American Nationalism as Confederate Nationalism

In the reading this week, I was particularly interested in Faust's characterization of Confederate nationalism as a reassertment of American nationalism.  As the new Confederate nation struggled to create for itself a new culture, it finally settled upon embracing the old, by claiming itself as "the legitimate heir of American revolutionary tradition" and "their independence as the fulfillment of American nationalism."[1]  In the Confederacy's attempt to cement its people with the new nation, or, to create an effective "imagined community [2], it appears that the Confederacy turned to religion to provide the cohesive force necessary for such an endeavor.  Jefferson Davis and others used religion as a basis for Southern "legitimation", by arguing that the south was "divinely chosen" to "as the fulfillment" of the "divinely chartered errand of" of the Puritan settlers of Boston in the 17th Century.[3]  The Confederacy, in seeing itself being divinely chosen, identified itself with biblical Judah, and staying true to the commands of God while the Northern Tribes (or states, as the came may be) wandered off in pursuit of their own interests. [4]  As the South saw it, all nations "have their assigned missions,"and theirs was to carry on the original mission of the both the Purtians and the founding fathers.[5]
This ideology, it seems to me, persisted beyond the end of the civil war, into the thinking of Southerners into the theology and philosophy of the "Lost Cause," and with the reintegration of the South into the rest of the Republic, it seems to have manifested itself into a hyper-nationalism which intimately identifies itself with Christianity and the vision of America as the "New Israel."  I wonder how much of a role this enhanced Southern ideology has played from the Civil War forward in creating American's own vision of itself and its mission in the world, all the way up to the present day?



[1] Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History) (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 14.
[2] Ibid, 16.
[3] Ibid, 26.
[4] Ibid, 28-29.
[5] Ibid, 27.