Confederate Reckoning

Key to Stephanie McCurry’s thesis is that the Confederacy did not simply collapse as a result of what McCurry describes as the “preoccupation with defeat” (6). Instead, she argues that the very nature of the Confederacy itself—its dependence on enslavement and its antidemocratic nature—set it up for defeat. The Confederacy was fighting against the tide of modern history, as enslavement was gradually being abolished and representative democracy was gaining power across the globe. The Confederacy was founded with the questionable consent of the majority of its white men—especially in states like South Carolina, where the question of secession was debated with little recourse to truly representative government institutions—and no consent from its enslaved people and women. McCurry argues that the question of democratic consent would continue to haunt the Confederacy, whose leaders envisioned it as a return to the original American republic untainted by ideas of “racial equality” (13).

Although the Union also excluded the views of women, the Civil War opened up avenues for women’s political participation in the North that it simply did not in the South, where an entrenched ruling class of wealthy planters sought to avoid any erosion of their hold on political power. White women who were shut out of official political channels formed informal networks through which they were nevertheless able to exert some political influence. The Confederacy’s Black population was even more thoroughly excluded from the political process. Although enslaved people formed 40 percent of the Confederacy’s population, they were not even considered citizens throughout most of the Confederacy’s brief history. Even white men, if they did not own land and have enslaved people to work it, were often treated as less than full citizens. Political participation in the South was confined to such a narrow slice of the population that many people had no reason to be invested in the Confederacy’s bid for lasting independence, and many would not have supported it, had they been consulted. As McCurry describes the dilemma, “the vision of ‘the people’ so passionately pursued proved utterly inadequate to the nation-building project Confederate architects undertook” (3). Those holding power in the South construed “the people” so narrowly that they deluded themselves into thinking their war for independence had a public mandate it never actually had. 

Even as they were shut out of official power, women found ways to assert themselves. In the experience of both Union and Confederate officials, women acted as political agents, specifically as spies, resisters, collaborators, and rebels. The food riots organized and led by women in the spring of 1863 “demonstrated political power” (180) and even forced the state governments of the Confederacy to expand welfare and pass new laws regulating what crops planters could grow. Enslaved people undermined the war effort through acts of resistance and collaboration and simply by stoking fears of revolt. In both cases, the Confederacy viewed women, especially poor women, and enslaved people as political non-entities. By systematically excluding large swathes of the population from the political arena, the Confederacy effectively doomed itself: It was not possible to wage a modern, total war without the support and participation of the whole public. McCurry argues that the US Civil War had global ramifications, as it demonstrated conclusively that a nation founded on enslavement and exclusion could not succeed: “The Confederate political project had been tried before the eyes of the world and it had failed” (357).