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The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South Hardcover – January 8, 2013
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In 1860 the American South was a vast, wealthy, imposing region where a small minority had amassed great political power and enormous fortunes through a system of forced labor. The South’s large population of slaveless whites almost universally supported the basic interests of plantation owners, despite the huge wealth gap that separated them. By the end of 1865 these structures of wealth and power had been shattered. Millions of black people had gained their freedom, many poorer whites had ceased following their wealthy neighbors, and plantation owners were brought to their knees, losing not only their slaves but their political power, their worldview, their very way of life. This sea change was felt nationwide, as the balance of power in Congress, the judiciary, and the presidency shifted dramatically and lastingly toward the North, and the country embarked on a course toward equal rights.
Levinecaptures the many-sided human drama of this story using a huge trove of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, government documents, and more. In The Fall of the House of Dixie, the true stakes of the Civil War become clearer than ever before, as slaves battle for their freedom in the face of brutal reprisals; Abraham Lincoln and his party turn what began as a limited war for the Union into a crusade against slavery by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation; poor southern whites grow increasingly disillusioned with fighting what they have come to see as the plantation owners’ war; and the slave owners grow ever more desperate as their beloved social order is destroyed, not just by the Union Army, but also from within. When the smoke clears, not only Dixie but all of American society is changed forever.
Brilliantly argued and engrossing, The Fall of the House of Dixie is a sweeping account of the destruction of the old South during the Civil War, offering a fresh perspective on the most colossal struggle in our history and the new world it brought into being.
Praise for The Fall of the House of Dixie
“This is the Civil War as it is seldom seen. . . . A portrait of a country in transition . . . as vivid as any that has been written.”—The Boston Globe
“An absorbing social history . . . For readers whose Civil War bibliography runs to standard works by Bruce Catton and James McPherson, [Bruce] Levine’s book offers fresh insights.”—The Wall Street Journal
“More poignantly than any book before, The Fall of the House of Dixie shows how deeply intertwined the Confederacy was with slavery, and how the destruction of both made possible a ‘second American revolution’ as far-reaching as the first.”—David W. Blight, author of American Oracle
“Splendidly colorful . . . Levine recounts this tale of Southern institutional rot with the ease and authority born of decades of study.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A deep, rich, and complex analysis of the period surrounding and including the American Civil War.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
- Print length464 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateJanuary 8, 2013
- Dimensions6.34 x 1.36 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-101400067030
- ISBN-13978-1400067039
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Review
“An absorbing social history . . . For readers whose Civil War bibliography runs to standard works by Bruce Catton and James McPherson . . . [Bruce] Levine’s book offers fresh insights.”—The Wall Street Journal
“More poignantly than any book before, The Fall of the House of Dixie shows how deeply intertwined the Confederacy was with slavery, and how the destruction of both made possible a ‘second American revolution’ as far-reaching as the first.”—David W. Blight, author of American Oracle
“Splendidly colorful . . . Levine recounts this tale of Southern institutional rot with the ease and authority born of decades of study.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A deep, rich, and complex analysis of the period surrounding and including the American Civil War.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This book limns the relationship between slavery and the rise and fall of the Confederacy more clearly and starkly than any other study. General readers and seasoned scholars alike will find new information and insights in this eye-opening account.”—James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry Freedom
“With his characteristic judiciousness and crystalline prose, Bruce Levine demonstrates the toll that disaffection and dissent took on the Confederate cause and brings into sharp focus what the Union victory, enduringly, achieved. He has, in short, written another modern classic.”—Elizabeth R. Varon, author of Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859
“A gripping, lucid grassroots history of the Civil War that declines the strict use of great battles and Big Men as its fulcrum, opting instead for the people. In the tradition of James McPherson, Bruce Levine has produced a book that is a work of both history and literature.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of The Beautiful Struggle
