Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South

by Stephanie McCurry

The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners' national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people--white women and slaves--and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise.

Wartime scarcity of food, labor, and soldiers tested the Confederate vision at every point and created domestic crises to match those found on the battlefields. Women and slaves became critical political actors as they contested government enlistment and tax and welfare policies, and struggled for their freedom. The attempt to repress a majority of its own population backfired on the Confederate States of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. That Confederate struggle played out in a highly charged international arena.

The political project of the Confederacy was tried by its own people and failed. The government was forced to become accountable to women and slaves, provoking an astounding transformation of the slaveholders' state. "Confederate Reckoning" is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.

Genres: History, Civil War, American History, Nonfiction, American Civil War, Politics, War

456 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2010

About the author

Stephanie McCurry is a specialist in nineteenth-century American history, with a focus on the American South, the Civil War era, and the history of women and gender.

McCurry attended college in Canada at the University of Western Ontario and moved to the United States for graduate school. She received her M.A. from the University of Rochester and her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She taught at the University of California, San Diego, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania before becoming Professor of History at Columbia University. In 2006-2007 she was a visiting professor of history at Princeton University.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

WOW! What a complex, challenging, and intriguing book! McCurrys history sets out to examine the Confederacy with depth and perspectives not often considered elsewhere.

The book starts by examining the process and structures of secession, and the formation of the Confederate government. McCurry lays bare both the thoroughly undemocratic machinery of secession, and also the unabashedly slavery-based reasoning for it, mostly through the words of leading participants. To be sure, if anyone has any doubt that the call of "states rights" or "property rights" was anything other than a cover for protecting slavery, they need to read this book. While the slavery question is the main issue for the politically powerful planter class, they still needed to persuade the rest of the white male population that couldn't be excluded through electoral tricks. To this end, McCurry explores the exploitation of gender roles, and masculine and patriarch archetypes in explaining the appeals to non-slaveholding citizens (white male voters, liable to military service).

Next, the role of women, particularly poor white women, in Southern society and its evolution during the war is covered. The domestic and civic roles (or lack thereof) in antebellum society are explored, and then the way that they gradually changed. The intrusive demands of the government for the service of their men, and the agricultural produce of their households, the author argues, forced these women into the public political sphere in ways they never had been before. Poor white women petitioned government officials with growing frequency, boldness, and efficacy as the war progressed and demands on themselves and their households grew. Women also took direct action in the form of threats and attacks flour mills, and in food riots in several major cities. The author delves into the level of organization and involvement these women these women resorted to in order to extract what they thought they were due from the government.

Lastly, the role and experience of African Americans in the Confederacy is examined. McCurry again explores cultural and gender themes here, but her main argument is that like the women, the slaves made political influence for themselves through their actions, despite not having official political power in the form of voting (or really any other civic) rights. African American slaves actions in actively and passively resisting the war, the author argues, made (some) Confederate officials eventually recognize that the consent and will of the slaves mattered to the preservation of the Confederate state. The theme of tension between state demands for access to slaves as material to support the war effort, and slaveholders attempts to preserve their property even at the expense of the state that existed to guarantee their right to own slaves.

All in all, Confederate Reckoning has some momentous things to say. It delves into the structural problems of the Confederacy on basic political and societal levels, and with a depth and honesty that is refreshing to read. That said, it's not a perfect book. The book is densely written, with long chapters that could really do with some breaking up to make absorbing the material presented easier. I also felt that the author could have done a better job tying together the broad spectrum of subjects she covered. The book read more like a series of related essays, than a cohesive body of work, to me.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Confederate Reckoning tells the little known story of the effect southern women and slaves had on the outcome of the Civil War. While most histories recount in detail the military strategies and battles, Stephanie McCurry looks behind the Confederate lines to show how women and slaves shaped the outcome of the war and eventually forced Confederate leaders to reconsider the very reasoning behind succession and the war.

McCurry does an outstanding job outlining the southern reasons for war. Their goal was to build a “modern proslavery and antidemocratic state, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal.” They wanted to redefine “We the people” as “We the white people” – and if they could have, they would have disenfranchised poor white southerners. McCurry clearly sets out the motives that, for over 100 years, have been muddled by conciliatory histories, southern sympathies and ignorance: The Confederate nation was built on the idea of slavery and antidemocratic policies – in direct opposition to what they saw as the trend in the northern states.

