Southern Families at War : Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South

Southern Families at War : Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South PDF Author: Women's History Catherine Clinton Historian of Southern History, and the American Civil War
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195350383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Whether it was planter patriarchs struggling to maintain authority, or Jewish families coerced by Christian evangelicalism, or wives and mothers left behind to care for slaves and children, the Civil War took a terrible toll. From the bustling sidewalks of Richmond to the parched plains of the Texas frontier, from the rich Alabama black belt to the Tennessee woodlands, no corner of the South went unscathed. Through the prism of the southern family, this volume of twelve original essays provides fresh insights into this watershed in American history.

Southern Families at War : Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South

Southern Families at War : Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South PDF Author: Women's History Catherine Clinton Historian of Southern History, and the American Civil War
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195350383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Get Book Here

Book Description
Whether it was planter patriarchs struggling to maintain authority, or Jewish families coerced by Christian evangelicalism, or wives and mothers left behind to care for slaves and children, the Civil War took a terrible toll. From the bustling sidewalks of Richmond to the parched plains of the Texas frontier, from the rich Alabama black belt to the Tennessee woodlands, no corner of the South went unscathed. Through the prism of the southern family, this volume of twelve original essays provides fresh insights into this watershed in American history.

Southern Families at War

Southern Families at War PDF Author: Catherine Clinton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199923760
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Whether it was planter patriarchs struggling to maintain authority, or Jewish families coerced by Christian evangelicalism, or wives and mothers left behind to care for slaves and children, the Civil War took a terrible toll. From the bustling sidewalks of Richmond to the parched plains of the Texas frontier, from the rich Alabama black belt to the Tennessee woodlands, no corner of the South went unscathed. Through the prism of the southern family, this volume of twelve original essays provides fresh insights into this watershed in American history.

Bitterly Divided

Bitterly Divided PDF Author: David Williams
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1595585958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The little-known history of anti-secession Southerners: “Absolutely essential Civil War reading.” —Booklist, starred review Bitterly Divided reveals that the South was in fact fighting two civil wars—the external one that we know so much about, and an internal one about which there is scant literature and virtually no public awareness. In this fascinating look at a hidden side of the South’s history, David Williams shows the powerful and little-understood impact of the thousands of draft resisters, Southern Unionists, fugitive slaves, and other Southerners who opposed the Confederate cause. “This fast-paced book will be a revelation even to professional historians. . . . His astonishing story details the deep, often murderous divisions in Southern society. Southerners took up arms against each other, engaged in massacres, guerrilla warfare, vigilante justice and lynchings, and deserted in droves from the Confederate army . . . Some counties and regions even seceded from the secessionists . . . With this book, the history of the Civil War will never be the same again.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Most Southerners looked on the conflict with the North as ‘a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,’ especially because owners of 20 or more slaves and all planters and public officials were exempt from military service . . . The Confederacy lost, it seems, because it was precisely the kind of house divided against itself that Lincoln famously said could not stand.” —Booklist, starred review

Why Confederates Fought

Why Confederates Fought PDF 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.

Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South PDF Author: John Inscoe
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813129613
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
Among the most pervasive of stereotypes imposed upon southern highlanders is that they were white, opposed slavery, and supported the Union before and during the Civil War, but the historical record suggests far different realities. John C. Inscoe has spent much of his scholarly career exploring the social, economic and political significance of slavery and slaveholding in the mountain South and the complex nature of the region’s wartime loyalties, and the brutal guerrilla warfare and home front traumas that stemmed from those divisions. The essays here embrace both facts and fictions related to those issues, often conveyed through intimate vignettes that focus on individuals, families, and communities, keeping the human dimension at the forefront of his insights and analysis. Drawing on the memories, memoirs, and other testimony of slaves and free blacks, slaveholders and abolitionists, guerrilla warriors, invading armies, and the highland civilians they encountered, Inscoe considers this multiplicity of perspectives and what is revealed about highlanders’ dual and overlapping identities as both a part of, and distinct from, the South as a whole. He devotes attention to how the truths derived from these contemporary voices were exploited, distorted, reshaped, reinforced, or ignored by later generations of novelists, journalists, filmmakers, dramatists, and even historians with differing agendas over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His cast of characters includes John Henry, Frederick Law Olmsted and John Brown, Andrew Johnson and Zebulon Vance, and those who later interpreted their stories—John Fox and John Ehle, Thomas Wolfe and Charles Frazier, Emma Bell Miles and Harry Caudill, Carter Woodson and W. J. Cash, Horace Kephart and John C. Campbell, even William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Their work and that of many others have contributed much to either our understanding—or misunderstanding—of nineteenth century Appalachia and its place in the American imagination.

