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4.0 AVERAGE
4.0 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
adventurous
challenging
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Add this to your Civil War reading list. I'm going to give a long review, but one that nonetheless still just gives the backbone of the book.
Lincoln once said that “somehow” the war was about slavery, even though most the North, including him, denied it at the start.
Most of the 11 Confederate states’ ordinances of secession admitted it, though. So, too, did the Confederate Constitution.
So, Bruce Levine starts there, in “The Fall of the House of Dixie.” (You know this book is good, beyond that, when Eric Foner is among those named in the Acknowledgements.)
As in, starts right there on page 4, with states from the 1860 US Census.
In all 15 slave states, 1 in 4 whites were slaveowners. (Levine later notes that in the 11 seceding states it was 1 in 3, so adjust the below accordingly.)
The typical master owned 4-6 slaves, he says. But, that was just the bottom rung of the highly capitalistic slaveowning South.
One in eight Southern masters had 20 or more slaves, and thus officially counted as “planters” according to the Census. The math says that’s 3 percent of Southern whites. In the seceding states, about 5 percent.
Next tier? The “ten thousand families” that owned 50 or more slaves, and now it gets more fun because Levine starts naming names. Allegedly “good master” Robert E. Lee and his wife were here; he and Mary Fitzhugh Custis Lee inherited 60 slaves with their Arlington mansion from her father, George Washington Parke Custis. (And that name should remind you of Lee’s connections.) Edmund Ruffin is in this group. So are two couples cited extensively in this book.
Next tier? The 1 in 15 planter families who owned 100 or more slaves, or 3,000 families. Jeff Davis and Robert Toombs were among this small group.
The semifinal cut for Levine? Those owning 250 or more slaves. Davis’ brother Joseph is here. So is Howell Cobb. So is the vile James Henry Hammond and the incendiary Robert Barnwell Rhett Sr. As is James Chesnut Sr., father-in-law of noted Confederate diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut.
The final cut? 500. Here, the father of the wife of one couple in the 50-plus class is here.
Add in, on the photo plates pages, the 1860 Census map of slave ownership percentages by county, and we’re good to go with the basic story.
Levine, lumping 1861 and 1862 together, does a yearly overview of the North’s military progress combined with the South’s reaction, much of it from people named in the various levels of slave ownership above. “Poor whites,” whether slaveless or the 4-6 class are also cited in detail. So are the two most states-rightists governors, Joseph E. Brown and Zebulon Vance, along with others noting the Confederacy’s internal contradictions.
Those contradictions culminate when Davis pushes a version of Patrick Cleburne’s proposal to arm slaves in exchange for (limited) freedom. Besides the argument that this would shatter the Confederacy’s basic operating principle, Levine notes that some planters still rejected the idea that slaves could fight. Others, on the other hand, thought they would — and for the Union, as soon as you gave them a Southern gun.
Of the many other things in this excellent book, one more needs to be cited.
And, that is Levine’s documentation of Lincoln’s war-long reticence over land redistribution. Reconstruction would of course gone better with him still alive. He would have reacted to the Klan, Knights of the Camilla etc. much more rapidly than Andy Johnson. Example? The Second Confiscation Act of 1862 gave him the formal right to seize not only slaves of disloyal owners, but their other property. However, and as Levine notes, AT LINCOLN’S INSISTENCE, on the death of said rebels, all property except their slaves would revert to their heirs. Rich Northern whites might pay to rent it under such terms; poor blacks couldn’t afford to touch it.
In a related matter, in the reconstruction of Louisiana’s beginnings, Lincoln ignored Salmon Chase’s cries not to allow its new state government to pass “as a temporary arrangement” special laws governing the newly freed slaves as a “laboring, landless and homeless class.”
Levine doesn’t tackle the colonization issue, but the two paragraphs above should refute the likes of David Reynolds and James Oakes about just how high-minded Lincoln was, or was not, about the future of freed slaves after Jan. 1, 1863. Was he continuing to evolve? Yes. Might have continued to evolve further, had he lived? Yes. Did he also, as I have noted to those two gentlemen, likely discuss the colonization issue with Spoons Butler the day before his assassination? Yes.
Lincoln once said that “somehow” the war was about slavery, even though most the North, including him, denied it at the start.
Most of the 11 Confederate states’ ordinances of secession admitted it, though. So, too, did the Confederate Constitution.
