The Old South in the Crucible of War
The Old South in the Crucible of War
Essays by Emory M. Thomas, Paul D. Escott, Lawrence N. Powell and Michael S. Wayne, Leon F. Litwack, Michael Barton, and Thomas B. Alexander
Not all codes and traditions of the Old South ended abruptly with the Civil War. For many historians, however, there is truth in the thesis that the war marks the division between the Old South and the New South.
To assess what happened to the old order during the tumultuous four years of the Confederacy, the essays in this book examine the South’s dealing with the problem of continuity and persistence as a new era emerged. In the crucible of war what happened to the class system, to yeomen and planters, to millions of slaves, and to the common soldier?
Myths and realities of the Old South undergo careful examination in this book of six papers from the Seventh Annual Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History (1981) at the University of Mississippi. Professor Emory M. Thomas, the foremost historian of the Confederate experience, defined the Confederacy as “an extended moment during which southerners attempted simultaneously to define themselves as a people and to act out a national identity,” and he characterized the Confederacy as “the logical expression of antebellum southern ideology.” The historians represented in this volume respond to Thomas’s thesis and focus upon the theme of southern continuity or upon the lack of it.
Harry P. Owens (1932-2020) was professor emeritus of history at the University of Mississippi. He was also author or editor of several publications, including Steamboats and the Cotton Economy: River Trade in the Yazoo-Mississippi River Delta and Perspectives and Irony in American Slavery, both published by University Press of Mississippi. James J. Cooke (1939-2016) was professor emeritus of history at the University of Mississippi and author or editor of seven books, including The Rainbow Division in the Great War, 1917-1919 and The Shamrock Battalion in the Great War.
