Confederate Reckoning

A great book for teaching me how much the wartime experiences and political resistance of the soldiers’ wives and the slaves impacted the fate of the Confederacy and pushed it in directions never imagined by the planters who created the Confederacy to serve their interests and not the majority of the population they expected to do their bidding. 

McCurry’s book opens up the remarkable story of angry white southern women using their power to make the Confederate and state governments responsive to their wartime needs. McCurry writes about women householders from families disrupted when mostly non-slaveholding farmers were drafted to fight a war for slavery while wealthier plantation owners were exempt. Building on her original work on southern yeoman families and the way gender shaped their practices and ideas, McCurry depicts the political actions and riots that women organized, that sprung from their shared ideas of community justice

This history of the Confederacy – winner of many awards and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 – expands our understanding of politics beyond the Confederacy’s male voters. Women in the South, who faced great problems and difficulties during the war, spoke out and protested in ways that forced an aristocratic, patriarchal political system to respond. Her book sheds new light on the challenges faced by the Confederacy.