american history tv on c-span-3. for more information about our schedule and our programs, please visit our website, at cspan.org/history. you can sign up for the weekly e-mail of highlights of the program schedule and a weekly podcast. and you can connect with us on twitter, facebook and youtube. >> this week on the civil war, author and university of pennsylvania history professor, stephanie mccurry, speaks about her book "confederate reckoning: power and politics in the civil war south." she says the south sewed the seeds of demise creating a regime that excluded white women and slaves that together comprised a segment of the majority of the population. the kansas city public library hosted this talk.

it is about 1:15. >> good evening, everybody. i would look to thank diane and her colleagues at umkc for inviting me here tonight to speak to this symposium. 151 years ago, last december, a group of south carolina politicians finally pulled off something they had been trying to do for years, they called a convention of what they called the people, and they voted themselves out of the union. within six weeks, i'm sorry, within weeks, six more deep south states had joined them in their bid for national independence. theirs was a gamble of massive proportions and as we know it changed the course of history. standing on the brink of war, no one in the american south could have known what lay ahead. the scale of war, the demands of waging it, the level, level of

mobilization it would require, the dominion of death it ushered in. all this was unimaginable in december 1860. still, southerners knew it was a dangerous, even reckless undertaking. so especially now as we engage the centennial of the american civil war, i think there's one question above all that we aught to ask and answer. why did they risk it? it's not enough to stop at abstract questions about the constitutionality of secession, far more pressing is the matter of why they insisted on exercising that claimed right. what was wrong with the original republic? what kind of country did secessionists want to build? i think you have to start there to grasp the drama of the reckoning that came after when that new southern nation was plunged into war. to me, the history of the confederacy is an epic story. a story of ambition and failure.

and one of the most gripping parts of that story is the way the war tested the confederacy from within as well as from without. in terms of the practicality and justice of its own national ambitions, the confederacy was subject to the judgment of it own people, even as it attempted to survive the military test posed by the union army. that many of those people were from the vast ranks of the politically dispossessed in the civil war south, poor white and rural women and enslaved men and women never consulted about the wisdom of secession in war. this shows the profound poverty of the founders' vision of the people. and it poses a whole host of challenging questions about how to write confederate history. so this is what i want to talk about tonight. about the violent unpredictability of what secessionists started. what they brought on themselves, and all of the other people of

the southern states who were dragged into war. and also, about the absolute impossibility in telling that history of separating the military fate of the confederate states of america from developments on the home front. for if we are to begun to understand what happened in the confederacy at war, we have to grapple with how the response of women, slaves and other noncitizens fundamentally shaped and put limits on what it was politically possible for the davis administration and the confederate military to do by way of waging war. this history of the confederacy is a far bigger story, i think, than has often been appreciated. in terms of causes, dynamics, and consequences, it was part of a far larger struggle being waged in the western world, over the future of slavery. of democracy. and the powers of nation states. confederates were fully caught

up in the turbulent currents of history that roiled the hemisphere in the age of emancipation. whatever the outcome, the political and military failure of southern slave holders bid for independence would register profoundly, not just in the region, but in the nation and the world. slave holders in cuba and brazil, as well as advocates of abolition everywhere paid close attention to -- to the result. the shored-lived confederate states of america was a signal event in the history of the western world. what secessionists set out to build was something entirely new in the history of nations, a modern, pro-slavery, and anti-democratic state, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal. southerners acted out of confidence, no other class of slave-holding people in the

hemisphere attempted this. they were emboldened by what they saw as the failure of emancipation in other parts of the world, determined to avoid the fate of slave holders in haiti and jamaica and convinced that the american vision of the people had been terribly betrayed. southern slave holders sought the kind of future for human slavery and republican government no longer possible they thought within the original union. and although they would later sound a different note, secessionists were brazenly candid in time and place about why the southern states were leaving the union and thus about the causes of secession. and they made their motives plain, not just in formal declarations, but new the long battle for the hearts and minds of southern people that proceeded and produced independence. secession was not just an idea or political argument. it had to be a political campaign. a hard-fought, downright dirty political campaign that went on more than a year and turned on

building support among the majority of voters, men, after all, who owned no slaves. if there was ever a time to deny that the interest of slave holders were driving secession, this was it. but to the contrary, secessionists made the need to defend slavery the very centerpiece of their electoral campaign. in the immediate aftermath of lincoln's election in november 1860, the first of a republican party candidate and first elected entirely by northern votes, advocates of secession moved to bring disunion before the vote of the people in various states. theirs was a political campaign, as sophisticated as any in modern history. and it used every means available not short of fraud and violence, to make the case for radical action. and to be sure, secessionists insisted that southerners' constitutional rights had been violated. but they also made no bones about what those rights were. indeed, popular appeals

