Robert E. Bonner

In the aftermath of secession and in the crucible of war, a cohort of Confederate nationalists offered polemics that made even George Fitzhugh look moderate by comparison. This talk will convey the protagonists of a “reactionary Enlightenment” that extended ideas dismissed as far-fetched during the 1850s into the mainstream of the Confederate dialogue. Their absolutist understanding of society, politics, and militarization, Bonner will argue, constituted the most sweeping American critique of liberal assumptions and values. As such, these forgotten wartime writings anticipated the underside of a Southern conservative tradition shaped by war, sacrifice, and authoritarian politics.

Robert E. Bonner was born and raised in Tennessee and is a graduate of the Baylor School in Chattanooga. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in history from Princeton in 1989 and a doctorate from Yale in 1998. He has since taught at the University of Southern Maine, Michigan State University, Amherst College, and, most recently, at Dartmouth College. In addition to several articles on proslavery politics and culture, he has written Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (2002); The Soldier's Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War (2006) and Mastering America: Proslavery Southerners and the Crisis of Federal Union (2008). Bonner is spending the 2007–2008 academic year as a fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, where he is continuing research on the cultural, political, moral, and military consequences of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire with his wife (who is also a historian) and their three sons.