NF Confederate Reckoning by Stephanie McCurry

[matthew mckeon]

I fought this book for the first 20 pages, mostly because McCurry kept using the term "project" as in the "Confederate project" (creating the Confederacy, but project this, project that). But as she picked up speed she has written a vivid book about the Confederate homefront and how the pressure of fighting the war squeezed it into shapes that its creator could barely recognize. And the actors in this "squeezing" were the people that by rights shouldn't have had any say at all: women and slaves.

 

[matthew mckeon]

McCurry begins with the story of the creation of the Confederacy and the debates between the Unionists and secessionists, as they tried to create a pro-slavery republic, dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal.The second part of the book "Antigone's Claim" was about a particular group of influential women in the Confederacy, soldiers' wives. As the South organized the big armies it needed to fight the war, the countryside was stripped of the labor that kept the mass of small farms going and the women and children fed. Poor farm women pleaded with state and Confederate authorities for relief. The national government regretfully denied aid or requests to allow husbands to return home to work the land, but the state governors, particularly in Georgia and North Carolina were more responsive, within the limited means at their disposal.

 

[matthew mckeon]

Soldiers' wives had the crying need for labor and food to survive and to hold on to their farms. They had the moral authority of having done their share to support the Confederacy; sending their husbands to make up the army. They became angrier as the war continued, directing much of their wrath at slaveowners, who had slaves to work their fields and with the passage of the "twenty negro" law, even more help as white men returned to the bigger plantations.

 

[matthew mckeon]

Then came the violence. McCurry describes nearly identical scenes enacted in different cities and towns across the Confederacy. An organized mob of women, identifying themselves as "soldiers' wives" approach a government office and plea or present a petition for the return of their husbands or government rations. Denied this, they then go to warehouses, bakeries or other sources of food. They demand the distribution of food at discounted government prices. The owners usually refused. The key phrase is uttered "Bread or Blood!" The women pull out weapons, knives, hatchets, hammers, pistols, revolvers and seize the food and carry it off.

 

[matthew mckeon]

To response this outbreak of violence, the state governments quickly expanded their efforts to distribute food and firewood to soldiers' wives. Gov. Brown told the Georgia legislature, "the great questions in this revolution is now a question of bread."North Carolina, which had expended less than 400 dollars in public aid in 1861, now appropriated $1 million, per year. Georgia appropriated $10 million.Women had become political players.

 

[16thVA]

I did the usual thing I do when I come across a general book about the Civil War, I turn to the index and look for "West Virginia". There is usually little of anything, and what there is is usually wrong. She got about 50/50. What she got wrong is that she said West Virginia did not support the Confederacy, which is not correct from the home front point of view. She then said that Pocahontas County eventually acknowledged the new state and the Union. Well, yes, after it had been clubbed repeatedly into submission. Here is a letter from a farmer in Pocahontas County at the start of the war.
http://sites.google.com/site/wvotherhistory/letter-to-jefferson-davis

 

[K Hale]

What she got wrong is that she said West Virginia did not support the Confederacy, which is not correct from the home front point of view.

Well, weren't things pretty split, but the majority had Unionist sentiments?

 

[16thVA]

Well, weren't things pretty split, but the majority had Unionist sentiments?

Not really. Most of the Union support was in the 16 counties around and north of the old B&O line. In the counties below that line there was actually a secessionist majority. Basically you could say that WV supported both the Union and the Confederacy, that would have been a much more accurate statement. You will find this expressed best in Russell Weigley's "A Great Civil War" , pg. 55, in his section on WV.
http://books.google.com/books?id=SQ...0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=west virginia&f=false

There is a new book called "Reconstructing Appalachia", and Ken Fones-Miller in his essay "A House Redivided", pg. 239-says:

"The founders of the new state ultimately could not escape the Old Dominion's legacy. New statehood leaders confronted a population that did not share their outlook."

Historians need to make a major overhaul of the traditional history of WV, and the upcoming sesquicentennial is just the opportunity to do so.

 

[wausaubob]

What she describes in her various youtube lectures is that the secessionist movement was a calculated anti-democratic revolution similar to the ascent to power of Napoleon III in France at about the same time.
The Confederacy in its conception was a militarized state, with limited concessions to democratic government, similar to Germany at about the same time, as unified under Prussia.
She is also describing how the war itself, and the gradual disconnection from the northern states, and the loss of the territory and the internal waterways, produced the gradual reduction of the white population in the Confederacy to the level of serfs.
The result is the politics of starvation.