Confederate Reckoning, Stephanie McCurry
Confederate Reckoning, Stephanie McCurry
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Confederate Reckoning
Power and Politics in the Civil War South

Author: Stephanie McCurry

Narrator: Teri Schnaubelt

Unabridged: 16 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/28/2018


Synopsis

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.

About Stephanie McCurry

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; and Masters of Small Worlds, winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize and four other awards. She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. McCurry 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Andrew on April 02, 2013

WOW! What a complex, challenging, and intriguing book! McCurrys history sets out to examine the Confederacy with depth and perspectives not often considered elsewhere. The book starts by examining the process and structures of secession, and the formation of the Confederate government. McCurry lays......more

Goodreads review by Keith on January 16, 2017

Confederate Reckoning tells the little known story of the effect southern women and slaves had on the outcome of the Civil War. While most histories recount in detail the military strategies and battles, Stephanie McCurry looks behind the Confederate lines to show how women and slaves shaped the out......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on December 24, 2022

Interesting in some ways, but a little bit of a slog at times (definitely on the academic side). McCurry's main argument is that the Confederate national project was essentially a slave-owning elite project, as much of the regular white population (and obviously the slaves) were ambivalent about sec......more

Goodreads review by Ben on February 24, 2015

McCurry describes the Confederacy as something unique: a modern, anti-democratic, pro-slavery, state. The seeds of the destruction of the Confederacy were present in its making. A state founded on the belief in and perpetuation of inequality, that did not consider slaves or women to be citizens, was......more

Goodreads review by Bfisher on May 18, 2015

Some very interesting comments here on the empowerment of slaves and white women (especially soldiers' wives) during the war.......more