McCurry then focuses on the disenfranchised in the southern nation – women and slaves. Neither was recognized as enfranchised citizens by the Confederate government; they were either partners or property of white males. Each group, though, profoundly shaped the course of the war and the Confederate defeat.

Slaves, to focus on one, played a critical role in the downfall of the south. Before succession and the war, southerners thought their slaves would be a valuable asset to fighting a war, and help offset the much larger population of the North. Their African American slaves proved them wrong. By escaping in droves to the U.S. troops, spying and sabotage, African Americans created a second battle front for southerners that weighed down their war effort and made their defeat inevitable.

It’s ironic that by the end of the war, southern leaders were talking about ways to persuade slaves to be loyal. Slaves were no longer non-human automatons to be led by plantation owners, but men and women that the southerners had to win over to their cause. (However futile and delusional the idea seems.)

In fact, by the end of the war, many southern leaders openly advocated offering freedom to slaves who would fight in their army, and a law was passed late in the war to make it happen. Some even discussed general emancipation for all slaves. As McCurry states, “Enslaved men and woman had managed to make their foundational political exclusion unsustainable, to make their political consent count, and to force the Confederate government to contend for their loyalty with emancipation.” (p. 351)

This is a very interesting book and one I’d recommend to people interested in American history. The book does, however, repeat itself often. (I think this could have been a long article rather than a short book.) Additionally, McCurry has a strange habit of contradicting herself. For example, she says that southerners thought that slavery would strengthen their war-making ability … except those who didn’t think that. Southerners wanted to enlist slaves in the army … except those who didn’t. Granted, there wasn’t any polling then, so it is difficult to understand the mindset of the majority and differing opinions always abound.

[Kidada · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the book and will be assigning it this fall term. Favorite parts--argument about the need to treat the CSA as a country in its own right (and to explore its objectives, challenges, and limitations) and analysis of soldiers' wives (working class white women's engagement of the politics of subsistence to resist CSA policy) and the war the CSA fought (against enslaved people seeking freedom) from within.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting in some ways, but a little bit of a slog at times (definitely on the academic side). McCurry's main argument is that the Confederate national project was essentially a slave-owning elite project, as much of the regular white population (and obviously the slaves) were ambivalent about secession and only jumped in (again, not in toto) when the fighting started and it seemed like their home states were at risk. However, she argues that the key flaw the COnfederate elite made was assuming the participation of 3 groups: the poor, women, and the enslaved. Within the prevailing ideas/culture of the time, these groups were assumed to be automatic supporters of whatever the male elite decided, rather than being agents in and of themselves.

So most of the book is about all the ways that those groups protested, inhibited, or just withdrew their enthusiasm for the war effort. Poor women preferred to have their men at home to help with the harvest (and not dying), and they demanded relief from the gov't for the loss of their men. They and many poor men protested the favoritism shown to the slave-holding elites, including the rule that 1 white man could be exempted from the draft on every plantation with 20 or more slaves. McCurry argues that these dynamics showed the rise of poor women's politics in that era and their lack of acquiescence to the Confederate project. McCurry insinuates but doesn't really prove that this had a major impact on the Confederate war effort.

McCurry is on stronger but less original ground in arguing that the Confederate elite erroneously assumed that slaves would be a strength rather than a liability in this conflict. Instead of meekly following their masters' orders, hundreds of thousands of slaves ran to Union lines or found other ways of resisting. Confederate fear of slave uprisings meant they decided to leave much of their white population at home to prevent such resistance. At the end of the war, they desperately tried to enlist slaves in the military, but in doing so they implicitly recognized that slaves were independent human beings and that they were part of the body politic.

One thing I wondered about was this idea of the Confederacy being anti-democratic, as McCurry argues. It was obviously supposed to be a slave-holding republic in which there was relatively little input from the bottom reaches of society. Obviously women and slaves couldn't vote (so about 70% of the population was disenfranchised), and in states like SC ordinary men could vote only for the General Assembly, which voted for every other state-wide or national office. This was a way for the slaveholding elite to drive policy and decision-making even if much of the rest of society wasn't as willing to support secession and war in the name of saving the right to own slaves. However, I don't know if that makes the Confederacy fully anti-democratic; it seemed imperfectly democratic in the way that the US republic was also imperfectly democratic (would be interesting to hear from a CW specialist on this).

