Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South

In this book, 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. 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 C.S.A. as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. 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.