Confederate Reckoning

“If the new political assertiveness of Southern women did not bring down the Confederacy, it did represent a powerful challenge to the Confederate vision of ‘the people’ and the republic, and speaks to the particular pressures and ruptures of war in slave society.”

Although the Confederacy and the Union shared similar traditional assumptions about women as non-actors in politics, McCurry suggests that, because of enslavement and the absence of an abolitionist movement, the CSA was even less hospitable to ideas of women’s rights than the North (150-51). The pressures of the US Civil War and the antidemocratic (1) tendencies of the CSA made women’s assertiveness in politics a unique challenge, as she indicates here.

“In terms of causes, dynamic, and consequences the entire history of the C.S.A. was part of a far larger set of historical struggles over the future of slave and servile systems, the political survival of slave states, the terms of emancipation, and the democratic imperatives of male citizenship in societies at war that erupted across the Western world in the age of emancipation.”

One of McCurry’s goals in “Confederate Reckoning” is to situate the history of the Confederacy within the history of the rest of the world. To that end, she emphasizes how the Confederacy stood against emancipatory and democratic movements unfolding in the rest of the world, such as the abolition of enslavement in Latin America.

“Secessionists saw a bright future for slavery if they could set its destiny in a new republic. To them slavery was no worn-out vestige of the past but a social system uniquely adapted to the conditions of the modern world.”

The Confederates saw themselves as acting on a wider stage than even North America. They did not simply want independence, but they had an ideological goal in mind that involved asserting the inequality of races and enslavement as a basis for a viable economic system.

“Slaves were said to be, by nature, good, childlike, and loyal servants to their masters; they posed a danger only when white outsiders attempted to ‘rouse an ignorant people [by appealing] to their superstition and lust.’”

Racist ideas based on the pseudo-science of the 18th and 19th centuries shaped not only Confederate culture and social thought, but politics as well. CSA leaders and policymakers continued to cling to these ideas even though they contradicted Confederates’ experience with enslaved resistance “on the ground” (268).

“Confederate founders were deeply committed to it and faced the necessity of making it real: real enough, that is, to justify treason, to ground a claim to national independence, and maybe, if they were unlucky, to support a war. As a political project it was daunting.”

The establishment of the Confederacy was very much an ideological project. However, part of that ideology was a republican vision that demanded some acknowledgment of the “consent of the governed” (17), despite the pro-enslavement nature of the Confederacy.

“But like Virginia, the Upper South split in every direction, showing just how divided the people were about the fundamental question of Union or Confederacy. In that threatening moment, every possible outcome was reached: alliance with the Confederate States of America, continued membership in the United States, even armed neutrality.”

Secession was not a historical certainty. Across the South, it was the slaveholding planter class that were the biggest and most decisive proponents of secession. However, each state and each region had different geographical and demographic distributions and economic, social, and political needs and interests, which created powerful divisions even within states. This was borne out most dramatically with the secession of West Virginia from Virginia.

“This was the vision of the new nation they offered to the world, one dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, a beacon of true liberty and a tribune of racial truth against the corruptions of modern liberal democracy and equality.”

A key point throughout “Confederate Reckoning” is that the C.S.A. was built on dangerous contradictions. It sought to be a nation built on republican principles forged in the 18th-century Enlightenment, yet it also rejected many democratic and egalitarian ideals, especially by continuing to make enslavement a cornerstone of its economy and society.

“Did the state’s greater interest lie in the protection of marriage and a husband’s legal rights? or in recognition of women citizens as political individuals capable of treason?”

Social questions like the political agency of women came about in response to practical considerations. In this case, it was driven by the fact that both the Union and the Confederacy found women (and employed their own women) acting as spies and resisters.

“Even for the rich ladies of New Orleans, marriage and gender no longer offered protective cover for political acts. Called out of coverture, the state now defined them as sovereign political individuals capable of dangerous partisan acts, answerable for their own beliefs and actions.”

Traditionally, women had been thought of as little more than extensions of their husbands or their families. The demands and complexities of the US Civil War changed these fundamental assumptions about women in ways that outlasted the war itself.

“At the most fundamental level, the attacks represented an abandonment of the idea of women as outside war, engaging them instead as dangerous partisans and enemies of the state.”

The idea that women were usually, if not always, passive victims of conflict did not go away easily. As the controversy over Order No. 28 demonstrated (104-10), the growing idea of women as political agents who had to be dealt with one way or the other by governments and military officials did not go uncontested.

“The idea that the state had incurred an obligation to the soldiers to protect their families was tied to religious and secular conceptions of the nation, its people, and their cause. Variously referred to as a promise, a solemn duty, a sacred claim, a state imperative, an obligation, and a public trust, it was trumpeted from press box and pulpit, piously sworn to by government officials and private citizens alike.”

Older concepts of masculinity and the role of men in the household were still prevalent in the US Civil War; indeed, they are arguably still powerful today. McCurry explains how such notions could still shape modern phenomena like the rise of welfare states.

