In recent years, historians of the Civil War era have increasingly turned their attention toward common soldiers and veterans, seeking to understand how individuals experienced the upheaval of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. James J. Broomall contributes to this historiographical current in Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers, a study of Confederate men's emotional experiences during and after the Civil War. Broomall aims to penetrate the hidden, inner worlds of Confederate soldiers and veterans, investigating how men felt about the rapid changes that roiled Southern society during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The book's scale includes deep dives into individual subjects interspersed with panoramas of Confederates’ larger “emotional communities.” Broomall traces his subjects’ emotions from the antebellum South to Reconstruction and beyond, paying careful attending to change and continuity over time.

Broomall argues that during the antebellum decades, “white men guarded their interactions with others to uphold a carefully maintained public face,” a finding that falls in line with the conclusions of previous studies of white masculinity (154). But Broomall finds that white Southern men exhibited more “flexible masculinities” (10) than the previous generation of scholarship has realized. Diaries offered a means for men to express in private the “joy and sadness, love and anxiety” that had to be kept from public view (154). Thus, historiographies that focus solely on men's public expressions of honor and mastery provide only a limited view of white Southern manhood, Broomall claims. “Once the public and private faces of Southern manhood are combined,” he asserts, “men appear at once pugilist and antagonist but also introspective and vulnerable” (154). During the Civil War, the many pressures to which Confederate soldiers were subjected rattled antebellum ideals and “forced the reconfiguration of prewar behavior and expression” (5). Soldiers “reacted with uncertainty” to the hardships of war, and they openly “turned to their comrades-in-arms for emotional support” (121), creating what Broomall describes as “emotional communities” that would outlast the Confederacy itself. The Civil War thus “widened” Confederate men's range of emotional expressions, Broomall argues, as soldiers became increasingly willing to reveal their fraught emotional states to one another (154).

Following Confederate veterans home after the Civil War, Broomall finds that Confederate men exhibited a spectrum of emotions ranging from excitement to sadness, anger, and more. Indeed, the paramilitary violence of Reconstruction, Broomall convincingly argues, was simultaneously a means of expressing bitterness at the Confederacy's military defeat, asserting a commitment to resurrecting the antebellum social and political order, and maintaining a continuation of soldiers’ wartime emotional communities. Later in the nineteenth century, as reconciliation became the predominant national strain of Civil War memory, Confederate veterans “turned inward, communicating to their famil[ies] and to other former soldiers about their experiences,” even while adopting reconciliationist tones in public (156).

One of the book's noteworthy strengths is Broomall's commitment to following Confederate men through the entire Civil War era, from the antebellum period to the war itself through Reconstruction and beyond. This approach allows for a dynamic view of masculinity that accounts for change and continuity over time. To his credit, Broomall also seeks to move our understanding of white Southern manhood beyond honor and mastery. For this purpose, Broomall's main sources are white Southern men's diaries—both published and in manuscript form—written before, during, and after the war, as well as wartime letters between soldiers and their loved ones on the home front. Broomall uses these ostensibly private sources to pierce white Southern men's stoic public facades and probe the emotions they jealously guarded from others. As a generation of scholarship on Southern manhood has demonstrated, “Southerners’ emotional expressions are … elusive because they actively maintained public masks,” revealing little about their private emotions. To solve this riddle, Broomall suggests that “[d]iaries offer an entry into these otherwise lost worlds and demonstrate that men thought about more than just honor and violence, however important these forces were to their public lives” (13). Yet placing too much emphasis on diaries is one of the chief shortcomings of this book. While diaries might enable historians to get a closer view into subjects’ inner emotions than is possible through other sources, diaries are nonetheless imperfect windows into subjects’ true selves. As several scholars have pointed out, nineteenth-century American diarists often wrote with an audience in mind. This fact complicates Broomall's claims that his analysis reveals the raw, unfiltered emotions of Confederate men.

Nevertheless, historians of Confederate soldiers and veterans and of white Southern masculinity will find interest in Private Confederacies. Broomall's analysis of the material culture and homosocial environment of Confederate camps and his analysis of white manhood as it relates to the Ku Klux Klan in particular are especially valuable. The book's final three chapters also provide a much-needed Southern counterpart to recent literature on Union veterans’ postwar lives. Overall, Private Confederacies provides a welcome addition to the literature on Southern masculinity and Confederate veterans, for as Broomall notes, “[i]t is only by considering the dialectic between public and private experiences that the depth of Southerners’ lives can be plumbed” (3).