Author: John Majewski
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807882372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
What would separate Union and Confederate countries look like if the South had won the Civil War? In fact, this was something that southern secessionists actively debated. Imagining themselves as nation builders, they understood the importance of a plan for the economic structure of the Confederacy. The traditional view assumes that Confederate slave-based agrarianism went hand in hand with a natural hostility toward industry and commerce. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, John Majewski's analysis finds that secessionists strongly believed in industrial development and state-led modernization. They blamed the South's lack of development on Union policies of discriminatory taxes on southern commerce and unfair subsidies for northern industry. Majewski argues that Confederates' opposition to a strong central government was politically tied to their struggle against northern legislative dominance. Once the Confederacy was formed, those who had advocated states' rights in the national legislature in order to defend against northern political dominance quickly came to support centralized power and a strong executive for war making and nation building.
Author: Stephanie McCurry
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674064216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456
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Book Description
Pulitzer Prize Finalist Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner of the Merle Curti Award “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 Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read.” —Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic “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 Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front.” —Eric Foner, The Nation “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...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.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, New Republic “A brilliant, eye-opening account of how Southern white women and black slaves fatally undermined the Confederacy from within.” —Edward Bonekemper, Civil War News 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.
Author: Adrian Brettle
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813944384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
Leading politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants preached a transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy, persuading many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had but to gain their future empire. Impervious to reality, their vision of future world leadership—territorial, economic, political, and cultural—provided a vitally important, underappreciated motivation to form an independent Confederate republic. In Colossal Ambitions, Adrian Brettle explores how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their postwar nation—its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global order. Brettle draws on rich caches of published and unpublished letters and diaries, Confederate national and state government documents, newspapers published in North America and England, conference proceedings, pamphlets, contemporary and scholarly articles, and more to engage the perspectives of not only modern historians but some of the most salient theorists of the Western World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An impressive and complex undertaking, Colossal Ambitions concludes that while some Confederate commentators saw wartime industrialization as pointing toward a different economic future, most Confederates saw their society as revolving once more around coercive labor, staple crop production, and exports in the war’s wake.
Author: Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080788765X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
In the first comprehensive study of the experience of Virginia soldiers and their families in the Civil War, Aaron Sheehan-Dean captures the inner world of the rank-and-file. Utilizing new statistical evidence and first-person narratives, Sheehan-Dean explores how Virginia soldiers--even those who were nonslaveholders--adapted their vision of the war's purpose to remain committed Confederates. Sheehan-Dean challenges earlier arguments that middle- and lower-class southerners gradually withdrew their support for the Confederacy because their class interests were not being met. Instead he argues that Virginia soldiers continued to be motivated by the profound emotional connection between military service and the protection of home and family, even as the war dragged on. The experience of fighting, explains Sheehan-Dean, redefined southern manhood and family relations, established the basis for postwar race and class relations, and transformed the shape of Virginia itself. He concludes that Virginians' experience of the Civil War offers important lessons about the reasons we fight wars and the ways that those reasons can change over time.
Author: William C. Davis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439105855
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1092
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Book Description
For four crucial months in 1861, delegates from all over the South met in Montgomery, Alabama, to establish a new nation. Davis (Jefferson Davis: The Man and the Hour, LJ 11/15/91) tells their story in this new work, another example of Davis's fine storytelling skill and an indispensable guide to understanding the formation of the Confederate government. Among the issues Davis examines are revising the Constitution to meet Southern needs, banning the importation of slaves, and determining whether the convention could be considered a congress. Also revealed are the many participating personalities, their ambitions and egos, politicking and lobbying for the presidency of the new nation, and the nature of the city of Montgomery itself.
