Reckoning with the Confederacy

The article reprises the main arguments of McCurry’s 2010 book Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South: the nature of the Confederate project; the terrible reckoning—including with its own people—that came to the new nation with war; and the radically transformative consequences of white Southerners’ risky gamble on proslavery nationalism. It also lays out the methodological contribution of the book as an attempt to write a political history of the disenfranchised.