First published 2013
Bruce Levine examines how the Civil War transformed from a conflict to preserve the Union into a complete demolition of Southern society. His account traces the collapse of a region where wealthy plantation owners wielded enormous political influence through slave labor, supported by millions of non-slaveholding whites. Levine documents how this social order crumbled between 1860 and 1865 as enslaved people fought for freedom, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, poor whites abandoned their allegiance to planters, and the Confederate elite watched their world disintegrate. Drawing from diaries, letters, newspapers, and government records, he shows how the war's outcome shifted national power permanently northward and set the country on a path toward equal rights. The book reveals the Civil War as a second American Revolution that changed not just the South but the entire nation.
Genres: history, american-civil-war, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 19th-century, american-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: historical-fiction, social-change
Setting: South, United States
Period: 1860-1865
464 pages · Hardcover · Random House
Content warnings: slavery