Confederate Reckoning by Stephanie McCurry

Those moments asserted a new form of power, one in which defied white supremacy and masculinity and reified the role of white women in the South.

White women did not figure in politically to the agenda of the Confederacy, but a series of confrontations with white women with political acts, like the bread riots, forced the Confederacy to deal with their presence and agency. As the United States fully reunited (or did it?) after the Civil War, women and African American people-and I am sure other people of color-had a new political voice and set a precedent for future generations to look back on.

They are fluid and malleable, incorporating peoples often silenced in the writing of great white men. It demonstrates and upends traditional values set by the founding fathers. This book shows that social and cultural events changed as women and people of color became central to the political scheme during the 1860s. Ultimately, McCurry’s argument maintains that “the people, male and female, black and white, Southern and Northern, who confronted each other in 1865 and engaged anew in paramilitary struggle over the terms of social and political life, were not the same people they had been in the 1860s” (9). McCurry’s primary goal is to demonstrate that internal issues from within the Confederacy played a significant factor in its demise, all of which came from people often silenced in the military study of the Civil War-women and enslaved peoples. In Stephanie McCurry’s Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, the ideas and realities of Confederate demise are put under an analytical microscope.

Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South

Confederate Reckoning by Stephanie McCurry