The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship - (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War) by Henry M McKiven (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship is a vast collection of Civil War correspondence from the affluent Pickens family of Greene County, Alabama. Unlike nearly all published letter collections from the era, the Pickens family correspondence includes letters written on the home front as well as those penned by family members serving in the Army of Northern Virginia. The correspondence provides rare insight into the mutual dependence of family on the home front and kin at war to sustain morale and foster the formation of Confederate national identity.

Expertly edited, annotated, and contextualized by Henry McKiven Jr., the correspondence between Mary Gaillard Pickens, a widow, and her two sons in Lee's army reveals the challenges she faced managing three plantations with at least two hundred enslaved people while struggling with anxiety and despondency brought on by fear that her sons would die in the war. The dispatches from Sam and James Pickens reveal much about their emotional struggle to maintain a commitment to the Confederacy, while their sister Mary's letters show how she grappled with the emotionally devastating impact of her fiancé dying in battle.

As the letters attest, apprehension, dread, and despair were constants in the lives of the Pickens family. That emotional burden only served to bind the family together in defense of a way of life dependent upon the labor of enslaved people. The Pickens clan continued to grasp flickering hopes for victory until the bitter end, believing that somehow the Confederacy and the world they had known before the war would survive and ultimately flourish.

Review Quotes

"This extensive body of correspondence from a wealthy Alabama family, splendidly edited by Henry McKiven, reveals a great deal about conditions on the homefront and battlefield during the Civil War. The Pickens family were keen and literate observers of important events, including some of the major campaigns fought by the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Their letters also provide valuable observations about how a planter class woman struggled to manage multiple plantations and a large number of slaves while trying to educate her children and keep one son out of military service."--Keith S. Bohannon, author of Campaigning with "Old Stonewall" Confederate Captain Ujanirtus Allen's Letters to His Wife

"McKiven unlocks a remarkable archival vault containing a wealth of Civil War-era social history. Drawing from the rare correspondence among family members, particularly that between mother and son, this indispensable collection brings together home front and battlefront to reveal the interior world of privileged enslavers who fought to maintain their intertwined racial and economic hierarchies threatened by war. The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship is an essential scholarly contribution and a must-read."--Martha Jane Brazy, author of An American Planter: Stephen Duncan of Antebellum Natchez and New York

About the Author

Henry M. McKiven Jr. is associate professor of history at the University of South Alabama and the author of Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875-1920.