The story from the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, continues to be told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Today, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate encounter. When the grandiosity of Southerners’ national ambitions fulfilled the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended implications ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals got built probably the most about Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South effective slave regime under western culture, that they had excluded nearly all their own people-white females and slaves-and thus sowed the seeds of their demise.

Wartime scarcity of meals, labor, and soldiers tested the Confederate vision at every point and created home crises to complement those on the battlefields. Ladies and slaves became vital political actors because they contested government enlistment and taxes and welfare policies, and struggled because of their freedom. The attempt to repress most its own inhabitants backfired for the Confederate Areas of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and regarded as in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. That Confederate struggle played out in an extremely charged international area.

The political project from the Confederacy was tried by its own people and failed. The government was forced to become accountable to ladies and slaves, provoking a fantastic transformation from the slaveholders’ state. Confederate Reckoning is the startling tale of the epic political fight in which females and slaves helped to decide the fate from the Confederacy and the results of the Civil War.