“Levine illuminates the experiences of southern men and women—white and black, free and enslaved, civilians and soldiers—with a sure grasp of the historical sources and a deft literary touch. He masterfully recaptures an era of unsurpassed drama and importance.”—Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Confederate War
“A compelling, valuable and eye-opening work [that] will inform and entertain the most discerning student of ‘the second American revolution.’”—The San Antonio Express-News
“Masterful . . . Levine’s employment of testimonies by slaveholders, slaves, and pro-Union Southerners is effective and often poignant.”—Booklist
“Levine’s engrossing story chronicles the collapse of a doomed republic—the Confederate States of America—built on the unstable sands of delusion, cruelty, and folly.”—Adam Goodheart, author of 1861: The Civil War Awakening
“Bruce Levine vividly traces the origins of the ‘slaveholders’ rebellion’ and its dramatic wartime collapse. With this book, he confirms his standing among the leading Civil War historians of our time.”—James Oakes, author of Freedom National
“Eloquent and illuminating . . . Shifting away from traditional accounts that emphasize generals and campaigns, Levine instead offers a brilliant and provocative analysis of the way in which slaves and non-elite whites transformed the conflict into a second American Revolution.”—Douglas R. Egerton, author of Year of Meteors
“The idea that Southern secession was unconnected to the defense of slavery has a surprising hold on the popular historical imagination, North and South. Levine’s demolition of such a misapprehension profoundly succeeds as both argument and drama.”—David Roediger, coauthor of The Production of Difference
“Thorough, convincing, and, in a word, brilliant. Our understanding of this central event in American history will never be the same.”—Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship
“The Fall of the House of Dixie will delight and disturb—and provide much needed clarity as Americans take a fresh look at the meaning of the Civil War.”—Ronald C. White, Jr., author of A. Lincoln
“The story of a war waged off the battlefield, a war of politics and ideology that transformed both Southern and Northern culture unfolds brilliantly in the able hands of this fine historian.”—Carol Berkin, author of Revolutionary Mothers
“Levine offers a fresh perspective on this oft-told story by relying heavily on personal letters, journals and diaries. . . . Brushing aside the notion that slavery was merely one of many issues over which the war was fought, Levine . . . shows that it was at the center of everything—the economy, culture, social relationships and worldview.”—BookPage
“Levine’s well-documented study . . . provides a concise and well-written overview of the conflict and a cogent discussion of . . . still-polarizing issues.”—The Dallas Morning News
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Introduction
In the middle of the nineteenth century, southern writers and politicians boasted often--and with considerable justification--that their states were the richest, most socially stable, and most politically powerful in the United States as a whole. Southern farms and plantations yielded handsome profits to their owners, who were some of the wealthiest people in the country, and the southern elite had also controlled all three branches of the federal government during most of its existence. At the root of this all this economic and political power lay the institution of slavery--an institution which, as the former slave Frederick Douglass would later recall, then “seemed impregnable.” Few could then have imagined, he noted, “that in less than ten years from that time, no master would wield a lash and no slave would clank a chain in the United States.”
But what almost no one foresaw in 1860 is exactly what came to pass. In Mark Twain’s words, the Civil War and its aftermath “uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country.” The most important and dramatic of these transformations was the radical destruction of slavery. One out of every three people in the South suddenly emerged from bondage into freedom, a change of such enormous significance and full of so many implications as almost to defy description.
For the South’s ruling families, meanwhile, the war turned the world upside down. It stripped them of their privileged status and their most valuable property. It deprived them of the totalitarian power they had previously wielded over the men, women, and children who produced most of the South’s great wealth. “The events of the last five years,” a Memphis newspaper editor summarized in 1865, “have produced an entire revolution in the entire Southern country. The old arrangement of things is broken up.” The ex-Confederate general Richard Taylor lodged the same complaint that year. “Society has been completely changed by the war,” he wrote. Even the stormy French revolution of the previous century “did not produce a greater change in the ‘Ancien Regime’ than has this in our social life.” Abraham Lincoln applauded this “total revolution of labor” as “a new birth of freedom.” Black South Carolinians cheered this “mighty revolution which must affect the future destiny of the world.”