This book does a good job highlighting the weaknesses and false assumptions of the Confederate project, but it is kind of loaded down in academic terminology and often is a bit dry. I think it could have used more time on how the elites viewed their nation as a whole (Matt Karp's book does a better job with this). So this is a good book if you are studying the Civil War at a graduate level but not if you are just a casual reader of Civil War history.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

McCurry describes the Confederacy as something unique: a modern, anti-democratic, pro-slavery, state. The seeds of the destruction of the Confederacy were present in its making. A state founded on the belief in and perpetuation of inequality, that did not consider slaves or women to be citizens, was forced to engage with both as political actors during the course of the war, ultimately eroding their foundational principles.

[Stacy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. I was nervous. A book about Confederate politics? It’s bottom-up approach made a non desirable topic not only digestible but enjoyable. She tells about white women of all classes and slave men and how they dictated a lot of southern policy, especially towards the end of the War. The Confederacy was full of so many ironies that it is almost amazing it lasted even as long as it did. I appreciate her labeling it the ‘Confederate experiment’ because that is exactly what it was. A failed experiment. Only pompous men (slave owners at the whim of the uneducated) would think this would work. A small amount of people overreaching and speaking for too many others. I’m glad to have read it.

[Samuel · Rating 2 out of 5]

In Stephanie McCurry's eyes, the Confederate States of America was explicitly and fundamentally a nation founded upon a pro-slavery agenda (no indirect language or way around it: consequently no complexity about it either apparently). Slavery not only enslaved Africans but it also oppressed women of both races as paternalism placed white men at the top of the societal (and political) hierarchy. Slavery, by alienating the majority of the South's population, led to its own demise, as subversive acts by slaves and women during the Civil War, which caused the whole system and the rebelling nation along with it to defeat. While she does bring up some very interesting points about women in rebellion for bread and slaves who headed across enemy lines into free territory (the latter pretty well-understood and documented by other historians), her overall grouping of these two groups is a little contrived. While she does not explicitly state that they were one in purpose, lumping black slaves and white women together as subversive agents detrimental to the Confederate cause somewhat sloppily suggests a unity of purpose and tactics when they were both very distinct undertakings with diverse motives: Confederate women had no desire for their men to lose the war whereas the vast majority of slaves were welcoming of a Union victory.

There is a lot of interesting and important historical arguments throughout McCurry's book that are a huge boon to Civil War scholarship, but the overall framing of the argument as a "reckoning" seems a little more sentimental than substantiative. Clever and seductive in its claims, it falls a little short of fully convincing the reader that this is the definitive interpretation of why the Confederacy lost the War to the Union.

pp. 85-309

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite the Confederate States of America’s (CSA) efforts to enshrine an exclusively white, male citizenship in its founding documents, southern women and slaves emerged as powerful political actors during the course of the Civil War. Stephanie McCurry’s well-researched, easily readable Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, traces this development and argues that military necessity often augmented the growing political power of slaves and women. As “soldiers’ wives,” poor women embraced an identity that bound their “politics of subsistence” to the state’s obligation to its citizen-soldiers. Slaves, who formed their own understanding of the war long before emancipation, employed a variety of tactics to negate the instrumental view of slave labor enshrined in the CSA Constitution. Even though soldiers’ wives and slaves did not consider themselves allies, the persistence with which both groups entered the political sphere raised similar sets of complex questions about citizenship, consent of the governed, and the reciprocal obligations between a state and its citizenry. The CSA’s response to soldiers’ wives and slaves eventually undid the very logic of the state itself. It was precisely the official recognition of women and slaves as political actors, coupled with the implicit acknowledgement of the Confederate political system’s failure, that constitutes the “reckoning” at the heart of McCurry’s text.

