Overview

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. Now, however, 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. 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. 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 Confederate States of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. That Confederate struggle played out in a highly charged international arena. The political project of the Confederacy was tried by its own people and failed. The government was forced to become accountable to women and slaves, provoking an astounding transformation of the slaveholders' state. 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.

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9798200385812

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Reviews

"""Forceful and elegantly written...this book [is] a landmark piece of Civil War historiography."" -- ""History News Network"" ""Moves political history from the study of elected politicians and government institutions to an exploration of power in all its dimensions...McCurry has helped to transform our understanding of the Confederacy--and of its impossibility."" -- ""New Republic"" ""Offers a carefully researched and well-grounded frontal assault, examining secession's causes and actualities."" -- ""San Francisco Book Review"" ""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 non-slaveholding class and slaves...Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front."" -- ""The Nation"""

Author Information

Stephanie McCurry is the author of Confederate Reckoning, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Merle Curti Prize, the Avery O. Craven Award, and the Willie Lee Rose Prize. Her book Masters of Small Worlds won the John Hope Franklin Prize and four other awards. She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower at Columbia University. She grew up in Belfast, Ireland, during the Troubles. Teri Schnaubelt is a Chicago-based stage, on-camera, and voice actor as well as oil painter and photographer. An Earphones Award-winning narrator, she has voiced over a hundred books for New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors, in addition to helping independent authors get their stories heard.

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