Even as it upended society in the South, the Civil War era transformed the shape of national politics in the United States as a whole. Beginning with Lincoln’s election in 1860, it finally broke the southern elite’s once-iron grip on the federal government and drove its leaders into the political wilderness. Into the offices that planters and their friends had previously occupied there now stepped northerners with very different values, priorities, and outlooks. These new men used their political might to encourage the growth and development of manufacturing, transportation, finance, and commerce and thereby speed the country’s transformation into the economic colossus familiar to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under the hands of these same men, meanwhile, the post-Civil War federal government assumed key roles previously assigned to the states, including the power and the responsibility to safeguard the freedom and rights of the nation’s citizens--citizens whose ranks now expanded to include millions of former slaves. Constitutional amendments adopted in the war’s aftermath laid the legal basis for and pointed the way towards transforming the United States into a multi-racial republic.
Relatively few people today are aware of just how all this happened. Although “the military movements connected with the Civil War are well known,” a witness to those events commented decades afterward, “the great mass of American people know but little, and so think less” about the destruction of slavery and all that it entailed. That observation holds true after the passage of another century and more.
The Fall of the House of Dixie was written to help fill that gaping hole in our collective memory. It traces the origins and development of America’s “second revolution,” explaining why it occurred and how it unfolded--especially how this great and terrible war undermined the economic, social, and political foundations of the old South, destroying human bondage and the storied world of the slaveholding elite. In recent years many scholarly books and articles have analyzed the Civil War’s momentous consequences. But bookstore shelves allotted to the Civil War are to this day filled principally with detailed accounts of armies, officers, and the battles they fought, great and small. Nearly every major study of the Civil War as a whole--especially those aimed at a wide audience--continues to take the military story as its organizing principle and narrative spine.
The Fall of the House of Dixie by no means ignores that subject. The slave-based society of the American South required powerful external blows to break it along its lines of internal stress. Union armies delivered those blows—blows that therefore make up a crucial part of the story told in this book. But the chapters that follow focus especially upon the transformation of that war from a conventional military conflict into a revolutionary struggle. And they emphasize the ways in which very different groups of people—slave owners, slaves, the great mass of slaveless southern whites, and soldiers both Union and Confederate, black as well as white—experienced and helped to bring about what one newspaper at the time called "the greatest social and political revolution of the age."
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; 1st Printing edition (January 8, 2013)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1400067030
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400067039
- Item Weight : 1.75 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.34 x 1.36 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #761,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #517 in U.S. Civil War Confederacy History
- #5,778 in Historical Study (Books)
- #12,469 in U.S. State & Local History
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Notwithstanding the complaints of the one star reviewers, this book is not a hatchet job on the South or southerners. Prof. Levine not only writes with great skill, he writes with a just-the-facts detachment of a journalist...and he backs it all up with 100 pages of notes at the end. Even the great Abraham Lincoln does not come away unscathed. His vacillation and tendency to lead from behind on the issues of emancipation and equal rights for the slaves and freed blacks is revealed with painful honesty, and with no "Great Emancipator" sentimentality whatsoever.
I took several things away from this incredible book. One was the sobering realization that the Civil War was probably inevitable, despite the recent revisionist insistence that it could have been avoided. Both sides-North and South, fatally underestimated the will and determination of the other. Both sides paid dearly in terms of lives lost.
And in the case of the South, their downfall meant the devastation of burnt destroyed cities, the humiliation of military defeat, and most shocking of all for them, the loss of a cherished and deeply embedded social order that had been unthinkable just ten years earlier.
GREAT read.
It's not news that there was some degree of class struggle between poor southern whites and rich planters. The civil war was, it was said, "A rich man's war and a poor man's fight". Even in the north the policy allowing people to buy substitutes allowed the wealthy to avoid battle. Levine, however, goes beyond this to show that much of the southern planter class was clearly obstructionist and damaged the southern war effort. In a war to protect slavery, for example, many wealthy southern slaveholders refused to supply requisitioned slaves to help in support roles and claimed exemptions to keep their white overseers on the job.
