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Abstract
Often undervalued in literary studies, Civil War letters encapsulate personal and private exchanges amid a time of national conflict. The letters of Christopher Wren Bunker, a Chinese-Thai American fighting for the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War, fashion a narrative of assimilation that attempts to defy his ambiguous racialized status, aligning the Bunker family with the planter class of the U.S. South. In his adoption of nineteenth-century letter conventions and the meticulous, performative nature of his writing, Bunker demonstrates his own ideas of whiteness, synonymous with economic privilege and citizenship. He additionally conforms to normative ideas of fraternity and masculinity in response to the distinct Otherness of his family, especially his father and uncle, the Siamese Twins. Viewing these letters as a literary object thus yields a complex account of one individuals motivations for fighting to defend the perpetuation of an established racial hierarchy to which he does not conform.