As wartime defeat thwarted their ambitions for independence, former Confederates in North Carolina attempted to reconstruct their domestic worlds along antebellum lines while constructing new modes of racial interaction in the wake of the destruction of slavery. Analyzing Confederates' reflections on defeat as a product of their age reveals that younger men met displayed stout ideological resistance, while their elders considered pragmatic solutions to reorder their world. Men younger than thirty expressed continued attachment to Confederate nationalism, strong emotions when writing about African-Americans and their fate, and a commitment to uphold fixed notions of gendered social and domestic roles in their wartime and immediate postwar writings. Men older than thirty, though holding similar convictions to their juniors, conceived of nationalism in terms of sacrifice, race as a temporary obstacle to social and economic tranquility under the guise of white supremacy, and gender as a set of mutating obligations and challenges.