“What these documents represent is evidence that in the turmoil of war, white Southern women had found a means of self-representation and, with it, a strategic and efficacious kind of political agency they had never possessed before.”

The significance of the category of “soldiers’ wives” (4) was that it enabled poor women to organize themselves as an effective “political constituency” (88). Being bereft of their husbands and male relations created the conditions that forced and enabled women to do so.

“Certainly Southern men and women, enslaved and free, had considerable experience of a big state by the time their military leaders stacked arms at Appomattox. When they faced the new Republican Party state in the aftermath of the war, their expectations and sense of legitimate authority and entitlements surely owed something to that recent ordeal.”

One of the lasting consequences of the US Civil War, McCurry argues, was that it familiarized Southern women and men with modern bureaucracy, in contrast to the household politics and patronage networks that had previously dominated the South. Such experience would be important in the post–Civil War world, as industrialization and the expansion of the United States into becoming a world power would necessitate a larger administrative state.

“The war was now a civilian war.”

McCurry suggests that the importance of the home front was not taken seriously in the South when the US Civil War began. However, as the war dragged on and saw more Confederate territory lost or devastated, it became clearer that it was, as President Jefferson Davis acknowledged, a “war of the people” (180).

“Social historians tend to read them as the disaffection of the Confederate poor; cultural historians as a public expression of a deep customary idea of the common good. Rich ideas all. But what they miss is what is most striking about the riots: the deep context, savvy politicking, strategic thinking, and collective organization they involved, and the political leadership and mass participation of women they announced.”

While acknowledging the views of other historians on the food riots, which have been extensively discussed and analyzed by historians, McCurry emphasizes the political dimension. Specifically, the food riots are an example of poor women, usually locked out of politics, acting in concert to change the policies and priorities of their government.

“Even if the Confederate experience of early and expansive welfare provision never imprinted the logic of American welfare policy in any permanent sense, the political relationships and practices it involved—particularly the intimate relationship between female citizens and the states, their sense of entitlement, expectation of state support, and strategic knowledge about how to make it happen—left a strong imprint in the South.”

Here, McCurry suggests that there may not be a direct line of continuity between the Confederacy’s expansion of welfare, brought on by the activism of “soldiers’ wives,” and the modern US welfare system. Instead, she sees the activism of the “soldiers’ wives” as significant in how it changed the relationship between women outside the upper classes and their government, specifically in making women more active in that relationship.

“Far from perfecting the republic of white men, fixing forever the exclusion of black and female dependents, the Confederate war had proved its undoing, most unpredictably, perhaps, in the way it brought white women—especially poor white women—to a position of unquestionable salience in Confederate politics.”

McCurry’s core argument is that the Confederacy’s “antidemocratic” (1) nature was self-defeating and doomed from the start. One way this was true is that women, forced to desperation by lack of affordable food, found themselves compelled to assert themselves in politics more than they had in the past.

“It was not of much concern to anyone in the antebellum South, but slavery compromised state authority and left whole subject populations outside its grasp.”

One issue at the heart of the CSA was that enslavement empowered wealthy households in a way that was rare for a modern state. Such power held by individual planter households undermined the CSA’s efforts to ensure its survival, like instituting a draft and impressing enslaved labor for military purposes.

“Like Mattie Jackson’s mother or the self-appointed prophet William Webb, enslaved men and women forged their own, directly adversarial interpretation of secession.”

Secession and the US Civil War opened up new opportunities for enslaved people to escape or resist their enslavement. It was how enslaved people themselves asserted their own “political agency” (268), despite Confederate leaders clinging to the idea that enslaved people were naturally “childlike…and loyal” (32).

“The personhood of slaves and evidence of their political agency veered up in the face of Confederate officials at every turn during the war, despite their determination to impress them simply as property.”

Enslaved resistance materially undermined the Confederate war effort and the CSA’s home front. More than that, however, it also disproved the Confederacy’s ideology that enslaved people were not capable of being independent, political actors.

“The necessity of fighting on two fronts was an ineluctable condition of war in the slaveholders’ republic.”

One of the insurmountable obstacles faced by the CSA was a result of its own nature as an economy built around enslavement. If the CSA entered a war, the fact that a large proportion of the population was enslaved would always present a serious logistical problem.

“To think of slave men as soldiers was to think of them as freemen and members of the state.”

By considering the idea of enlisting enslaved people in its military, the Confederacy was contradicting one of its own foundational ideas. If enslaved people could fight in a war, then they could not be considered property and they were entitled, under the Confederacy’s own ideal of the “citizen soldier,” to become full, free citizens. As McCurry writes, it “represented the utter failure of the Confederate political project” (352).

“Enslaved men and women had managed to make their foundational political exclusion unsustainable, to make their political consent count, and to force the Confederate government to contend for their loyalty with emancipation.”

In this way, McCurry describes enslaved people as not only active participants in the Confederacy’s downfall, but also as active agents in history. They not only helped undermine the CSA, but also demonstrated that an economy and nation built around enslavement could not survive in the modern world.