Publisher Description
The J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois and associate editor of North and South magazine, Bruce Levine presents a gripping chronicle of the cultural and economic upheaval the South experienced during and after the Civil War. Drawing upon a treasure trove of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and government documents, Levine offers a unique perspective on the old South’s demise through the voices of those who lived through the conflict.
Download and start listening now!
“Very interesting treatment of a complex subject. The slave economy of the pre-Civil War South gave the relatively small number of large scale slave owners enormous wealth and with it enormous political clout, such that I don’t think most people today realize just how much sway they had over American politics and policy. In some respects the situation was not dissimilar from today’s concentration of wealth and the use of that wealth by a minority to influence policy to favor themselves, sometime over the common good. Even the large mass of non-slave owning Southerners favored slavery, since they saw the hope of eventually becoming slave owners as the way out of the subsistence farming that was the lot of the majority of them. At the same time, they developed an almost surreal mythology to justify keeping the slaves in bondage because it was God’s plan, the slaves were like children and couldn’t take care of themselves, and the slaves were happy with their lot and loyal to their masters. The other, contradictory side of the coin was the pervasive fear of slave rebellions and the need to keep them firmly under control.
In the North, the war began not as a war to free the slaves but as a war to preserve the Union. Racism was as endemic there as elsewhere. Lincoln came into office with no intention of doing more than trying to restrict the spread of slavery. As the war progressed, abolition became first a war measure to chip away at the economic underpinnings of the Southern economy. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the parts of the country under Confederate control. Lincoln couldn’t afford to alienate slave owners in the slave holding border states that remained loyal to the Union. But once the process of liberation started, and as more Northerners were exposed the reality of slavery the movement to abolish slavery entirely gathered momentum.
One of the great irony of the war was the attitude of the large slave holders who were obsessed with preserving their property, to the point of resisting efforts of the Confederate government to requisition their slaves for labor in support of the armies and paying taxes in kind to support the war.”
—
Charles (4 out of 5 stars)
