woodward argues that Presidential Reconstruction made little headway not only because of President Andrew Johnson’s intransigence and leniency toward former Confederates, but also because loyalty to church, tradition, and locality precipitated a crisis amongst white southerners. One could not be both loyal to the nation and loyal to the region. In claiming allegiance to the union, white southerners had to affirm they were both “anti-Confederate” and “anti-Southern.” The penalty for not doing so was social ostracism by the community. Woodward concludes this lecture by acknowledging the defeated South’s inability to convince the North of its loyalty to the Union.