Sabrina Darnowsky

When is a General not a General?

This is not a riddle, but rather a serious question. I recently completed the chapter on the Civil War in my biography of Murray Shipley, and one of my faithful draft readers is a former high school history teacher who keeps abreast of trends among contemporary historians. In providing me with her feedback, she included a link to an article in the Smithsonian Magazine about the vocabulary we use in discussing that war and its participants.

One area of current concern is using the term Union to describe the Northern government. Although this expression was common during the nineteenth century, the historian Michael Landis suggests that it’s preferable to refer to the nation by its name, the United States, which better recognizes its legitimacy.

Likewise, the article asserts that when we speak of the Confederate States of America, or the Confederacy, we place the secessionists on equal footing with the United States. Yet no other government in the world recognized the Confederacy as a sovereign nation. The nickname Rebels is more accurate, given that the Southern states were in armed rebellion against the United States.

Abraham Lincoln himself did not refer to Jefferson Davis as a president, but rather as an insurgent leader. And if Jefferson Davis could not legitimately be called a president, could his military leaders legitimately be called Generals?

In writing my chapter on the Civil War (or, as the historian Steven Hahn would call it, the War of the Rebellion), I did not want to grant undue stature to the secessionists. At the same time, I wanted to accurately reflect the vocabulary of the period. I’m approaching Shipley’s biography as a work of creative non-fiction rather than as a historical examination of the past as seen from the present. I’m writing about his world as he would have seen it and spoken about it.

Ultimately, I continued to use the term Union in reference to the Northern states and their military. I did emulate Lincoln in inserting the phrase so-called before a solitary mention of the Confederate States of America. When talking about the members of the Southern army, I alternated between the terms Confederate and Rebel as needed to avoid undue repetition, but predominantly used the term Rebel. And when it came time to identify the leader of the troops that were advancing upon Cincinnati, I still called Kirby Smith a General. Whether or not the title lends him legitimacy, it provides necessary context regarding the role he played within the Rebel army.