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This chapter describes the Irish enlistment in the Confederate Army. The Irish who wished to remain in the southern states were compelled to switch their allegiance to the new Confederate States of America. Many responded to calls to defend it, often forming their own ethnic units. About 20,000 Irishmen would serve in the Confederate armed forces.

This chapter discusses the series of Reconstruction Acts passed by Congress in March of 1867, prompted by former Confederate soldiers parading through the streets, the southern press's tirade against Reconstruction policies, southern whites' treatment of freedmen, and President Andrew Johnson's moderate policies toward the South. The first of the acts stipulated the terms by which the southern states might reenter the Union. Each of the eleven Confederate states, excluding Tennessee, would be required to write a new constitution that provided for manhood suffrage, to approve the new constitution by a majority of voters, and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Equally important, the act divided the region into five military districts, whose commanders could use the army to protect life and property.

Conceived in war, the Confederate States of America was a nation-state built around its military. As this chapter argues, military service quickly became fused with ideas about Confederate citizenship, and the military became a site where faith in the national cause melded effortlessly with religion and where white southern men were schooled in how to become soldiers and citizens, all at once.

This chapter shows how the “visible hand” of an activist state made Confederates more likely to resort to far stronger state action when war endangered the survival of slavery. Whether it was government investment in railroads, government ownership of key industries, or government regulation of commerce, Confederates adopted centralized control of the economy with surprisingly little opposition. States' objections to a strong central government, so prominent in the South under the old Union, did little to slow down the growth of the Confederate state. In antebellum debates, secessionists never imagined creating a Confederate Leviathan, but their general economic philosophy certainly helped make one possible. The creation of a strong Confederate state revealed the powerful sense of nationalism that knit together the supporters of the Confederacy's slave society.

This chapter examines the changes in the lives of merchant families in the American South during the period from 1860 to 1863. The election of Republican Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 precipitated the initial wave of southern state secessions and the following year eleven southern states declared their secession from the U.S. and formed the Confederate States of America. These events wreaked havoc upon the lives of thousands of southern merchants and their families because the war changed business patterns, threatened the safety of home and called men and merchants to become Confederate soldiers.

This chapter discusses how the Confederate States of America, or southern states, dispatched a number of delegates to Great Britain in an effort to coax the British to recognize their right to self-determination. The southern states made such an effort as previously Great Britain had allowed Sicily and Naples to secure freedoms from Italy. The southern states were hopeful that their delegates would be able to convince the British about their right to self-determination and recognize them as an independent state. The chapter also finds that bureaucrats, politicians, and policymakers from these states made concerted efforts to ensure that their right to self-determination was recognized, helping them to emerge as an independent sovereign nation.

This chapter examines welfare in Georgia, focusing on the continuity of benevolence, albeit of a different sort. In Georgia, poor whites benefited from large aid programs originating first from the Confederate state, then from the Freedmen's Bureau, and finally from charitable associations headquartered in the North.

Slaves were not initially involved in the U.S. Civil War, as white men were presumed to be the ones to settle the momentous issues that had divided the Union. Federal officials believed that the black population would not affect the outcome of the conflict, and few in the Confederate States foresaw how enslaved African Americans would contribute to the overall mobilization. But even fewer advocated the arming of slaves in pursuit of Confederate independence. In the end, about 100,000 or 200,000 free and enslaved men likely provided direct support to Confederate armed forces as servants, teamsters, and military laborers and contributed significantly to the war effort. For the Union, about 200,000 African Americans were recruited in the army and the navy and played a key role in the Union's victory.

This chapter shows how the supporters of the Confederate States of America regarded themselves as the true progenitors of the republic. They also deemed their secession from the Union as a return to the world of limited national government envisioned by the Founding Fathers. In his Inaugural Address of February 1861 delivered in Montgomery, Alabama, President Jefferson Davis declared: “We have assembled to usher into existence the Permanent Government of the Confederate States. Through this instrumentality, under the favor of Divine Providence, we hope to perpetuate the principles of our revolutionary fathers. … Therefore we are in arms to renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty.” Thus from the southern perspective, the Union was in peril, but not from the secessionists; rather, the danger came from a big government in Washington that had subverted the original Union's emphasis on states' rights into a northern tyranny.