etch sized, quote, the deep and vital interests of every man, non-slave holder as well as slave holder in the maintenance of slavely and the political independence of the south. one pamphlet bluntly titled, quote, the interest in slavery of the southern nonslaveholder, reminded non-slave holders of the particular value and dignity of white men's labor in slave society. no white man at the south serves the other as a body servant. cleans his boots. waits on his table or performs menial services of his household. his blood would revolt against it and necessity would never drive him to it. others tried to stir up poor white men's racial and sexual fears about slave emancipation. where are the white non-slaveholders of haiti one south carolina politician asked? conjuring up a future of racial war, rape and what he called extermination or amalgamation under the new black republican regime.

such appeals were clearly designed to make it seem as if the very future of all white men, not just those who own slaves, but all free men, as they invariably put it was at stake in secession. by february, 1861, they had triumphed in seven deep south states, some by incredibly slim margins and in one, georgia, probably by fraud. as printed ordnance of secession hit the streets, trumpeting southern independents to the world, the states also offered formal justifications of their actions as jefferson had done in the declaration of independence. in their declaration for example, mississippi said bluntly, quote, our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, with a northern majority advocating negro equality, we have no choice but to submit to the loss of our property worth $4 billion dollars or secede from the

union." president davis and other southern leaders would later deny it. but at the time nobody tried to obscure the fact that the protection of slavery was the cause of secession. they had a right to defend property and slaves. secessionists said clearly in 1860 and 1861 against a federal government and new black republican regime pledged to abolish it. in march 1861,the new vice president of the cabinet, this is davis' cabinet, the vice president of the confederacy, briefly a booster of the confederacy, very briefly, offered a political manifesto for the slaveholders republic. he was trying to convince virginia to cast their lot. and they were still refusing to secede. to convince them he offered them a blunt assessment of the difference between the old union and the new. the original american republic he said, quote, rested upon the

assumption of the equality of the races. but our new government is founded upon explicitly the opposite idea. its foundations are laid. its corner stone rests upon the greet truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavely is his natural condition. this, our new government, its the first in the history of the world based on this great truth. when representatives of that new nation sat down in montgomery to write their constitution, pro-slavery proposals were rendered concrete. you often hear the confederate constitution is simply a copy of the american constitution. but this is -- very much not the case. they purged the document of the euphemisms adopted in the origin nam u.s. constitution, brazenly using the words slaves instead of other persons, in writing the 3/5 clause and fugitive slave cause and bound the congress and territorial governments to recognize and protect the

institution of negro slavely and also guaranteed citizens of the right of so jurn and transit in any state or territory with their slaves or other prompt. clearly they aimed at empire, in the southwest. but the centerpiece of the confederate constitution, what up-ends any attempt to cast it simply as the a copy of the original one, was a wholly new clause which prohibited the government from ever changing the law of slavery. quote, no bill of attainder or law denying or impairing the right of negro, i'm sorry, the right of property and negro slaves shall ever be passed. keep this in mind. they tied their hands before they even got started. thus they moved to make slavery permanent and to dispence with all agitating issues about slavery that plagued political life in the antebellum period. and founders also seized on this opportunity to limit democracy in other ways, moving to spell

and fix out, i'm sorry, moving to spell out and fix its racial and gender basis. let there be but two classes of persons here, the white and the black, the new alabama constitution specified. keep all the white men politically equal, the superior race, let the negro be subordinate and our government will be strong and our liberties secure. the racial and gender boundaries of confederate democracy were abundantly clear. jefferson davis and other confederate leaders would cast secession as a wholly constitutional move, designed simply to restore government, to what the founding fathers had originally intended. davis would enshrine that version of the south's motives in his postwar memoirs and it would become a staple of the mythology of the lost cause. the goal of secession he said, was merely to protect the rights of sovereign states from quote

the tremendous and sweeping usurpation of the federal government. this is what he said in the 1880s. the existence of african servitude was in no way the cause of the conflict, but only an incident to it. and all too many historians have fallen for the pitch. confederates did not believe they needed to make new worlds, the historian emory thomas, famously said. they were more than content with the world they already had. this could not be more wrong. in falling for the lost cause argument, historians have lost sight of the true nature of what confederates attempted to do at such incredible risk of blood and treasure. in seceding to perfect the republic confederate founders, in fact, set out to make shotgun that had never existed before in the united states. an explicitly pro slavery country. secessionists, constitutional,