So, Bruce Levine starts there, in “The Fall of the House of Dixie.” (You know this book is good, beyond that, when Eric Foner is among those named in the Acknowledgements.)
As in, starts right there on page 4, with states from the 1860 US Census.
In all 15 slave states, 1 in 4 whites were slaveowners. (Levine later notes that in the 11 seceding states it was 1 in 3, so adjust the below accordingly.)
The typical master owned 4-6 slaves, he says. But, that was just the bottom rung of the highly capitalistic slaveowning South.
One in eight Southern masters had 20 or more slaves, and thus officially counted as “planters” according to the Census. The math says that’s 3 percent of Southern whites. In the seceding states, about 5 percent.
Next tier? The “ten thousand families” that owned 50 or more slaves, and now it gets more fun because Levine starts naming names. Allegedly “good master” Robert E. Lee and his wife were here; he and Mary Fitzhugh Custis Lee inherited 60 slaves with their Arlington mansion from her father, George Washington Parke Custis. (And that name should remind you of Lee’s connections.) Edmund Ruffin is in this group. So are two couples cited extensively in this book.
Next tier? The 1 in 15 planter families who owned 100 or more slaves, or 3,000 families. Jeff Davis and Robert Toombs were among this small group.
The semifinal cut for Levine? Those owning 250 or more slaves. Davis’ brother Joseph is here. So is Howell Cobb. So is the vile James Henry Hammond and the incendiary Robert Barnwell Rhett Sr. As is James Chesnut Sr., father-in-law of noted Confederate diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut.
The final cut? 500. Here, the father of the wife of one couple in the 50-plus class is here.
Add in, on the photo plates pages, the 1860 Census map of slave ownership percentages by county, and we’re good to go with the basic story.
Levine, lumping 1861 and 1862 together, does a yearly overview of the North’s military progress combined with the South’s reaction, much of it from people named in the various levels of slave ownership above. “Poor whites,” whether slaveless or the 4-6 class are also cited in detail. So are the two most states-rightists governors, Joseph E. Brown and Zebulon Vance, along with others noting the Confederacy’s internal contradictions.
Those contradictions culminate when Davis pushes a version of Patrick Cleburne’s proposal to arm slaves in exchange for (limited) freedom. Besides the argument that this would shatter the Confederacy’s basic operating principle, Levine notes that some planters still rejected the idea that slaves could fight. Others, on the other hand, thought they would — and for the Union, as soon as you gave them a Southern gun.
Of the many other things in this excellent book, one more needs to be cited.
And, that is Levine’s documentation of Lincoln’s war-long reticence over land redistribution. Reconstruction would of course gone better with him still alive. He would have reacted to the Klan, Knights of the Camilla etc. much more rapidly than Andy Johnson. Example? The Second Confiscation Act of 1862 gave him the formal right to seize not only slaves of disloyal owners, but their other property. However, and as Levine notes, AT LINCOLN’S INSISTENCE, on the death of said rebels, all property except their slaves would revert to their heirs. Rich Northern whites might pay to rent it under such terms; poor blacks couldn’t afford to touch it.
In a related matter, in the reconstruction of Louisiana’s beginnings, Lincoln ignored Salmon Chase’s cries not to allow its new state government to pass “as a temporary arrangement” special laws governing the newly freed slaves as a “laboring, landless and homeless class.”
Levine doesn’t tackle the colonization issue, but the two paragraphs above should refute the likes of David Reynolds and James Oakes about just how high-minded Lincoln was, or was not, about the future of freed slaves after Jan. 1, 1863. Was he continuing to evolve? Yes. Might have continued to evolve further, had he lived? Yes. Did he also, as I have noted to those two gentlemen, likely discuss the colonization issue with Spoons Butler the day before his assassination? Yes.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
Excellent history not just of generals and battles rather of the people and society. The end of the Civil War was just a truce in the war against white supremacist ideology. After this I started WEB Dubois Black Reconstruction.
