16. The Confederate Homefront

Questions:
1.Was slavery central to Confederate identity?
2. How pervasive were defeatism and demoralisation within the South, and what part did they play in Confederate defeat?
3. How was Confederate nationalism generated?
4. How effective was Jefferson Davis’s leadership?

Anne Sarah Rubin, “A Religious Patriotism: The Culture of Confederate Identity” from A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
William Blair, “Towards a Rich Man’s Fight” from Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Benjamin L. Carp, “Nations of American Rebels: Understanding Nationalism in Revolutionary North America and the Civil War South,” Civil War History 48.1 (2002)
Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” Journal of American History 76 (Mar. 1990): 1200-28
George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolt Against Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
Paul Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978)
Robert Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (2002)
William W. Freehling, “The Last Best Hope,” from The South vs the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Martin Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001)

Primary sources
C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)
Robert Manson Myers, The Children of Pride (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972)