When Sherman Marched North from the Sea

When Sherman Marched North from the Sea PDF Author: Jacqueline Glass Campbell
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Home front and battle front merged in 1865 when General William T. Sherman occupied Savannah and then marched his armies north through the Carolinas. Although much has been written about the military aspects of Sherman's March, Jacqueline Campbell reveals a more complex story. Integrating evidence from Northern soldiers and from Southern civilians, black and white, male and female, Campbell demonstrates the importance of culture for determining the limits of war and how it is fought. Sherman's March was an invasion of both geographical and psychological space. The Union army viewed the Southern landscape as military terrain. But when they brought war into Southern households, Northern soldiers were frequently astounded by the fierceness with which many white Southern women defended their homes. Campbell argues that in the household-centered South, Confederate women saw both ideological and material reasons to resist. While some Northern soldiers lauded this bravery, others regarded such behavior as inappropriate and unwomanly. Campbell also investigates the complexities behind African Americans' decisions either to stay on the plantation or to flee with Union troops. Black Southerners' delight at the coming of the army of "emancipation" often turned to terror as Yankees plundered their homes and assaulted black women. Ultimately, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea calls into question postwar rhetoric that represented the heroic defense of the South as a male prerogative and praised Confederate women for their "feminine" qualities of sentimentality, patience, and endurance. Campbell suggests that political considerations underlie this interpretation--that Yankee depredations seemed more outrageous when portrayed as an attack on defenseless women and children. Campbell convincingly restores these women to their role as vital players in the fight for a Confederate nation, as models of self-assertion rather than passive self-sacrifice.

Inside the Confederate Nation

Inside the Confederate Nation PDF Author: Lesley J. Gordon
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807147974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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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.

Plain Folk's Fight

Plain Folk's Fight PDF Author: Mark V. Wetherington
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807877042
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
In an examination of the effects of the Civil War on the rural Southern home front, Mark V. Wetherington looks closely at the experiences of white "plain folk--mostly yeoman farmers and craftspeople--in the wiregrass region of southern Georgia before, during, and after the war. Although previous scholars have argued that common people in the South fought the battles of the region's elites, Wetherington contends that the plain folk in this Georgia region fought for their own self-interest. Plain folk, whose communities were outside areas in which slaves were the majority of the population, feared black emancipation would allow former slaves to move from cotton plantations to subsistence areas like their piney woods communities. Thus, they favored secession, defended their way of life by fighting in the Confederate army, and kept the antebellum patriarchy intact in their home communities. Unable by late 1864 to sustain a two-front war in Virginia and at home, surviving veterans took their fight to the local political arena, where they used paramilitary tactics and ritual violence to defeat freedpeople and their white Republican allies, preserving a white patriarchy that relied on ex-Confederate officers for a new generation of leadership.

Why Texans Fought in the Civil War

Why Texans Fought in the Civil War PDF Author: Charles David Grear
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603448098
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In Why Texans Fought in the Civil War, Charles David Grear provides insights into what motivated Texans to fight for the Confederacy. Mining important primary sources—including thousands of letters and unpublished journals—he affords readers the opportunity to hear, often in the combatants’ own words, why it was so important to them to engage in tumultuous struggles occurring so far from home. As Grear notes, in the decade prior to the Civil War the population of Texas had tripled. The state was increasingly populated by immigrants from all parts of the South and foreign countries. When the war began, it was not just Texas that many of these soldiers enlisted to protect, but also their native states, where they had family ties.

A Shattered Nation

A Shattered Nation PDF Author: Anne Sarah Rubin
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807888958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Historians often assert that Confederate nationalism had its origins in pre-Civil War sectional conflict with the North, reached its apex at the start of the war, and then dropped off quickly after the end of hostilities. Anne Sarah Rubin argues instead that white Southerners did not actually begin to formulate a national identity until it became evident that the Confederacy was destined to fight a lengthy war against the Union. She also demonstrates that an attachment to a symbolic or sentimental Confederacy existed independent of the political Confederacy and was therefore able to persist well after the collapse of the Confederate state. White Southerners redefined symbols and figures of the failed state as emotional touchstones and political rallying points in the struggle to retain local (and racial) control, even as former Confederates took the loyalty oath and applied for pardons in droves. Exploring the creation, maintenance, and transformation of Confederate identity during the tumultuous years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Rubin sheds new light on the ways in which Confederates felt connected to their national creation and provides a provocative example of what happens when a nation disintegrates and leaves its people behind to forge a new identity.