Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South [Hardcover]

Stephanie McCurry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0674045890 | ISBN-13: 978-0674045897 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

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 Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

This is a major book [that] permanently rewrites the history of the Confederacy.
--James L. Roark, author of Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction

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 The Confederate War

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: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

[McCurry] has written 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 20100428)

Forceful and elegantly written...this book [is] a landmark piece of Civil War historiography.
--Jim Cullen (History News Network 20100611)

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. This desire allowed them to not only ignore the long odds against their success, just as Tea Partiers fail to consider their program's (such as it is) absurd contradictions...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 20100622)

The sesquicentennial of the Civil War now looms on the horizon, promising its own deluge of books of every size, shape and description. We will be fortunate indeed if in sheer originality and insight they measure up to Confederate Reckoning...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 20100714)

Building upon her work over almost two decades, McCurry presents a new history of the South's experience during the war. It is an account that foregrounds social history as contrasted with military history, and in this respect it is of a piece with much of the pathbreaking new scholarship on the war. It moves political history from the study of elected politicians and government institutions to an exploration of power in all its dimensions...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: Power and Politics in the Civil War South 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...McCurry has helped to transform our understanding of the Confederacy--and of its impossibility...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. And in doing so McCurry has written also a paean to social justice and to democracy, commitments and aspirations we would be well-served to make the heart of our Sesquicentennial commemorations.
--Drew Gilpin Faust (New Republic 20101028)

About the Author

Stephanie McCurry is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 456 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1 edition (April 30, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674045890
• ISBN-13: 978-0674045897
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.5 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #663,649 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A "Love - Hate" relationship with this book August 15, 2011

By James Brooks

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I loved the book because I thought that it did an excellent job of exposing interesting facts, such as:
- The word "hubris" (excessive pride or arrogance) is the best one word definition of the planter class which ruled the South.

- The southern slaves were an "enemy within" the South. So in effect, the south was fighting a "two front" war.

- The slaves had "no country" until the North offered them freedom.

- The planter class in the South started the secession movement and war and then refused to support it by allowing their slaves to be impressed for labor.

- The incredible convoluted Southern thinking that slaves were:
- An asset when fighting a war when the history of recent wars by similar slave holding countries showed the opposite.
- That slaves were content and would support a war and society that imprisoned them and their astounding surprise when slaves did not choose to support their "jail keepers".

I hated the writing style of the author. I found that she often repeated herself and kept saying the same thing over and over, only in different ways. I felt that I had to dig out the information noted above rather than it being presented in an easy to digest format.

If the writing style had been better, I would have rated this book with five star.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Adds to our understanding, but flawed February 9, 2013

By Thomas W. Robinson

Format:Paperback

The Confederacy was formed as a slaveholding, white man's republic. The irony, McCurry argues, is that the people who were not supposed to play an active role in this new nation, namely women and slaves, ended up playing decisive roles in the Civil War South. Women, especially soldiers' wives, secured a place as active and legitimate participants in the political and social worlds of the South. Slaves not only did not actively support the Confederacy, but undermined it by running away, joining the Union war effort, and/or simply not working on the farms and plantations they lived on anymore. In this way, they became the Jacobins of the South.
The thrust of this book is that the actions of these women and slaves expanded the realm of politics to those who did not have a vote, but could still affect the policies and outcome of the war. McCurry shows, through both a synthesis of previous secondary work as well as primary sources, that the war brought women into close contact with their state and federal governments. Further, she argues, this changed the shape of American politics forever. Women, both North and South, were not active participants the way that they became during the Civil War. McCurry feels that southern women, though, were more assertive in demanding assistance from the Confederate and state governments. The women came to believe that the governments owed it to them to offer support while their husbands were off fighting. McCurry shows that women were often successful in this, through rioting more than writing.
This is a well-written, readable account that does have some good information. That being said, the main issue with the book is less the evidence or conclusions McCurry has reached and more the way it is presented. From the introduction forward, McCurry writes as if what she is presenting is groundbreaking, earth-shattering stuff. In fact, as her endnotes indicate, much of what she writes has been written before, although perhaps not in the same terms or using the same framework she does. However, the ideas McCurry espouses were written, at minimum, over thirty years ago by Emory Thomas in The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience. Thomas argued, as McCurry does, that the Confederacy was a white man's revolution that quickly dismantled as the war started and wore on. This is a somewhat petty criticism and has more to do with McCurry's hubris than anything wrong with the book. She should be commended for synthesizing the secondary research since Thomas wrote and thus expanding upon his original work.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book! May 20, 2013

By Darrell Criswell

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I think this is a fabulous book. I have always been interested in the causes of the civil war and this book presents an interesting, almost fascinating perspective, which I havent' seen in other books. I have also been reading James Oakes fabulous "Freedom National" and the two books complement each other extremely well. McCurry's book is not of the quality that Oakes book is but not much is.

I cannot understand the criticism of her writing. I find her writing to be very good...admittedly some of the sentences are too long and a few ill defined names but this is a very well written book.

Although we have all studied some version of much of this material before I find it hard to believe that almost anyone won't be astonished by the magnitude of the task the confederacy was attempting to take and its inherent stupidity or maybe a better description would be craziness of these people.

Good book!