Marching masters : slavery, race, and the Confederate army during the Civil War / Colin Edward Woodward.

Woodward, Colin Edward, 1975-
Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2014.
Added to CLICnet on 09/29/2015


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Part of the series A nation divided : studies in the Civil War era;Nation divided.
Notes:

  • Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-274) and index.
  • The question of slavery : Confederate soldiers and the Southern cause, 1861-1862 — Planters and yeomen, officers and privates : race, class and Confederate soldiers — The greatest of masters : the Confederate Army and the impressment of Black labor — Send me the Negro boy : Confederate soldiers and the need for slaves in camp — We crushed their freedom : emancipation and the problem of slave loyalty — On battlefields and in prisons : Confederate soldiers confront Black Union troops — Free to fight : the Confederate Army and the use of slaves as soldiers — Relics of the antebellum era : Confederate soldiers and the postwar world — Conclusion : republics have proverbially short memories .
  • The Confederate army went to war to defend a nation of slaveholding states, and although men rushed to recruiting stations for many reasons, they understood that the fundamental political issue at stake in the conflict was the future of slavery. Most Confederate soldiers were not slaveholders themselves, but they were products of the largest and most prosperous slaveholding civilization the world had ever seen, and they sought to maintain clear divisions between black and white, master and servant, free and slave. In Marching Masters Colin Woodward explores not only the importance of slavery in the minds of Confederate soldiers but also its effects on military policy and decision making. Beyond showing how essential the defense of slavery was in motivating Confederate troops to fight, Woodward examines the Rebels’ persistent belief in the need to defend slavery and deploy it militarily as the war raged on. Slavery proved essential to the Confederate war machine, and Rebels strove to protect it just as they did Southern cities, towns, and railroads. Slaves served by the tens of thousands in the Southern armies–never as soldiers, but as menial laborers who cooked meals, washed horses, and dug ditches. By following Rebel troops’ continued adherence to notions of white supremacy into the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, the book carries the story beyond the Confederacy’s surrender. Drawing upon hundreds of soldiers’ letters, diaries, and memoirs, Marching Masters combines the latest social and military history in its compelling examination of the last bloody years of slavery in the United States. — Publisher’s description.

Subjects:

Requested by Wittenbreer, B. & Lansing, M.

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