Confederate Reckoning
Power and Politics in the Civil War South
Published on 7. May 2012
Book
Paperback/Softback
456 pages
978-0-674-06421-8 (ISBN)
Description
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize
Winner of the Merle Curti Award
"McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read."
-Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic
"McCurry challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass not simply government but the entire public sphere. The struggle for Southern independence, she shows, opened the door for the mobilization of two groups previously outside the political nation-white women of the nonslaveholding class and slaves...Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front."
-Eric Foner, The Nation
"Perhaps the highest praise one can offer McCurry's work is to say that once we look through her eyes, it will become almost impossible to believe that we ever saw or thought otherwise...At the outset of the book, McCurry insists that she is not going to ask or answer the timeworn question of why the South lost the Civil War. Yet in her vivid and richly textured portrait of what she calls the Confederacy's 'undoing,' she has in fact accomplished exactly that."
-Drew Gilpin Faust, New Republic
"A brilliant, eye-opening account of how Southern white women and black slaves fatally undermined the Confederacy from within."
-Edward Bonekemper, Civil War News
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.
Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize
Winner of the Merle Curti Award
"McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read."
-Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic
"McCurry challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass not simply government but the entire public sphere. The struggle for Southern independence, she shows, opened the door for the mobilization of two groups previously outside the political nation-white women of the nonslaveholding class and slaves...Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front."
-Eric Foner, The Nation
"Perhaps the highest praise one can offer McCurry's work is to say that once we look through her eyes, it will become almost impossible to believe that we ever saw or thought otherwise...At the outset of the book, McCurry insists that she is not going to ask or answer the timeworn question of why the South lost the Civil War. Yet in her vivid and richly textured portrait of what she calls the Confederacy's 'undoing,' she has in fact accomplished exactly that."
-Drew Gilpin Faust, New Republic
"A brilliant, eye-opening account of how Southern white women and black slaves fatally undermined the Confederacy from within."
-Edward Bonekemper, Civil War News
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.
Reviews / Votes
McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read. -- Tony Horwitz, author of <i>Confederates in the Attic</i> McCurry challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass not simply government but the entire public sphere. The struggle for Southern independence, she shows, opened the door for the mobilization of two groups previously outside the political nation-white women of the nonslaveholding class and slaves... Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front. -- Eric Foner * The Nation * Perhaps the highest praise one can offer McCurry's work is to say that once we look through her eyes, it will become almost impossible to believe that we ever saw or thought otherwise... Confederate Reckoning is a book about politics that stretches far beyond the ballot and the statehouse, all the way into plantations and farms and families and communities across the South... At the outset of the book, McCurry insists that she is not going to ask or answer the timeworn question of why the South lost the Civil War. Yet in her vivid and richly textured portrait of what she calls the Confederacy's 'undoing,' she has in fact accomplished exactly that. -- Drew Gilpin Faust * New Republic * Good history teaches readers about the past, excellent history offers perspective on the present. By this standard, Stephanie McCurry's Confederate Reckoning surely achieves excellence... McCurry offers a carefully researched and well-grounded frontal assault, examining secession's causes and actualities. She quickly disposes of the claims that the war was really about anything other than slavery, demonstrating that fanciful patinas such as 'states rights' merely meant linguistic obfuscation of that brutal reality... As modern citizens decry government actions and hearken back to an ideal that never was, so too did the South assert a wish to return to a fictional revolutionary era utopia... McCurry shines a light on the South's brutal reality and thus encourages us to cast a cold analytical eye on our own. -- Jordan Magill * San Francisco Book Review * A staggeringly smart analysis of the politics of the Confederacy-indeed, she has written one of the most illuminating and creative studies of 19th-century American political life, period... I have been waiting for McCurry's second book to be published since I read Masters of Small Worlds over a decade ago; it is a triumph of political history, and it was well worth the wait. -- Lauren Winner * Books & Culture * Forceful and elegantly written...this book [is] a landmark piece of Civil War historiography. * History News Network * Combining the best of the tradition of writing history 'from the bottom up,' with prodigious research, and a red thread of analytical brilliance, Confederate Reckoning dramatically reshapes our understanding of the history of slavery and the Civil War. -- Walter Johnson, author of <i>Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market</i> This is a major book [that] permanently rewrites the history of the Confederacy. -- James L. Roark, author of <i>Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction</i> Analyzing the experience of women, African Americans, and others often placed at the margins of Confederate history, McCurry powerfully challenges readers to get beyond high politics and storied military campaigns to engage a profoundly complicated, and often surprising, story of struggle and change amid seismic events. -- Gary W. Gallagher, author of <i>The Confederate War</i>More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass
United States
Dimensions
Height: 233 mm
Width: 154 mm
Thickness: 35 mm
Weight
515 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-674-06421-8 (9780674064218)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
08/2010
1st Edition
Harvard University Press
€28.19
Available for download
Person
Stephanie McCurry is the author of Confederate Reckoning, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Merle Curti Prize, the Avery O. Craven Award, and the Willie Lee Rose Prize; and Masters of Small Worlds, winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize and four other awards. She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. McCurry is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower at Columbia University. She grew up in Belfast, Ireland, during the Troubles.
Content
* Prologue: The Confederate Project * Who Are the People? * The Brothers' War * Antigone's Claim * Soldiers' Wives and the Politics of Subsistence * Women Numerous and Armed *"Amor Patriae" *"Our Open Enemies" * The Fall * Epilogue: Confederate Reckoning * Notes * Acknowledgments * Index