Author: Ann L. Tucker
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813944295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, American Library Association (2021) From the earliest stirrings of southern nationalism to the defeat of the Confederacy, analysis of European nationalist movements played a critical role in how southerners thought about their new southern nation. Southerners argued that because the Confederate nation was cast in the same mold as its European counterparts, it deserved independence. In Newest Born of Nations, Ann Tucker utilizes print sources such as newspapers and magazines to reveal how elite white southerners developed an international perspective on nationhood that helped them clarify their own national values, conceive of the South as distinct from the North, and ultimately define and legitimize the Confederacy. While popular at home, claims to equivalency with European nations failed to resonate with Europeans and northerners, who viewed slavery as incompatible with liberal nationalism. Forced to reevaluate their claims about the international place of southern nationalism, some southerners redoubled their attempts to place the Confederacy within the broader trends of nineteenth-century nationalism. More conservative southerners took a different tack, emphasizing the distinctiveness of their nationalism, claiming that the Confederacy actually purified nationalism through slavery. Southern Unionists likewise internationalized their case for national unity. By examining the evolution of and variation within these international perspectives, Tucker reveals the making of a southern nationhood to be a complex, contested process.
Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807116067
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 130
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Book Description
For decades, historians have debated the meaning and significance of Confederate nationalism and the role it played in the outcome of the Civil War. Yet they have paid little attention to the actual development and content of this Confederate ideology. In The Creation of Confederate Nationalism, Drew Gilpin Faust argues that coming to a fuller understanding of southern thought during the Civil War period offers a valuable refraction of the essential assumptions on which the Old South and the Confederacy were built. She shows the benefits of exploring Confederate nationalism “as the South’s commentary upon itself, as its effort to represent southern culture to the world at large, to history, and perhaps most revealingly, to its own people.”
Author: Wilfred Knight
Publisher: Arthur H. Clark Company
ISBN:
Category : Cherokee Indians
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Stand Watie was born 12 December 1806 in the Cherokee Nation at the place where Rome, Georgia is now located. His birth name was Ta-ker-taw-ker. He changed his named to Degadoga and then to Stand Watie when he was twelve. His parents were Oo-wa-tie and Susanna Reese. His brother took the name Elias Boudinot. He married (1) Elizabeth Fields (d. 1836), (2) Isabel Miller Hicks, (3) Eleanor Looney and (4) Sarah Caroline Bell. He married Sarah 18 September 1843 and they had five children. He was a Brigadier General in the Confederate Army. He died 9 September 187 in Honey Creek, Indian Territory (Oklahoma).
Author: Coleman Hutchison
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337315
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
Apples and Ashes offers the first literary history of the Civil War South. The product of extensive archival research, it tells an expansive story about a nation struggling to write itself into existence. Confederate literature was in intimate conversation with other contemporary literary cultures, especially those of the United States and Britain. Thus, Coleman Hutchison argues, it has profound implications for our understanding of American literary nationalism and the relationship between literature and nationalism more broadly. Apples and Ashes is organized by genre, with each chapter using a single text or a small set of texts to limn a broader aspect of Confederate literary culture. Hutchison discusses an understudied and diverse archive of literary texts including the literary criticism of Edgar Allan Poe; southern responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin; the novels of Augusta Jane Evans; Confederate popular poetry; the de facto Confederate national anthem, “Dixie”; and several postwar southern memoirs. In addition to emphasizing the centrality of slavery to the Confederate literary imagination, the book also considers a series of novel topics: the reprinting of European novels in the Confederate South, including Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables; Confederate propaganda in Europe; and postwar Confederate emigration to Latin America. In discussing literary criticism, fiction, poetry, popular song, and memoir, Apples and Ashes reminds us of Confederate literature's once-great expectations. Before their defeat and abjection—before apples turned to ashes in their mouths—many Confederates thought they were in the process of creating a nation and a national literature that would endure.
Author: Lesley J. Gordon
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807147966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
In The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (1970) and The Confederate Nation (1979), Emory Thomas redefined the field of Civil War history and reconceptualized the Confederacy as a unique entity fighting a war for survival. Inside the Confederate Nation honors his enormous contributions to the field with fresh interpretations of all aspects of Confederate life -- nationalism and identity, family and gender, battlefront and home front, race, and postwar legacies and memories. Many of the volume's twenty essays focus on individuals, households, communities, and particular regions of the South, highlighting the sheer variety of circumstances southerners faced over the course of the war. Other chapters explore the public and private dilemmas faced by diplomats, policy makers, journalists, and soldiers within the new nation. All of the essays attempt to explain the place of southerners within the Confederacy, how they came to see themselves and others differently because of secession, and the disparities between their expectations and reality.
