by Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr.
Christopher McIlwain’s Civil War Alabama is a
landmark book that sheds invigorating new light on the causes, the course, and
the outcomes in Alabama of the nation’s greatest drama and trauma. Based on
twenty years of exhaustive research that draws on a vast trove of primary
sources such as letters, newspapers, and personal journals, Civil War
Alabama presents compelling new explanations for how Alabama’s white
citizens came to take up arms against the federal government.
A fledgling state at only forty years old, Alabama approached the 1860s
with expanding populations of both whites and black slaves. They were locked
together in a powerful yet fragile economic engine that produced and
concentrated titanic wealth in the hands of a white elite. Perceiving
themselves trapped between a mass of disenfranchised black slaves and the
industrializing and increasingly abolitionist North, white Alabamians were led
into secession and war by a charismatic cohort who claimed the imprimatur of
biblical scripture, romanticized traditions of chivalry, and the military
mantle of the American Revolution.
And yet, Alabama’s white citizens were not a monolith of one mind. McIlwain
dispels the received wisdom of a white citizenry united behind a cadre of
patriarchs and patriots. Providing a fresh and insightful synthesis of military
events, economic factors such as inflation and shortages, politics and
elections, the pivotal role of the legal profession, and the influence of the
press, McIlwain’s Civil War Alabama illuminates the fissiparous state of
white, antebellum Alabamians divided by class, geography, financial interests,
and political loyalties.
Vital and compelling, Civil War Alabama will take its place among the
definitive books about Alabama’s doomed Confederate experiment and legacy.
Although he rigorously dismantles idealized myths about the South’s “Lost
Cause,” McIlwain restores for contemporary readers the fervent struggles
between Alabamians over their response to the epic crisis of their times.
About the Author
Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr. is an attorney in
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who has spent the last twenty-five years researching
nineteenth-century Alabama, focusing particularly on law, politics, and the
Civil War. His article “United States District Judge Richard Busteed and the
Alabama Klan Trials of 1872” appeared in the Alabama Review.
ISBN 978-0817318949, University Alabama Press, © 2016,
Hardcover, 456 pages, Maps, Photographs & Illustrations, Endnotes,
Bibliography & Index. $59.95. To purchase this book click HERE.
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