constitutional and restorationist rhetoric obscured radical new ends. theirs was a country that defended slavery, rejected democracy, and scorned the declaration of independence. it rejected most of the principles americans value most highly. secession was the south's big gamble on the future of slavery. and they didn't have to do it. pro-slavery southerners could have played a wait and see game as many unionists advised, but for those mostly deep south men who orchestrated secession in the fall of 1860 and winter of 1861, the election of abraham lincoln presented a risky but desperately sought opportunity to bring the crisis of slavery to a head. and with secession, those men went all in. with war came the reckoning. i think it's hard to exaggerate the drama of what ensued in the confederacy once the founders were free to pursue their dream

of a slaveholder state. once war ban the south-pro slavery and anti-democratic experiment was tried, not just by the enemy armies or raid against it, but by the very people, the slaves and white women, the confederate founders had counted out. the confederacy faced a political as well as a military testing. it could hardly have been otherwise. it had been difficult enough to convince the south's white men to support secession. i don't need to tell anybody that in missouri, i am sure. in some southern, even deep south states, commitments to unionism ran so deep, it took substantial manipulation of the electoral system to produce slim majorities for independence. nowhere in the deep south, were ordinances of secession submitted for popular ratification. in the upper south, only war and lincoln's call for troops broke the impasse, and even then, four

slave states, this one included chose union. but as it turned out, there were far more of the people to contend with in the making of history in the civil war than the white men who cast their votes for or against this union. as the founders faced the tax of building a new nation, the demand on the people escalated alarmingly. out of a total population off about 10 million people in the confederate states, fewer than 1.5 million the number of white male voters had ever had a say on secession. but this is what the positions politicians meant when they talked about the consent of the governed. but if it only took 1/6 of the confederacy, it would have called for 10 million to secure its survival. the confederate's commitment to nation making, involved a wreck ening wreckening, including the

massive, enfranchised women and slaves. confederates original vision of the people proved utterly inadequate to the nation building project they launched in 1861 as that kris police state attempted to surmount the structural problems it faced as a slave regime at war. excuse me. war immeasurably upped the ante in the white man's new republic. as the new government turned to its citizens to support and defend the bid for national independence, it faced the necessity of building support among those whose consent for war had never been secured. and then began a relentless process in which government officials and military men all the way up the chain of command, scrambled to execute policies, designed to build a state and wage war, while preserving slavery and feeding and protecting a civilian population increasingly that denied the support of their men. in mobilizing for the war, the

confederacy faced a number of political challenges, particularly to slave regimes. chief among them was the way the institution of slavery limited the power of the federal government and compromised its sovereignty. as jefferson davis once said, slavery was a form of government for those not fit to govern themselves. excuse me. slavery was the slave state. their masters the authority to which they owed allegiance. but what that meant in practice was that, slaves had no standing in relationship to the state, owed the government no allegiance, and could be accessed by it only as the property of their masters. that left considerable power in the hand of the masters themselves, establishing slave holders as a competing source of authority to the government, and limiting the number of men the government could call on for the defense of the state. in both respects, the davis government would suffer as it tried to mobilize for war.

a state that couldn't claim the allegiance of a big segment of its adult male population, let's just say they faced inherent dangers, ones exacerbated by war. at one level, the problem was obvious. the confederacy had an economy in population a fraction the size of its enemy. sorry, i have been sick this week. the north had ten times the south's manufacturing capacity and the population of 10 million in the south was dwarfed by the union's 22 million. but even that understates the manpower problem, because in addition, 40% of the adult men in the confederacy were enslaved. and as such unavailable for military service. and it quickly became clear what such imbalances meant. the south would have to exert unprecedented and insupportable demands on its own population

and build up a powerful central state government, ironically, to do what the private sector could not. the increasingly intimate and coercive relations was profoundly disorienting to people accustomed to little government interference in their lives. the new powers claimed by the new federal government challenged slaveholders usual authority over their property, and posed tests of nationalism, many of them failed. but for slaves and white women, people in whom government had expressed no previous interest, who has been content to leave to the government of husband and fathers, i'm sorry, husbands and masters, the war was more than a test of political commitments, it was a profoundly transformative event. for them the confederate war was a moment when time itself seemed to open up and they stepped into the making of history.

