Masters Thesis

Ancient Confederate: The Charleston Mercury, Southern Nationhood, and the Classical Past

“Ancient Confederates” examines how the extremist Charleston Mercury represented the ancient past in its pages throughout the Civil War era. Focusing on the period from the election of Abraham Lincoln in November of 1860 through the end of the war, this thesis argues that the Mercury regularly employed the history of the Greco-Roman world to support the Confederate cause. As the secession crisis and then the war took shape, the ancient past served primarily to engender and reaffirm aspects of an imagined Southern identity to encourage unity across the South, particularly among elites. To do this, articles in the Mercury appropriated aspects of the ancient past perceived as positives to the “Southern people,” while ascribing the despised features of Greco-Roman civilization to their Northern foes. As the initial enthusiasm for the war declined and circumstances became more trying for the rebels, they shifted their uses of the past towards more immediate aims, trying to sustain a spirit of resistance, resolve, and determination among Southerners increasingly demoralized by events of the war. In both phases, the applications of the classical past in the Mercury were remarkably flexible, illustrating the tenuous relationship between the truth and the ideologically driven newspaper, as well as the symbolic character of the ancient world as it was conscripted and made to fight for the Southern cause.

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