Stephanie McCurry
Autor von Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South
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Bildnachweis: University of Pennsylvania
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- Rechtmäßiger Name
- McCurry, Stephanie
- Geschlecht
- female
- Nationalität
- Nothern Ireland
UK - Geburtsort
- Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
- Wohnorte
- New York, New York, USA
- Ausbildung
- State University of New York, Binghamton (Ph.D|1988)
University of Rochester (MA|1983)
University of Western Ontario (BA|1981) - Berufe
- professor
historian - Organisationen
- Columbia University
University of Pennsylvania
Northwestern University
University of California, San Diego - Preise und Auszeichnungen
- Society of American Historians (2013)
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However, before McCurry even gets to the actions of the "soldiers' wives" demanding subsistence, and the slaves seeking freedom, she deal with the whole mechanics of secession, which entailed the planters pushing their effective power to the hilt, and using a lot of intimidation, to take their states out of the Union. This being over the protests of significant minorities of pro-union opinion. There was just one long term element of weakness for the new state, but this was overlooked, considering that the Southern elites seem to have always considered adherence to the United States, and its constitution, a matter of, well, convenience.
From there, McCurry devotes two long chapters to the behavior of non-elite women in the Confederacy, the women who wound up staging food riots through-out the South in 1863. While I had been aware of these riots, I was not aware of the details, that they were preceded by a long political pressure campaign by women to make Confederate governments live up to their obligations to support the wives of the soldiers, followed by armed insurrection to take food by force when all else failed. The Confederate politicians did not think of these women as being anything other than part of the households of their husbands, and these women didn't think of themselves as citizens, but they certainly acted like an estate, and left the authorities slack-jawed and scrambling for solutions. Just one of many surprises the reality of total war presented men who thought they could just waltz out of their own political obligations.
This then brings us to the last third of this book, wherein McCurry deals with the practical aspects of what slavery meant to the Confederacy, and while the Confederate leadership convinced themselves that slavery would be a force-multiplier for them in the case of an unlikely war, the slave owners and the slaves had their own agendas. The bottom line is that the average slave holder saw themselves as a sovereign citizen, for whom adhesion to government requirements was optional, and if complying with Confederate requisitions for labor risked the loss of their "property," they were opting out. Even if it meant, ironically, the failure of the Confederate project.
As for the slaves wanting to be free, well, Thomas Jefferson hit the nail on the head when he observed that, in time of war, a population of slaves would always be a security weakness, and such was the case for the Confederacy. McCurry spends a lot of time discussing how war broke all the plantation colonies of the Western Hemisphere, as states waging war needed to maximize every resource, including men of military age. McCurry works very had to give the reader some sense of how the slaves helped themselves in the course of getting their freedom, opening up a second front in the American Civil War that further drained Confederate military resources.
A particular value of this book is that McCurry goes to some lengths to rise above the cliches of American Exceptionalism, and this book is part of the now long-running trend to adopting an "Atlanticist" perspective. Besides comparing the Confederate experience with slavery with the collapse of the institution in the other societies of North and South America, she tends to place the revolt of the "soldiers' wives" into European tradition of social revolution, when authoritarian states demanded too much of their people, and political authority buckled under the pressure.
I wound up wishing that I had read this book years earlier, and had been on the verge of striking it from by own version of Mount TBR. Due to it being a relatively old study at this point, there are new considerations, that McCurry couldn't have thought of. Yes, she doesn't gloss over post-1865 racial violence in the United States, just concluding that organized slavery was broken as a social order. That there are state and local governments in the former states of the Confederacy who are mounting a new campaign to white-wash the experience of the Civil War demonstrates that the past of that war is not really past.… (mehr)