Rebels Against the Confederacy
Subtitle: North Carolina's Unionists
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9781107075245
Subjects: North carolina, history; United states, history, civil war, 1861-1865, public opinion
Description: In this groundbreaking study, Barton A. Myers analyzes the secret world of hundreds of white and black Southern Unionists as they struggled for survival in a new Confederate world, resisted the imposition of Confederate military and civil authority, began a diffuse underground movement to destroy the Confederacy, joined the United States Army as soldiers, and waged a series of violent guerrilla battles at the local level against other Southerners. Myers also details the work of Confederates as they struggled to build a new nation at the local level and maintain control over manpower, labor, agricultural, and financial resources, which Southern Unionists possessed. The story is not solely one of triumph over adversity but also one of persecution and, ultimately, erasure of these dissidents by the postwar South's Lost Cause mythologizers.