A Slaveholders’ Republic in the Tumult of War

Shaken by Union incursions into his ambivalent patch of the Confederacy in the winter of 1862, the reluctant northern Alabama secessionist Joshua Burns Moore registered deep skepticism over President Lincoln’s enduring commitment to restoring the Union “as it was” before the outbreak of war. “He may think [it possible],” Moore wrote, “and doubtless does. But from the very nature of the conflict, so sure as the war continues, it is the death blow to negro slavery.”¹ Among his fellow Southerners, as the testimony of Booker T. Washington and countless others illustrates, none grasped the salience and accuracy of Moore’s prophecy more instinctively than the slaves themselves.

In different ways, the two important studies under review here—Victoria Bynum’s close reconstruction of Southern unionist resistance in three home-front settings “seared by violent wars within the larger war” (p. 2) and Stephanie McCurry’s more ambitious attempt to fundamentally reframe the political history of the Confederacy—confirm that Moore had identified a profound contradiction at the heart of the Confederate project. The attempt to establish vi et armis an independent slaveholder’s republic exposed core antagonisms in Southern society; and in pursuing a war that dramatically intensified these, Lincoln unleashed a process that overwhelmed attempts to keep the conflict within bounds. Try as he might to prevent the conflict from “degenerat[ing] into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle,” Lincoln was pushed well beyond his limited objectives by the evolution of the war itself. “When Northern armies entered the South they became armies of emancipation,” W. E. B. Du Bois insisted, with exquisitely well-aimed irony. “It was the last thing they planned to be.”²

Taking its inspiration from the social and intellectual ferment of the 1960s, the revolution in American historiography so closely linked to the triumph over Jim Crow has had a profound and enduring effect on scholarly understanding of the Civil War, discrediting both the genteel attachment to the Lost Cause once influential among gentleman academics and the more malicious denigration of black agency that lodged itself at the margins. To date, this critical reappraisal has focused overwhelmingly on attempting to explain the transformation of Northern war aims. Thus the animated, often contentious debate over “Who freed the slaves?” has produced a sophisticated literature that aims not merely to re-take the measure of Lincoln in light of the new history of emancipation, but to grapple with fundamental questions about the relationship between high politics and pressure from below, documenting in intricate detail the range of actions through which slaves and their allies struggled to insert themselves into the algebra of war. For all its impressive results, however, this is mainly a reassessment aimed at reapportioning agency within Union lines. McCurry makes an almost self-evident but no less profound point when she insists that, by their actions, the slaves forced changes on the Confederacy as unforeseen and transformative as those they imposed on Lincoln and the North. This is a starting point that leads her into one of the most prolific revisions to our understanding of the war in a generation.

Confederate Reckoning offers a theoretically astute and painstakingly researched exploration of the slaves’ grasp for freedom, but that is an almost incidental achievement in a study that aims to do much more. McCurry is explicit in her ambition to overturn many of our assumptions about the Confederate experience, and she hits the target far more often than she misses. Conversant with a developing literature on comparative slave emancipation, the study situates the slave South’s bid for independence within a global struggle over slavery, democracy, and the powers of nation-states, as a “steady counterpoint to the age of revolution and emancipation” (p. 12...