Long Gray Lines: The Southern Military School Tradition, 1839-1915 [Hardcover]

Rod Andrew Jr. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 17, 2007

Military training was a prominent feature of higher education across the nineteenth-century South. Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel, as well as land-grant schools such as Texas A&M, Auburn, and Clemson, organized themselves on a military basis, requiring their male students to wear uniforms, join a corps of cadets, and subject themselves to constant military discipline. Several southern black colleges also adopted a military approach.

Challenging assumptions about a distinctive "southern military tradition," Rod Andrew demonstrates that southern military schools were less concerned with preparing young men for actual combat than with instilling in their students broader values of honor, patriotism, civic duty, and virtue. Southerners had a remarkable tendency to reconcile militarism with republicanism, Andrew says, and following the Civil War, the Lost Cause legend further strengthened the link in southerners' minds between military and civic virtue.

Though traditionally black colleges faced struggles that white schools did not, notes Andrew, they were motivated by the same conviction that powered white military schools--the belief that a good soldier was by definition a good citizen.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Using a combination of the published and unpublished records of the southern military schools, newspapers, government records, and a wide-ranging secondary literature, the book makes an important . . . contribution. (Choice)"

"Andrew's stimulating investigation of the southern military school tradition yields original insights into why and how southerners, more than other Americans, equated martial valor with civic virtue. (Winfred B. Moore Jr.,The Citadel)"

"Andrew skillfully employs his analysis of educational goals and institutional growth to illuminate larger themes central to the history of the New South: the nature of the Lost Cause, the fate of the republican tradition after the Civil War, and most important, the development of the southern military tradition. (Gaines M. Foster, Louisiana State University)"

"A significant contribution to the ongoing historical debate over the existence of a unique southern military tradition. . . . It is well-researched and well-written, and it offers a solid discussion of the historiography while making a significant contribution to it. (Journal of the Early Republic)"

"Andrew's brief study of the southern military school tradition is a valuable resource. It is well researched, well argued and thought provoking. . . . A useful work with important insights into a significant southern tradition. (Civil War Book Review)"

About the Author

Rod Andrew Jr. formerly taught history at The Citadel and is now assistant professor of history at Clemson University. He has served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps and is currently a major in the Marine Corps Reserve.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (January 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807826103
• ISBN-13: 978-0807826102
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,861,967 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A history that prompts broad thinking on education and society, September 9, 2010

By 

Donald M. Bishop (Virginia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Long Gray Lines: The Southern Military School Tradition, 1839-1915 (Paperback)

Read one way, this is a straightforward history of military colleges and secondary schools in the American south in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Crisply organized chapters deal with the views that undergirded the military schools movement, the founding of state colleges like Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel, the many effects of the Civil War, how the South responded to the Morrill Act that established the land grant colleges, and the tensions between "militarism" and "republicanism" that the military colleges had to resolve.

There's a fine essay on the system of discipline for cadets and how it came to incorporate legal protections recognized in American society. Another chapter traces the history of the separate military schools for African-Americans (Hampton was the most famous).

Read another way, this book addresses historical narratives of the ante-bellum South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Andrew challenges historians who have argued that the popularity of military schooling in the South derived from slavery and racism, and he succeeds in adding more depth and texture to discussion of the issue. Southern educators and parents were affected both by regional and national culture; law; concepts of duty, honor, virtue, and citizenship; reflections on adolescence; the economic development of the south; and the evolution of thinking on education and its purposes.

This is history, but as always history sparks thinking on the present. The legacy of the cultural values that supported the military schools, a century or more later, can be seen in the number of young men and women from the South who serve in the armed forces.

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