Fall of the House of Dixie (eBook)

Bruce Levine (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013 | 1. Auflage
464 Seiten
Random House Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-679-64535-1 (ISBN)

Infos

In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic, political, and social life of the old South, utterly destroying the Confederacy and the society it represented and defended. Told through the words of the people who lived it, The Fall of the House of Dixie illuminates the way a war undertaken to preserve the status quo became a second American Revolution whose impact on the country was as strong and lasting as that of our first.

In 1860 the American South was a vast, wealthy, imposing region where a small minority had amassed great political power and enormous fortunes through a system of forced labor. The South's large population of slaveless whites almost universally supported the basic interests of plantation owners, despite the huge wealth gap that separated them. By the end of 1865 these structures of wealth and power had been shattered. Millions of black people had gained their freedom, many poorer whites had ceased following their wealthy neighbors, and plantation owners were brought to their knees, losing not only their slaves but their political power, their worldview, their very way of life. This sea change was felt nationwide, as the balance of power in Congress, the judiciary, and the presidency shifted dramatically and lastingly toward the North, and the country embarked on a course toward equal rights.

Levine captures the many-sided human drama of this story using a huge trove of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, government documents, and more. In The Fall of the House of Dixie, the true stakes of the Civil War become clearer than ever before, as slaves battle for their freedom in the face of brutal reprisals, Abraham Lincoln and his party turn what began as a limited war for the Union into a crusade against slavery by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, poor southern whites grow increasingly disillusioned with fighting what they have come to see as the plantation owners' war, and the slave owners grow ever more desperate as their beloved social order is destroyed, not just by the Union Army, but also from within. When the smoke clears, not only Dixie but all of American society is changed forever.

Brilliantly argued and engrossing, The Fall of the House of Dixie is a sweeping account of the destruction of the old South during the Civil War, offering a fresh perspective on the most colossal struggle in our history and the new world it brought into being.

Praise for The Fall of the House of Dixie

'This is the Civil War as it is seldom seen. . . . A portrait of a country in transition . . . as vivid as any that has been written.'--The Boston Globe

'An absorbing social history . . . For readers whose Civil War bibliography runs to standard works by Bruce Catton and James McPherson, [Bruce] Levine's book offers fresh insights.'--The Wall Street Journal

'More poignantly than any book before, The Fall of the House of Dixie shows how deeply intertwined the Confederacy was with slavery, and how the destruction of both made possible a 'second American revolution' as far-reaching as the first.'--David W. Blight, author of American Oracle

'Splendidly colorful . . . Levine recounts this tale of Southern institutional rot with the ease and authority born of decades of study.'--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

'A deep, rich, and complex analysis of the period surrounding and including the American Civil War.'--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Textauszug

In the middle of the nineteenth century, southern writers and politicians boasted often--and with considerable justification--that their states were the richest, most socially stable, and most politically powerful in the United States as a whole. Southern farms and plantations yielded handsome profits to their owners, who were some of the wealthiest people in the country, and the southern elite had also controlled all three branches of the federal government during most of its existence. At the root of this all this economic and political power lay the institution of slavery--an institution which, as the former slave Frederick Douglass would later recall, then 'seemed impregnable.' Few could then have imagined, he noted, 'that in less than ten years from that time, no master would wield a lash and no slave would clank a chain in the United States.' But what almost no one foresaw in 1860 is exactly what came to pass. In Mark Twain's words, the Civil War and its aftermath 'uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country.' The most important and dramatic of these transformations was the radical destruction of slavery. One out of every three people in the South suddenly emerged from bondage into freedom, a change of such enormous significance and full of so many implications as almost to defy description. For the South's ruling families, meanwhile, the war turned the world upside down. It stripped them of their privileged status and their most valuable property. It deprived them of the totalitarian power they had previously wielded over the men, women, and children who produced most of the South's great wealth. 'The events of the last five years,' a Memphis newspaper editor summarized in 1865, 'have produced an entire revolution in the entire Southern country. The old arrangement of things is broken up.' The ex-Confederate general Richard Taylor lodged the same complaint that year. 'Society has been completely changed by the war,' he wrote. Even the stormy French revolution of the previous century 'did not produce a greater change in the 'Ancien Regime' than has this in our social life.' Abraham Lincoln applauded this 'total revolution of labor' as 'a new birth of freedom.' Black South Carolinians cheered this 'mighty revolution which must affect the future destiny of the world.' Even as it upended society in the South, the Civil War era transformed the shape of national politics in the United States as a whole. Beginning with Lincoln's election in 1860, it finally broke the southern elite's once-iron grip on the federal government and drove its leaders into the political wilderness. Into the offices that planters and their friends had previously occupied there now stepped northerners with very different values, priorities, and outlooks. These new men used their political might to encourage the growth and development of manufacturing, transportation, finance, and commerce and thereby speed the country's transformation into the economic colossus familiar to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under the hands of these same men, meanwhile, the post-Civil War federal government assumed key roles previously assigned to the states, including the power and the responsibility to safeguard the freedom and rights of the nation's citizens--citizens whose ranks now expanded to include millions of former slaves. Constitutional amendments adopted in the war's aftermath laid the legal basis for and pointed the way towards transforming the United States into a multi-racial republic. Relatively few people today are aware of just how all this happened. Although 'the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 8.1.2013
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Sozialgeschichte
• ISBN-10: 0-679-64535-7 / 0679645357
• ISBN-13: 978-0-679-64535-1 / 9780679645351