McCurry's book will appeal to Civil War buffs and folks interested in women's or African American history.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, a strong piece of history. The author makes a compelling argument about the effect of the internal dilemma of the confederacy- that the demands of war forced it to make concessions to women & slaves, the two groups that were purposely excluded in its founding. Her use of international conflict works well for slave rebellions, but less so for the argument about women. A definite read for a full understanding of the civil war (and not just the military aspects)

[Bfisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some very interesting comments here on the empowerment of slaves and white women (especially soldiers' wives) during the war.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great piece of scholarship on the Confederacy, and how it was a doomed project from the start.

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A long time ago I was in a conversation about the American Civil War (this was in Virginia; it happens), when one of my friends acidly observed that, at the end of the day, the planter class that provoked secession, and the catastrophe that ensued, mostly did so in a bid preserve their own convenience. This book covers what those people disregarded by the southern agrarian elite, thought of the convenience of the planter class.

However, before McCurry even gets to the actions of the "soldiers' wives" demanding subsistence, and the slaves seeking freedom, she deals with the whole mechanics of secession, which entailed the planters pushing their effective power to the hilt, and using a lot of intimidation, to take their states out of the Union. This being over the protests of significant minorities of pro-union opinion. This was just one long term element of weakness for the new state, but this was overlooked, considering that the Southern elites seem to have always considered adherence to the United States, and its constitution, a matter of, well, convenience.

From there, McCurry devotes two long chapters to the behavior of non-elite women in the Confederacy, the women who wound up staging food riots through-out the South in 1863. While I had been aware of these riots, I was not aware of the details, that they were preceded by a long political pressure campaign by women to make Confederate governments live up to their obligations to support the wives of the soldiers, followed by armed insurrection to take food by force when all else failed. The Confederate politicians did not think of these women as being anything other than part of the households of their husbands, and these women didn't think of themselves as citizens, but they certainly acted like an estate, and left the authorities slack-jawed and scrambling for solutions. Just one of many surprises the reality of total war presented men who thought they could just waltz out of their own political obligations.

This then brings us to the last third of this book, wherein McCurry deals with the practical aspects of what slavery meant to the Confederacy, and while the Confederate leadership convinced themselves that slavery would be a force-multiplier for them in the case of an unlikely war, the slave owners and the slaves had their own agendas. The bottom line is that the average slave holder saw themselves as a sovereign citizen, for whom adhesion to government requirements was optional, and if complying with Confederate requisitions for labor risked the loss of their "property," they were opting out. Even if it meant, ironically, the failure of the Confederate project.

As for the slaves wanting to be free, well, Thomas Jefferson hit the nail on the head when he observed that, in time of war, a population of slaves would always be a security weakness, and such was the case for the Confederacy. McCurry spends a lot of time discussing how war broke all the plantation colonies of the Western Hemisphere, as states waging war needed to maximize every resource, including men of military age. McCurry works very had to give the reader some sense of how the slaves helped themselves in the course of getting their freedom, opening up a second front in the American Civil War that further drained Confederate military resources.

A particular value of this book is that McCurry goes to some lengths to rise above the cliches of American Exceptionalism, and this book is part of the now long-running trend to adopting an "Atlanticist" perspective. Besides comparing the Confederate experience with slavery with the collapse of the institution in the other societies of North and South America, she tends to place the revolt of the "soldiers' wives" into European tradition of social revolution, when authoritarian states demanded too much of their people, and political authority buckled under the pressure.

I wound up wishing that I had read this book years earlier, and had been on the verge of striking it from by own version of Mount TBR. Due to it being a relatively old study at this point, there are new considerations, that McCurry couldn't have thought of. Yes, she doesn't gloss over post-1865 racial violence in the United States, just concluding that organized slavery was broken as a social order. That there are state and local governments in the former states of the Confederacy who are mounting a new campaign to white-wash the experience of the Civil War demonstrates that the past of that war is not really past.

