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.