In her new book, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, Dr. Stephanie McCurry presents a re-examination of the Confederacy for which wartime scarcity of food, labor and slaves, created stresses and crises which rivaled those on the battlefields. McCurry makes the case that while Southern statesmen and leaders had created a powerful system based on slavery, in excluding the majority of the Southern population--white women and slaves--they had doomed their enterprise to failure. She argues that the disenfranchised applied pressure as they contested government enlistment, tax policies, and fought for their freedom and ultimately played a decisive role in deciding the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.
"McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read.