[Safoora Seyedi · Rating 4 out of 5]

She's got a pretty good sense of humor. I think the title itself, is a bit of an ironic joke. If you read that title, "Power and Politics in the Civil War South," what do you expect? Oh, you know, congressional debates, elections, cabinet meetings. Power and politics. There's a million books with that kind of subtitle. Boring. That's not what she's writing about. She's saying what women are doing on the grassroots level is also politics. Right? We've got to expand our definition of politics from just the electoral sphere.
It's also about power. Power within the society. Who's going to exercise it and how?
So she challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass all sorts of different kind of events in what we call the public sphere.
The struggle for Southern independence opens the door for the political mobilization of groups that had had little influence in the pre-war South. One, we saw before, was slaves. It opens the door for slaves, as we've seen, to run away, to join the Union army, to become a political factor
in the South. Secondly, women who had, you know, the notion of the law of coverture which is enforced in the North and the South, the common law of coverture, says a woman is an appendage of her husband. She has no legal identity (a married woman) other than that
of her husband. She can't sign a contract. She can't own property. She can't vote, obviously. She's not an individual actor, so to speak, on the political stage. But she becomes that, forgetting about the law. They forge, and what McCurry shows, is poorer women forge a political identity.
It's not the same as the upper-class women. Upper-class women address the Confederate government as upper-class people. They are part of the elite. They demand recognition as part of the elite. The identity that these poorer women construct for themselves, she says, is as the wives of soldiers. They're not exactly claiming autonomy for themselves. They are soldiers' wives, but the government has an obligation to them as soldiers' wives. The government cannot let them starve. The government cannot let them fail to feed their families. And on a small farm, when the man is taken away in the draft, or volunteers, it's very hard for a woman and maybe some children to actually manage the farm and to harvest the crops and to feed the family over the next couple of years.
The economic situation deteriorates as the war goes on. These poorer women flood the Confederate government, Confederate Congress, state authorities, with demands for assistance. Demands. Not charity, but a right. They have a right to support from the government, because they are soldiers' wives. And sometimes they take to the streets. And eventually, some of them actually go along with their husbands. Now McCurry, and I guess Faust, are not saying: this is the cause of Confederate defeat, the disaffection of more and more women. But it certainly is a problem, and politicians understand it is a problem. And they have to address these demands of soldiers' wives. And they start, Congress begins, as the war goes on, exempting poor families from taxation. They begin what she calls, maybe in a slight exaggeration, an inchoate welfare system. The South (here's an irony) the South, the Confederacy, is the first government in the United States to create a welfare system. That is, actual direct aid to poor people by the government because they're poor. So these women are not anti-Confederate, exactly. They resent the way the war is being conducted. But the disaffection of women on the homefront reverberates in to the army. And if men in the army know their families are discontent or not able to eat, that makes morale in the army begin to deteriorate.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book encompasses an often overlooked aspect of the Civil War; the part played in the conflict by women and slaves. Along the way, the author gives plenty of historical background about the struggles both of these groups faced. I found the book to be very interesting and the narrative was good and very brisk. Also, and this needs to be emphasized more in historiographic writing: there were NO typos in the text. This always makes for a better read!!

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book focusing on Confederacy's internal conflicts based in class, democracy, gender, and slavery taking seriously the CSA as an ideologically rooted political project which had to engage in the real work of statebuilding. Deeply researched, theoretically engaging, and still accessible. Must read for anyone interested in the Civil War.

[Alexander J · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the better critical histories I’ve been through. There is a lot of merit to examining the impacts of subaltern politics and how it impacted the Confederate fortune, as the confederacy was a national project meant to permanently subordinate these subaltern groups. It is particularly interesting in its analysis of how slavery created a two pronged weakness in the CSA, as both the masters and the slaves induced considerable weaknesses in the body politic.

[Lauren Seyfferth · Rating 3 out of 5]

look my girl Stephanie can write and write well but I am over learning about the confederacy

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

I quickly skimmed Confederate Reckoning in grad school, but promised myself that I would pick it up again and give it a more thorough read. I'm glad that I did. Stephanie McCurry is an exceptional writer, skilled in narrative structure and argumentative clarity. Her prose and pacing are beautiful.

