The Old South in the Crucible of War (review)

358CIVIL WAR HISTORY romance. Printed in 1984, the volume serves to remind us that King represented that last generation of white scholars who knew the hoary veterans of the southern crusade and were still thrilled by their memories . In February 1961, he journeyed to Milledgeville, Georgia, to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the state's secession. "I joined in wholeheartedly with the fun," he told his readers, "and tried to lift my voice with the crowd in a Rebel Yell." Fred A. Bailey Abilene Christian University The Old South in the Crucible of War. Edited by Harry P. Owens and James J. Cooke. (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1983. Pp. x, 110. $12.50 cloth. $7.50 paper.) This volume grew out of the Seventh Annual Chancellor's Symposium at the University of Mississippi. Using the work of Emory M. Thomas as a point ofdeparture, the symposium brought Thomas together with Paul D. Escott, Lawrence N. Powell and Michael S. Wayne, Leon F. Litwack, Michael Barton, and Thomas B. Alexander "to examine the South during the four years of the Confederacy and to reflect on the theme of continuity , or lack of it" (p. viii). Thomas's essay "Reckoning with Rebels" opens the book with a brief restatement ofhis view that the war wrought great changes in the South. Highlighting the economic trends toward urbanization and industrialization , the increasing power of the central government, the questioning of old social structures, and a willingness in the end to let go ofslavery to forestall defeat, Thomas concludes that "Confederate Southerners made fundamental alterations in the institutions and ideas they had gone to war to protect" (p. 9). Most of the revolutionary aspects of the Confederate experience, Thomas adds, did not carry over into the postwar South. In "The Failure of Confederate Nationalism: The Old South's Class System in the Crucible of War," Paul D. Escott argues that the sacrifices called for by the Davis government and the harsh measures employed to fuel the war effort exposed class tensions and prevented the formation of a unified southern society committed to the struggle. Lawrence N. Powell and Michael S. Wayne, in "Self-Interest and the Decline of Confederate Nationalism," find that planters of the Lower Mississippi Valley were motivated primarily by economic self-interest. Persuaded by mid-1863 that Richmond could not or would not safeguard their economic well-being, and courted economically by the Lincoln administration , the planters looked after their purses and gave no firm allegiance to either government. Leon Litwack's "Many Thousands Gone: Black Southerners and the Confederacy" stresses that the war forced masters to abandon their be- book reviews359 liefs in the happiness and loyalty of their slaves and to accept the fact that they did not know the black mind. For the blacks, the "ultimate significance of the Confederacy lay in its destruction" (p. 59) . That destruction did not bring revolutionary change in the day-to-day status of southern blacks, however, who though free suffered new forms of white coercion and control. Michael Barton's "Did the Confederacy Change Southern Soldiers? Some Obvious and Some Unobtrusive Measures" approaches through diaries kept by officers and enlisted men the question ofwhether thewar created a Confederate identity significantly different from that of antebellum southerners. While admittingthat Thomas's thesis is "plausible and deliciously ironic" (p. 78) , Barton reports that his research reveals continuity rather than change. Thomas B. Alexander's summary essay "The Dimensions of Continuity Across the Civil War" discusses recent scholarly literature, citing examples of continuity and of change, and points to topics historians might explore in the future. He ends with the observation that "The South Shall Rise Again was not written of Southern history; that has never fallen, and has never shown fewer signs of ever falling than it does right now" (p. 97). The essays in this collection attest to the vigor of current Confederate scholarship. They not only introduce the reader to some of thebest recent work on the Confederacy, but also suggest many areas of potential inquiry. For anyone interested in the debate over the war's impact on the southern people, this slim volume is an excellent place to...