Purchase disdain for neutrality led some citizens to call for a military alliance with Tennessee or for regional secession and the formation of a Confederate state with West Tennessee. Delegates to a convention in Mayfield in May ultimately abandoned both proposals because they believed the rest of the state was bound to secede anyway. But apparently no other part of a loyal border state considered such an unprecedented move during the Civil War.

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to examine the rebel children and their families in South Carolina, where the Civil War erupted. Composed of a black majority, South Carolina earned a reputation as the most militant Confederate state. Fierce fighting took place along the coast. In 1860, South Carolina leaders urged their people to war and gambled with the future of the children of their state, and lost.

During the last year of the war, Confederate record keeping had become haphazard and incomplete at best with company and regimental record books in a disorderly state. But such disarray did not begin to compare to the destruction of both Confederate governmental and army records during the first week of April 1865. In this essay Bohannon surveys the destruction and search for Confederate records at the end of the war, and he reminds us that the paucity of official military correspondence and reports make it extremely difficult to fully recover the story of those final days of Lee’s command.

A review of the demobilization of the Confederate Army from April 1865 and beyond. A long view of this act of demobilization demonstrates a range of postwar social, political, and military challenges that might otherwise be missed and illuminates how Confederate soldiers became citizens. While some former Confederates tried to continue the war’s aims outside of the United States, most soldiers journeyed home and then began to think about how to become a citizen again.

During the War of the Rebellion, the South took the initiative in employing Negro soldiers. However, they were free Negroes, and many of them owned large interests in Louisiana and South Carolina. A law was passed on June 28, 1861 conferring upon the black man military privileges and duties. It was the first law enacted by any State, whether in or out of the Union, and before the United States Congress or the Confederate Congress had entertained any proposition contemplating the military employment of Negroes. While the Confederate States did not use Negroes to any great extent, they had learned the value of the Negro in a time of war as well as in a time of peace. Although the Confiscation Act of August 6, 1861, and the order of the War Department to the commanding general at Port Royal, warranted and justified the employment of fugitive slaves in a military capacity, no direct legislation had been secured to enroll the Negro as a soldier. Nevertheless, a number of Negro surgeons and chaplains were commissioned during the war.

This chapter analyzes how De Bow viewed the American Civil War. As a leading secessionist he hoped for an important job in the new government of the Confederate States of America. He became an agent for the Produce Loan Office, which attempted to raise money for the southern war effort. His new job and the lack of printing supplies meant that he had to stop publishing the Review in 1862. De Bow immediately recognized flaws in many of the industrial and commercial innovations he had helped promote in the South. By 1864 he realized that southern defeat had become inevitable, and he spent the last years of the war moving from place to place, avoiding northern armies, and trying to raise money for the southern cause. At the end of the war he pledged his loyalty to the United States and began to rebuild the editorial offices of the Review.

This chapter argues that secession transformed the Knights of the Golden Circle from a political confidence game into a multipurpose tool for a nation-building enterprise. That is, the Knights of the Golden Circle eased the effort of the Southern elite to build a nation by secession from a country it could no longer control and acquire the new territory they believed they could. Over time, George W. L. Bickley fine-tuned his flattery of the Southern elite, shaping for them a tool that appealed to popular prejudices against republican ideology. In response, the masters of the new Confederate nation found the Knights of the Golden Circle most useful as an all-purpose label for its enforcement arm at the defining margins of the new Confederate States of America.

In the late winter of 1865, the newly appointed Confederate Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge believed that the war was lost, reunion all but inevitable, and with Lee’s endorsement the Confederate Congress might press Jefferson Davis to sue for peace. For months prior to Appomattox, Lee, Breckinridge, and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell strategized on how the Confederacy might avoid an absolute military subjugation. As late as April 2, Breckinridge and Campbell were devising a new peace strategy, and on April 7 Lee and the secretary of war discussed how they might yet avoid outright surrender. Highlighting the interplay between the military and political goals of the war, Davis’s essay places Lee’s exchanges with Grant between April 7 and 9 into context: if Lee could stall as long as possible and perhaps convince the Union general to agree to an armistice, perhaps the Confederacy might yet survive intact or at the very least the Union would be forced to make significant concessions.