There's a lot to unpack here, but what really stood out to me were the ideological dimensions of the C.S.A.'s project. McCurry has a gift for finding paradox and irony within history. Sure, she explores how "[w]ar transformed precisely the social and political relations it [i.e., the C.S.A.] was designed to preserve", but her observations go way beyond that. Not only did the C.S.A.'s commitment to the creation of an anti-democratic, pro-slavery nation situate it fundamentally at odds with its women and slave demographics, but McCurry also explores precisely how the C.S.A.'s ideological and foundational principles delimited their ontological assumptions - that is, how the C.S.A. perceived their world, their subjects, their property, and the very notion of possibility. For instance, their particular brand of White supremacy maintained certain assumptions about slaves and their supposedly innate abilities. Consequently, they were not prepared to handle the extent to which slaves could wield political power and function as agents of historical change. The internal contradictions at the heart of the C.S.A. worldview set their nation-building project up for failure.

McCurry extends this ideological shortsightedness and naivety to the question of gender as well, and the ability for White Southern planter women and soldiers' wives to use their unique positions as political leverage. I think McCurry could have paid more attention to the role of female slaves, but I'm quite pleased with her book overall.

Confederate Reckoning offers a really interesting take on the doomed Confederate project. Beyond that, it offers a cautionary warning which transcends the Civil War context itself. McCurry shows us exactly how the hateful, divisive and oppositional beliefs we hold about the world ultimately determine our activities within it, and - in this case - our undoings as well.

[Andee Nero · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of this is misleading, but in a good way. I thought this would be another Civil War political history. It is a political history, but it is more specifically a history of how ordinary Confederates engaged in politics, with an emphasis on women and slaves. I especially liked this because, while it made clear that the CSA was an evil state, it also took time to remove that bias and try to understand why so many considered seceding to create a proslavery, antidemocratic nation a good idea, moving beyond the simple, though true, statement that these people were just a bunch of racists. Yes, obviously, they, like most 19th century white people, were racist, but there is more at play than white supremacy and McCurry does a great job of making the people of the CSA into a realistic group of people rather than an abstract entity.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read it for a rousing feminist defense of "Beast" Butler's infamous Gen. Order 28, if you're into that sort of thing.

McCurry's argument that the rise of poor white women in the Confederacy against the oppressive policies of their governments was singular is a profoundly ahistorical reading of her chosen texts. Any reader of the trashy Outlander series can explain how the highland immigrant society valued deep kinship networks and looked to battle lords for economic support of the families of fighters. It's bizarre to argue that some kind of unprecedented political epiphany happened there.

[Aloysius · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book on how the Confederate States of America, from its outset, had to contend from threats from within its borders as well as from without. From the discontent caused by the fractious and bare-knuckle procedures for secession of the 11 states to the demands of poor white women widowed by the war's demands and the unrest from slaves seeking freedom, McCurry details the stresses of war and internal contradictions that ultimately doomed the experiment that was the reactionary proslavery Southern republic.

[Lisa Barrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

An engrossing and insightful book, rich in well-researched detail. The confederacy was seriously weakened by the revolt of low-income women ("soldier's wives") who took up arms against merchants and planters in multiple cities throughout the south to feed their starving families. Perhaps even more important were the insurrections by enslaved people, starting as early as 1862, and their widespread spying for the Union Army and their enlistment in the Union Army.

[Jason S · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best works of social and political history that I have read recently. Clearly and vividly supported, the thesis is that class, gender, and race divisions within the Confederacy were its ultimate undoing. A powerful thesis that is well proven and is a must read for any study of the civil war.

[Pamela Wetherill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this book very much. Her perspective-an analysis of the effect of disfranchised populations in the CSA on the politics of the war-is unique, timely, and well-argued. Her examination of the effects of the apartheid government conceived by wealthy planters is sobering.

[AskHistorians]

Provides fresh interpretations of how the underpinning power structures of the South were subverted by the Confederate government, and the failure of the government to deal with the stresses the war caused to these power structures led to its own demise.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

McCurry's book is solid and exceptional history--a great narrative about the South during the Confederacy, and this one includes African Americans and women.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought provoking. I'm still trying to swallow the idea of a slave insurrection amidst a white civil war, as analogous to Haiti with different demographics.

[Ron Stafford · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great monograph on a forgotten or rather overlooked civil war history. The women role in the civil war has long been overlooked, as well the true nature of the confederacy. Great book!

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic history of the Confederacy that includes race and gender in its analysis.

[Nick Mariner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really. Really. Good.