I went into this book with notions as to slavery's responsibility of the Civil War and came out on the other end not only vindicated but educated and angered. I don't know how you write history better than what Bruce Levine does here, in a shallow 299 pages no less. Levine deftly shapes a narrative of how slavery impacted the southern economy and how its primary benefactors, the planter class, dominated southern culture and politics, up to the point of secession and civil war. Eschewing any attempts at telling a simple story, Levine gives us long looks into everyone from southern aristocracy to poor whites who were ambivalent (at best) about a rich man's war, to slaves who knew full well what was going on as the Union advanced and rejoiced, to the closed doors of both seats of power and their motivations. It blows away any notion that the Civil War was about anything less than slavery and deals honestly with the racism involved in the north and the south and how blacks were caught in the middle.
I said I felt "angered" upon reading this book. It's not because of the writing but the content. Since Jim Crow, there has been a push by white people to deny the causes of the Civil War in an attempt to mollify truth tellers, erase black identity in American history, and forsake white guilt. I have long since lost my patience with those who defend the Confederacy, make bs "states rights" arguments that don't match the light of day, and wave around the Confederate flag (Nope, not referring to it as the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia. You clowns know damn well what it stands for). The Civil War was about keeping black people enslaved. It is a mercy that the south lost. It did not solve all of the nation's problems. But it is the single greatest thing to happen to this Republic since it was established. To suggest any less is to fall into the same trap of erasing the narrative of the racially oppressed. I will be angry but now there's more fuel for the fire. Thanks to Bruce Levine for telling this story so well.
I said I felt "angered" upon reading this book. It's not because of the writing but the content. Since Jim Crow, there has been a push by white people to deny the causes of the Civil War in an attempt to mollify truth tellers, erase black identity in American history, and forsake white guilt. I have long since lost my patience with those who defend the Confederacy, make bs "states rights" arguments that don't match the light of day, and wave around the Confederate flag (Nope, not referring to it as the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia. You clowns know damn well what it stands for). The Civil War was about keeping black people enslaved. It is a mercy that the south lost. It did not solve all of the nation's problems. But it is the single greatest thing to happen to this Republic since it was established. To suggest any less is to fall into the same trap of erasing the narrative of the racially oppressed. I will be angry but now there's more fuel for the fire. Thanks to Bruce Levine for telling this story so well.
Finally a book that sees the Civil War as being all about slavery as opposed to states rights. Well researched and enjoyable to read.
Really enjoyable read about how Southern culture and social structures affected the Civil War. Lots of anecdotes mixed in with the statistics to keep things interesting!
A book detailing how the Civil War tore apart the social institutions of the Antebellum South.
Levine's thesis, that the Civil War was America's Second Revolution, is not necessarily original, but his execution is fresh and fascinating. The book is about events that took place during the Civil War, but it is not military history. Instead, it follows in great detail the social evolution that took place in both the South and the North as the war progressed. In the former, the ferocious dedication of the planter class to preserving its "peculiar institution", chattel slavery, and the socio-economic order it made possible, gradually giving way to realization that their way of life would inevitably be destroyed. From the antebellum southern aristocrat's point of view, with which the book is mostly concerned, The Fall of the House of Dixie is an apocalypse. To a lesser extent, Levine follows how popular sentiment in the North shifted from a commitment to preserving the Union to a crusade to annihilate chattel slavery. Levine tells these stories not by recounting events, but through referencing journals, letters, diaries, speeches, and editorials supported by official records that demonstrate the ferocious debates taking place off the battlefields and how they shaped much of America as we know it today (the good, the bad, and the ugly).
As the Civil War entered its final days, Chaplain William H. Hunter stood before a packed house of freedmen and Black union soldiers in Wilmington, North Carolina's Front Street Methodist Church. Hunter, a former slave who purchased his freedom, addressed the crowd and in a few sentences summarized the momentous social, political, and cultural changes wrought throughout the United States: "A few short years ago I left North Carolina a slave; I now return a man. I have the honor the be the regular minister of the Gospel in the Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States and also a regularly commissioned chaplain in the American Army" (p. 264). The implications of the Emancipation Proclamation, the centrality of slave and freedmen religion, and the pride attending black military service all intersected in the life of William H. Hunter.
In this well-written narrative of the Civil War, historian Bruce Levine argues that the conflict amounted to nothing less than a "second American Revolution." While the first American Revolution was radical in its own time—given that equality among white men was a novel concept—by 1870 this second revolution ushered in emancipation, voting rights, and full legal equality to black and white men. Frederick Douglass described the "inexorable logic" of abolishing slavery once the Civil War commenced, and Bruce Levine injects that logic into his own narrative to describe the procession from sectional conflict during the 1850s, secession after the Election of 1860, the twin Confiscation Acts that legalized ad hoc emancipation, the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 that transformed the conflics from one of reunion into the full assault on slavery, and finally Reconstruction's 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States' Constitution that abolished slavery, conferred citizenship upon freedmen, and granted the franchise to black men, respectively.
