Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861-1865Bitter Fruits of Bondage is the late Armstead L. Robinson's magnum opus, a controversial history that explodes orthodoxies on both sides of the historical debate over why the South lost the Civil War. Recent studies, while conceding the importance of social factors in the unraveling of the Confederacy, still conclude that the South was defeated as a result of its losses on the battlefield, which in turn resulted largely from the superiority of Northern military manpower and industrial resources. Robinson contends that these factors were not decisive, that the process of social change initiated during the birth of Confederate nationalism undermined the social and cultural foundations of the southern way of life built on slavery, igniting class conflict that ultimately sapped white southerners of the will to go on. In particular, simmering tensions between nonslaveholders and smallholding yeoman farmers on the one hand and wealthy slaveholding planters on the other undermined Confederate solidarity on both the home front and the battlefield. Through their desire to be free, slaves fanned the flames of discord. Confederate leaders were unable to reconcile political ideology with military realities, and, as a result, they lost control over the important Mississippi River Valley during the first two years of the war. The major Confederate defeats in 1863 at Vicksburg and Missionary Ridge were directly attributable to growing disenchantment based on class conflict over slavery. Because the antebellum way of life proved unable to adapt successfully to the rigors of war, the South had to fight its struggle for nationhood against mounting odds. By synthesizing the results of unparalleled archival research, Robinson tells the story of how the war and slavery were intertwined, and how internal social conflict undermined the Confederacy in the end. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 64
... plantation South . Carefully reconstructing the dynamic interaction between military events and public policy , Robinson's account concludes that simmering tensions be- tween nonslaveholders and smallholding yeoman farmers , on the one ...
... plantations and the productivity of their labor force . In short order , contemporaries came to view the draft as a measure designed to favor large slaveholders at the expense of or- dinary citizens . This appearance of favoritism held ...
... plantation elite of the antebellum South made up less than 3 percent of the free population in the region and less than 2 per- cent of the total free and slave populations combined . Only a tiny elite , in fact , controlled the plantations ...
... plantations to keep black slaves in line . And out of that alienation came a defeatism that destroyed the Confederate cause . Nonslaveholders , through desertion and draft resistance , demonstrated their unwillingness to fight to ...
... plantation owners abandoned the area , taking their slaves and other chattel property beyond the reach of the invaders . During the two months when Union forces occupied northern Alabama , large numbers of slaves seized the opportunity ...
Contents
A Most UnCivil War Slavery and a Separate Nation | 13 |
Playing Thunder The Impact of Slavery on Confederate Military Strength | 37 |
A Peoples Contest? Popular Disaffection in the Confederacy | 58 |
This War Is Our War the Cause Is Our Cause Aristocrats and Common Soldiers in Confederate Camps | 84 |
The Failure of Southern Voluntarism and the Collapse of the Upper South Frontier | 104 |
Invasion of the Heartland and the Failure to Achieve Universal Conscription | 134 |
In the Wake of Military Occupation Disaffection Profiteering Slave Unrest and Curbs on Civil Liberties | 163 |
The Carefully Fostered Hostility of Class against Class Demoralization and the Fall of Vicksburg | 189 |
A War Fought by the Weak Desertions Brigandage Counterinsurgency Anarchy and the Rise of an Antiwar Movement | 220 |
Every Man Says That Every Other Man Ought to Fight Election Losses and the Debacle at Missionary Ridge | 248 |
Epilogue Slavery and the Death of the Southern Revolution | 272 |
Notes | 285 |
327 | |