The Life and Death of Frank Clewell, Confederate Veteran: Microhistory and the Civil War-Era South (original) (raw)

F rancis C. Clewell lived a "life of adventure." 1 At least, that is how Clewell's mother remembered the Confederate veteran when he died in 1867 at the young age of twenty-five. It was a decent epitaph for a yeoman North Carolina man who lived such a brief life amid a backdrop of monumental social, political, and economic turmoil. But when all angles of Clewell's short, yet astonishing life and death are considered in relation to the broader history of the Civil War-era South, a "life of adventure" falls short. A more accurate description of Clewell's saga would read: he personified Southern history in the Civil War era. By this description, I mean that Clewell's life and death illustrate an astonishingly wide spectrum of the Civil Warera South's major historical developments and themes. Clewell's early life speaks to the immense shadow the West cast over antebellum Southerners' outlooks as well as the complex relationship between yeoman Whites, elite planters, and the institution of slavery. Clewell's actions and experiences in Confederate gray illustrate how proslavery views animated White Southerners' support for the Confederacy, underscore the complex, fraught nature of wartime emancipation, and undercut core elements of the Lost Cause mythology that emerged in the postbellum South. Clewell's postwar travels and travails throw into stark relief the gender crisis and tremendous economic disruptions faced by Southerners in the Civil War's wake while shining new light on how non-slaveholding White men like Clewell navigated these changes. Finally, Clewell's untimely death is emblematic of the mental and physical trauma that plagued veterans long after the war's final shots. All this in