Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South
Combining the best of the tradition of writing history "from the bottom up,"with prodigious research, and a red thread of analytical brilliance,Confederate Reckoningdramatically reshapes our understanding of the history of slavery and the Civil War. (Walter Johnson, author ofSoul 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 ofMasters 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 ofThe 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 Reckoningis a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read. (Tony Horwitz, author ofConfederates 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 readMasters of Small Worldsover a decade ago; it is a triumph of political history, and it was well worth the wait. (Lauren WinnerBooks & Culture2010-04-28)Forceful and elegantly written...this book [is] a landmark piece of Civil War historiography. (Jim CullenHistory News Network2010-06-11)Good history teaches readers about the past, excellent history offers perspective on the present. By this standard, Stephanie McCurry'sConfederate Reckoningsurely 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 MagillSan Francisco Book Review2010-06-22)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 toConfederate 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 Reckoningoffers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front. (Eric FonerThe Nation2010-07-14)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 Southis 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 FaustNew Republic2010-10-28)