The Fall of the House of Dixie: How the Civil War Remade the American South by Bruce Levine (review)

Historian Bruce Levine believes a second American Revolution occurred in the 1860s. Events at this time altered the whole country, not just the South, and ended the compromises that had concluded the revolution of 1776. Two changes qualified this as a revolution; first, the granting of full black citizenship “pointed the way toward transforming the United States into a multi-racial republic,” and, second, the conflict brought “an end to southern slaveholder dominance of the Union politically” (xiii). In The Fall of the House of Dixie, Levine explains that the Civil War both created and protected this revolution.

Central to Levine’s argument is that the leaders of both sections in 1860–61 did not want a revolution. Southerners, whether unionist or secessionist, had committed to, via slavery, keeping blacks subordinate; at the same time, even the reformist Republican Party did not incline toward revolution, as northerners “would fight not to launch a new revolution but to safeguard the gains of the last one” (67). So both sides were conservative, one wishing to preserve the master race-relations, the other, the Union.

Inevitably, Levine neglects the initial radicalism of Confederates and Republicans, but his decision to stress the continuity between the secession crisis and earlier events is necessary to rightly attribute greater importance to the war. For, if preservation was the immediate need, what changed to create this revolution? Levine’s answer is the “pressure of events” from the conflict. Out of all leading Americans, he believes only the slaveholders remained consistent in their beliefs during the war.

The slaveholder always wished to preserve the “Old South,” defined as white supremacy through slavery. The centralization and mobilization of the Confederacy and its resources were only the often bitterly contested means to that end. White supremacy had to be preserved by whatever means necessary, even if that meant undermining the war effort. The Old South was ill-equipped to fight a prolonged war with the Union, yet “the demands of racial ideology and race control trumped the call even of military necessity” (90). Only in early 1865, against intense opposition in the slaveholder-dominated Confederate Congress, was President Jefferson Davis finally able to “copy of the revolutionaries in at least one regard,” securing the passage of laws for black enlistment and eventual emancipation (272). But it was too little too late, and the final divergence of the goals of Confederate independence and white supremacy doomed the former.

To sustain this argument, Levine overlooks much of the power of the Confederate nation. But he does stress that seceding for and then fighting for white supremacy meant the non-slaveholding majority supported the slaveholder minority; it was this persistent unity, crowned with the successes of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, which gave the Confederacy its will to fight. This strength meant the Confederacy had to be defeated militarily in order to compel it to surrender its demand for independence.

In linking the military events of the war to the social and political developments of the era, Levine is following in the steps of other historians, such as Gary W. Gallagher, taking the war out of historical isolation. By giving his analysis of both sections a chronological structure, Levine connects the progress of the war with the rise of what he sees as its three revolutionary agents, of which only one, the self-emancipating slaves, originated in Dixie. The other two, the Union army and the Republican Party, originated in the North.

Levine sees the self-emancipation of the slaves as central to his definition of the Second American Revolution as a wartime event, as “every mass-based revolution is a school of political education for people previously kept off the political stage” (177). Although “the slaves ardently wished for freedom and would fight for nothing less,” their main revolutionary role was indirect...