Confederate Reckoning

“The short-lived Confederate States of America was a signal event in the history of the Western world. What secessionists set out to build was something entirely new in the history of nations: a modern proslavery and antidemocratic state, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal.”

This lays out a core part of Stephanie McCurry’s thesis. Contrary to what modern defenders of the CSA might argue, McCurry asserts that not only was the Confederacy’s foundation rooted in the defense of enslavement, the fact that the Confederacy was so beholden to enslavement was a core part of why it failed.

“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.