Both issues, as McCurry correctly argues, were not connected to the ways that poor people and slaves perceived their daily struggles. She does not frame these life-and-death political battles around questions of Confederate nationalism or why the South lost. While most scholars have focused on the ironies of a Confederate nation that pursued centralized federal authority and debated limited emancipation, McCurry gets us into the pit of political contestation where politicians, generals, slaves, poor women, yeomen, Confederate soldiers, and Union armies repeatedly slammed into each other over the control of both natural and human resources.
The relentless style of argumentation that follows buries the theory in the dustbin of interpretations about southern defeat. Within the first few pages of her book, she scores a knockout blow against the trendy notion that the Confederacy died of an identity crisis. The latest academic fashions hold no appeal to Stephanie McCurry, and thankfully so, as her Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South is a brilliant exploration into the bare-knuckled political battles between the disenfranchised and those deemed citizens by the state.
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