Confederate Reckoning by Stephanie McCurry

She is currently undergraduate chair in the history department and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Her previous book, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country, won several prizes. She also studies the history of women and gender. McCurry is a specialist in 19th-century American history, with a special focus on the American South and the Civil War era. The reckoning that arrived in slow motion over the next four years came not simply because the Confederacy was defeated militarily by outside enemies but also because of internal resistance and outright rebellion from its own people, those assumed to be politically insignificant or mere “property.” That is the main thesis of history Professor Stephanie McCurry’s new book, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. architects did not reckon on was that the disenfranchised majority-white women and slaves-would become a force to be reckoned with. Most of “the people” were not consulted on the wisdom of their project.

When the Confederate States of America seceded from the Union in 1861, its founding fathers reckoned that they could build a nation and fight a war while uniting the Southern population behind their cause.

Confederate Reckoning by Stephanie McCurry