I think that today it would be hard to imagine that someone would prefer slavery over freedom, but Levine provides plenty of evidence showing that many slaveholders honestly believed that their slaves were 100% loyal and preferred to live a life in bondage. He supplies quote after quote, taken from contemporaneous southern diaries, including that of the famous Mary Chestnut, in which slaveholders talked about how much they believed their slaves loved them. Levine follows this with even more evidentiary quotes by southern masters expressing shock and outrage when their slaves bolted for freedom at the first opportunity. The lesson here is, I guess, to be careful about believing your own propaganda.
Even though the Union Army praised the invaluable military intelligence and other assistance that self-freed slaves brought with them, I knew there were many instances where freed slaves were mistreated by Union soldiers. I was surprised, however, by the callous manner they were treated by General Sherman. Levine describes a shocking incident from December 1864, after the fall of Atlanta. Many newly freed slaves were following Sherman's army when they came to a creek near Savannah. The soldiers crossed using portable pontoon bridges. Once the soldiers had crossed, Sherman ordered the bridges be pulled up. This left refugee families trapped between icy, raging waters in front of them and vengeful Confederate soldiers closing in behind them. Hundreds were killed by rebel soldiers or by drowning as they tried to cross on their own. As Levine writes, "To put it mildly, Sherman's army sent out mixed signals to their black would-be friends and companions. But still they came."
The book explores the idea that, by the end of the war, many slave owners were reconciled to rejoining the union, and even to the abolition of legal slavery, but held great hope that the north would allow them to create social conditions that would keep their former slaves in a form of serfdom, of economic bondage -- the effect of slavery without actual slaves. The south was successful. For a detailed examination of how the south accomplished this goal see Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II .
Levine's book is an examination of the unraveling of the southern social fabric, which he compares to Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher". The book is interesting and informative, but I'm only giving it 4 stars because the first two-thirds of the book broke little new ground.
Top reviews from other countries
This book offers a unique perspective on the developments prior to, during and after the civil war, as these developments affected the lives of the men and women held in the bondage of slavery that has become American's greatest historical shame. It also looks at the viewpoint of those defending the "peculiar institution", as well as the less affluent white southerners who did not own slaves, but who bore the brunt of the conflict as soldiers and as families left home. It offers remarkable insight into this strange mindset, both at the beginning of the war, and as the war progressed and as many of the myths southerners believed about a quick and glorious war failed to materialize.
Levine explores the reality of slavery that ran contrary to the idyllic image presented by many southerners of the time who sought to defend this heinous practice. He describes the cruel and inhumane discipline, the separation of families, and the other abuses perpetrated by "southern gentlemen" on human beings that they viewed as being of a lesser race. Without editorializing, he exposes the hypocrisy and the insensitive ramblings of diarists such as Mary Chestnut and Katherine Stone, who somehow viewed themselves as benevolent and as the victims when their self-centered and immoral way of life came to an end, letting the writings speak for themselves. He also explores the vantage of the middle and lower class of white soldiers who detested the wealthy southern ruling class, but whose feelings of white supremacy and pride as southerners impelled them to hate the Yankees even more.
This book follows the course of the war, explaining how many political and military strategic moves were driven by considerations of slavery, in some cases by not wanting to upset those border states where slavery still existed, and other cases, by causing internal division between the Confederate government of Jefferson Davis which prosecuted the war, and the provincial and selfish considerations of southern governors who refused to fully support the war, preferring instead to keep resources at home, rather than contribute to the common cause. An especially interesting discussion is that about the decision of both north and south over whether or not to allow African-Americans to aid in the war effort, in support roles as well as in carrying muskets. There is also an interesting exploration of the problem of desertion in the south by poor white soldiers who felt that they did not have sufficient stake in the goals of the war (i.e. protecting the interests of slaveholders) to leave their families to fend for themselves. The book also describes the actions of slaves as the war began to go badly for the south, what their options were, and how those left in the south tried to prevent the loss of the slave population.
This book has many strengths, not the least of which is in how it provides a fresh perspective on the Civil War. Many books have been written about the war, with most focusing on military strategy, especially by Abraham Lincoln and his generals. Bruce Levine tells the reader much that he or she did not know before, even for those who have read extensively on this era. Fascinating insight coupled with outstanding research leaves the reader with a fresh perspective on a war which Abraham Lincoln famously said "all knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war."







