Old South

by David Williams

Sheds new light on the people and events that shaped the South in ways that affect the region and the nation to this day. Each chapter is accompanied by documents that illuminate the South's people in intimate and telling ways. The story begins with a survey of the South's first peoples and the eventual intrusion by  Europeans, resulting in a clash of cultures that transformed societies. Subsequent struggles for land and power, strategies to subdue and enslave, and efforts to resist and survive laid the foundations of what would become a distinct region called the South. During the American Revolution, that region passed out of the British Empire, birthed in a conflict that was as much a civil war as a war for independence, especially for Southerners. Over the following decades, Native Americans were relentlessly driven out as the South moved west, establishing an agriculturally based society and economy dominated by a slaveholding minority. Facing pressures against them from within the South as well as without, slaveholders sought to make slavery perpetual in a war that pitted not only North against South, but also Southerners against each other. Barely a year into the war, an Atlanta newspaper "If we are defeated, it will be by the people at home." And so the Confederacy was defeated, not only by Union armies, in which nearly half a million Southern men served, but also by opposition on the home front.

230 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2014

About the author

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A professor of history at Valdosta State University, David Williams received his Ph.D. in history from Auburn University in 1988. The author of numerous articles on Georgia history, the Old South, Appalachia, and the Civil War, Williams is the author of Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley and Johnny Reb's War: Battlefield and Homefront and the coauthor of Gold Fever: America's First Gold Rush and Plain Folk in a Rich Man's War: Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia. He lives in Valdosta, Georgia.