confederate reckoning by stephanie mccurry

Their points of orientation drew from their political exclusion by a nation that had insatiable wartime demands. Both issues, as McCurry correctly argues, were not connected to the ways that poor people and slaves perceived their daily struggles. She does not frame these life-and-death political battles around questions of Confederate nationalism or why the South lost. While most scholars have focused on the ironies of a Confederate nation that pursued centralized federal authority and debated limited emancipation, McCurry gets us into the pit of political contestation where politicians, generals, slaves, poor women, yeomen, Confederate soldiers, and Union armies repeatedly slammed into each other over the control of both natural and human resources. The relentless style of argumentation that follows buries the theory in the dustbin of interpretations about southern defeat. Within the first few pages of her book, she scores a knockout blow against the trendy notion that the Confederacy died of an identity crisis. 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.The latest academic fashions hold no appeal to Stephanie McCurry, and thankfully so, as her Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South is a brilliant exploration into the bare-knuckled political battles between the disenfranchised and those deemed citizens by the state. The government was forced to become accountable to women and slaves, provoking an astounding transformation of the slaveholders' state. The attempt to repress a majority of its own population backfired on the Confederate State of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle. Women and slaves became crucial political actors as they contested government enlistment and tax and welfare policies, and struggled for their freedom. 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.

When the grandiosity of Southerners' national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued.

Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. Summary: '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.

Confederate reckoning by stephanie mccurry