by 1862, the process of desperate innovation was already well under way. and the davis administration driven to adopt the first conscription act in american history. when all was said and done, confederate armies would enlist a staggering 75 to 85% of the white military age population. to say this tested the limit of popular support for war is an understatement. when combined with exceptions, the government was forced to make for slaveholders, including the exemption of one white man for every 20 slaves on a plantation, and the decision to allow the purchase of substitutes, conscription quickly raised cries of rich man's war, poor man's fight. but it soon became the women's fight as well. for as the confederate government began to face the challenge posed by unionist guerrillas, draft evaders and

deserters, they found themselves fighting not just the men but the women as well, including the wives, mothers and daughters who defied the state's authority to conscript, and undermined its capacity to wage war. as army units went out to hunt deserters, governments issued orders authorizing the arrest of parties of any age and sex and federal judges urged that the combatants be handled speedily and lovely. against them, the most radical and severe treatment is required. as the military pursued a harsh, even brutal policy on the ground, accounts began to pour in of poor white women intimidated, beaten, tortured for information on the whereabouts of their men fo foalfolk. the horrifying scenes in the novel and movie "cold mountain" are just retellings of documents we all read in the archives. coupled with the growing number of arrests of women spies and members of unionist guerrilla

bands, the recognition that women were capable of treason. that they could do damage, to the military and the government, led confederate officials into what some bluntly called, quote, a war against the women. the old image of antigony, the nothing then. and behind it all -- lay a wholly new estimation of women's political significance and a new view of women's standing in relation to the state. this is a cartoon of the -- the treatment that women in new orleans were handing out to butlers, occupying troops, it was encounters with confederate women in occupied cities was one of the main confrontations. this is a very unusual development in the war. i think, a very meaningful one. after butler decided to move against secession women of new orleans it became general policy

in the, general union policy in the occupied south, to make not only men, but women, take oaths of allegiance to the union. or be forced into exile behind confederate lines. as far as i know it is the first time. no union officials began the war, carrying, one way or another, who women were loyal to. but they soon learned that it mattered just as confederate officials did too. i love this picture because what the -- the officials in new orleans said is that a lot of elite southern women in new orleans went to the provost art marshall's office convinced this must be a mistake. they couldn't possibly be expecting them to take an oath of allegiance. they figured if they talked to the right guy, in just the right way, you know, there would be an exception made for them. he said they came becrinolined and bejeweled, talking all kinds

of flirtation talk, but they all had to sign the paper or get pushed out of the city of new rough awakening. but if the confederate government was forced to contend with the women in their new individual capacity as traitors, they faced another arguably more daunting political challenge from the mass of white southern women in their new collective identity as soldiers' wives. the south was an agrarian society, whole regions of it populated by yeomen and poor white families. there had never been any expectation that women would be able to make subsistence on those farms without the labor of their uses and adult sons. and indeed they could not. by 1863, with husband and sons in the war, and the countryside literally stripped of men, the food crisis in the confederacy reached starvation proportions. and at that point it turned into a political and policy crisis, provoked by women who mobilized

to insist that the government fulfill the promises it had made to them when it took their men off to war. this politics of subsistence and the new political class of soldiers' wives who made it was one entirely unanticipated element of the reckoning war had wrought in the confederacy. for more than a year, poor white soldiers' wives besieged state and federal officials with warnings about the consequences of a military policy geared towards the interest, as they put it, of the big men. an increasingly, radical threatening language. they demanded not just individual relief like the release of a particular man from the army but justice for the confederate poor. they also began to speak in the collective voice. we soldiers' wives. we poor people.

and they increasingly targeted policy demanding revision of conscription and tax laws. and all of this evidence of poor white women's new politics has been there all along. moldering in the archives, historians have missed it for generations. but nobody missed what happened next. in the spring of 1863, soldiers' wives took direct action in a wave of spectacular food riots that hit the south from mobile to richmond. mobs of women numbering from a dozen to more than 300 and armed with navy rekofrlers, pistols, repeaters, bowie knives and hatchets, carried out 12 violent attacks. there are rumors of more, on stores, government warehouses, army convoys, railroad depots, salt works and granaries. the attacks occurred in broad day light. they were all perpetrated in the space of one month.

between the middle of march and middle of april 1863. conspiracy theories abounded. this must have been the work of men. right? yankee operatives, the southern papers said. in most cases we don't know how these riots were organized, but in richmond, the biggest, we do. as it turns out, it wasn't the work of men, but of one mary jackson. soldier's mother, farm wife, huckster of meat at the city market. she tried to solve her problems through proper channels by appeals to the secretary of war to release her son from service. hers was just one of the thousands of angry, half-literal petitions delivered to government officials, by soldiers wives and mothers over the course of the war. these food riots have a deep back story. one that is not often told. and they are not as we often assume isolated events, but i think the most dramatic manifestation