For in the Confederacy, McCurry postulates, slaveholders envisioned “a republic perfectly suited to them as a slaveholding people, a republic of white men, defined by slavery and the political exclusion of the mass of the Southern people” (2). McCurry endeavors from the outset to clearly outline the flawed logic of the Confederacy’s founders in provoking “precisely the transformation of their own political culture that they had hoped to avoid by secession” (1). Instead, the book offers a full-scale examination of the political actors (white and black) that contributed to a marked shift in Confederate policy regarding women and slavery-developments that McCurry argues affected a newly-(re)United States in the aftermath of the war. Yet, in McCurry’s work readers will find a pronounced movement away from simply addressing the question of why the Confederacy failed. Throughout her analysis, she clearly illustrates that the fundamental pro-slavery ideologies upon which the short-lived nation rested ultimately contributed to its downfall.
Stephanie McCurry’s latest work offers a welcomed examination of the “Confederate Project” as it existed from 1860 to 1865. She captures the strides they made toward family security and independence, even prosperity, in the first five years of freedom, and then the tsunami of violence that came at them as unrepentant enslavers turned into bitter defeated Confederates.Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South by Stephanie McCurry. Drawing primarily on testimonies offered in an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan by Congress in 1871, and on narratives of formerly enslaved people gathered by the Works Project Administration in the 1930s, she offers a riveting picture of the hopefulness and energy of freed people as they began their lives after slavery.
As in her excellent first book, “ They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence From Emancipation to World War I” (2012), Williams, a historian at Wayne State University, centers the story on first-person accounts by Black survivors, the people who lived to give witness. What is most powerful here is not the forensic analysis of the violence, though it is devastating, but the way Williams conveys the experience of the victims.
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