Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South is a non-fiction history published in 2010 about how and why the Confederacy failed to survive in the US Civil War because of its own dependence on enslavement and other political and social values and developments, especially involving women, enslaved people, and poor white farmers. Its author, Stephanie McCurry, is a US historian currently teaching at Columbia University and specializing in the US Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Confederate Reckoning was highly praised upon its publication. In addition to receiving several awards, including the Avery O. Craven Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the Willie Lee Rose Prize, and the Merle Curti Award, the book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.

This guide refers to the first edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss enslavement and racism.

Summary

Confederate Reckoning begins around the time of Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, when the Southern states began debating secession from the United States. Though they thought of their efforts as a restoration of the original republic of the United States, McCurry argues, the architects of what would become the Confederate States of America (CSA) sought to forge “a modern proslavery and antidemocratic state, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal” (1). The secession movement was led by plantation owners, whose wealth depended on enslavement. To legitimize the effort as a democratic one, however, they had to appeal to a broader public, including poor white farmers. Still, especially in states like South Carolina where planters held a disproportionate amount of power, the democratic process to decide on secession was subverted through tactics from unopposed elections to voter intimidation.

McCurry argues that the newly formed CSA faced two major opponents from within: poor white women and enslaved people. As the war dragged on, white men were conscripted into the army, forcing women to manage their farms, businesses, and households alone. Food prices rose, a situation exploited by speculators. In response, such women began to assert themselves as “soldiers’ wives, who turned old promises of protection into a new set of demands on the Confederate state” (132). They flooded Confederate politicians, even the Confederacy’s president Jefferson Davis, with petitions and letters, and they organized and led food riots in major Southern cities. Eventually, their efforts forced the state governments of the CSA to greatly expand welfare for the poor.

Enslaved people undermined the war effort with their “refusal…to act as property” (281). Taking advantage of the opportunities presented by the war itself, enslaved Southerners fled behind enemy lines, gave valuable intelligence to Union forces, and rose up and looted plantations, among other acts of resistance. At the same time, plantation owners dug in their heels and resisted the increasingly desperate Confederate government’s efforts to conscript enslaved people as military labor and even, in the frantic last days of the CSA, as soldiers. In the end, the Confederacy “failed in the face of enemy armies and the determined resistance of its own people to it” (361).