Bruce Levine interprets the Emancipation Proclamation gradually emerging from the exigencies of a protracted war against the Confederacy. While politicians and military strategists predicted a short, decisive contest after Ft. Sumter, all quickly realized that Confederate tenacity and Northern disorganization predicted a long, bitter struggle. Frederick Douglass, Benjamin F. Butler, and others pressed Lincoln to attack the heart of Confederate resistance, manpower, and support: the peculiar institution. After Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation he faced severe criticism from Northern Democrats, but the realities that Union soldiers encountered in the slave South, Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, and Confederate intransigence convinced many that abolishing slavery was pragmatic (or morally commendable) and rallied support to Lincoln in the Election of 1864. That Election sealed the fate of the C.S.A because it amounted to nothing less than a public mandate for Lincoln to continue with his policies.
Many of the sub-arguments in The Fall of the House of Dixie come from recent histories written by Joseph Glatthaar, Gary Gallagher, and Mark Grimsley on the conflict. Nevertheless, Levine pushes an original thesis about the "second American Revolution" that forces his reader to grapple with important questions about the significance of the Civil War. In this way, Levine demonstrates the vital connections between American wars and transformations in American political culture and social relationships. This book speaks to the continued relevance of military history for the academy and the specific value of "war and society" historiography. The interested reader will find in Levine a clear, gripping and terrifying story of the Civil War.
I highly recommend this work to any and all interested in the Civil War, especially those looking for a volume that integrates both important military episodes (battles, tactics, campaigns) and the simultaneous and subsequent social changes made possible by the conflict. It's also up-to-date on the most recent interpretations of the conflict produced by academic historians.
In this well-written narrative of the Civil War, historian Bruce Levine argues that the conflict amounted to nothing less than a "second American Revolution." While the first American Revolution was radical in its own time—given that equality among white men was a novel concept—by 1870 this second revolution ushered in emancipation, voting rights, and full legal equality to black and white men. Frederick Douglass described the "inexorable logic" of abolishing slavery once the Civil War commenced, and Bruce Levine injects that logic into his own narrative to describe the procession from sectional conflict during the 1850s, secession after the Election of 1860, the twin Confiscation Acts that legalized ad hoc emancipation, the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 that transformed the conflics from one of reunion into the full assault on slavery, and finally Reconstruction's 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States' Constitution that abolished slavery, conferred citizenship upon freedmen, and granted the franchise to black men, respectively.
Bruce Levine interprets the Emancipation Proclamation gradually emerging from the exigencies of a protracted war against the Confederacy. While politicians and military strategists predicted a short, decisive contest after Ft. Sumter, all quickly realized that Confederate tenacity and Northern disorganization predicted a long, bitter struggle. Frederick Douglass, Benjamin F. Butler, and others pressed Lincoln to attack the heart of Confederate resistance, manpower, and support: the peculiar institution. After Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation he faced severe criticism from Northern Democrats, but the realities that Union soldiers encountered in the slave South, Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, and Confederate intransigence convinced many that abolishing slavery was pragmatic (or morally commendable) and rallied support to Lincoln in the Election of 1864. That Election sealed the fate of the C.S.A because it amounted to nothing less than a public mandate for Lincoln to continue with his policies.
Many of the sub-arguments in The Fall of the House of Dixie come from recent histories written by Joseph Glatthaar, Gary Gallagher, and Mark Grimsley on the conflict. Nevertheless, Levine pushes an original thesis about the "second American Revolution" that forces his reader to grapple with important questions about the significance of the Civil War. In this way, Levine demonstrates the vital connections between American wars and transformations in American political culture and social relationships. This book speaks to the continued relevance of military history for the academy and the specific value of "war and society" historiography. The interested reader will find in Levine a clear, gripping and terrifying story of the Civil War.
I highly recommend this work to any and all interested in the Civil War, especially those looking for a volume that integrates both important military episodes (battles, tactics, campaigns) and the simultaneous and subsequent social changes made possible by the conflict. It's also up-to-date on the most recent interpretations of the conflict produced by academic historians.