Civil War Alabama

By Christopher Lyle McIlwain; Foreword by G. Ward Hubbs

University of Alabama Press

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.

Not since Walter Lynwood Fleming’s partisan Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (1905) has there been a broad history of this state’s Civil War experience. To be sure, there is no dearth of recent books and articles on specific aspects of the war and its vivid personalities and legacies—from the Battle of Mobile Bay to Gen. Josiah Gorgas’ herculean efforts to keep the Confederacy in powder and shot—but not one since Fleming has attempted to wrap it all into one package.’
—Alabama Review

‘Exhaustively researched, skillfully compiled, and engagingly written, McIlwain’s impressive volume is a service to scholars searching for greater detail and support for their own work, as well as Alabamians hoping to understand exactly how their state could fall into the grip of destructive demagogues and ruinous rebellion.’
—H-Net Reviews

Civil War Alabama is one of the most interesting and provocative studies of a Confederate state that has appeared in recent years. McIlwain presents an impressive amount of fresh research and information that advances a number of striking and controversial interpretations.’
—George C. Rable, author of God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War

‘McIlwain has produced an engaging, often witty, and always informative study of the development of Reconstructionist thought in Alabama. This is a topic that has only recently garnered serious attention, and so McIlwain stands as one of its pioneers.’
—Ben H. Severance, author of Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Alabama in the Civil War and Tennessee’s Radical Army: The State Guard and Its Role in Reconstruction, 1867–1869

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.

List of Figures
Foreword by G. Ward Hubbs
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Alabama Secedes
Chapter 1. The "Lawyers' Revolution"
Chapter 2. "A Leap in the Dark"
Chapter 3 "There Will Be a Revulsion"
Part II. The War Begins
Chapter 4 "Sprinkle Blood in the Face of the People"
Chapter 5 "Food for Sad and Gloomy Fits"
Chapter 6 Evil Times
Part III The Decree of the Nation
Chapter 7 "Yankeeizing Southerners"
Chapter 8 "The Struggle of the Masters"
Part IV The Hard War
Chapter 9 The Destroying Angels
Chapter 10 The Reconstructionists
Chapter 11 The Slaughter Pen
Chapter 12 The River of Death
Part V In Search of Peace
Chapter 13 "God Close This Terrible War"
Chapter 14 War Eagle!
Chapter 15 The Horrors of the Black Flag
Part VI Bowing Down to Mars
Chapter 16 "Retrograde Movements" and "Backward Advances"
Chapter 17 Rousseau's Raid
Chapter 18 The Fall of Mobile Bay and Atlanta
Part VII The Death Throes of a Rebellion
Chapter 19 "On the Wrong Side of the Line of Battle"
Chapter 20 "Rats to Your Holes"
Chapter 21 "Balls and Parties Are All the Rage"
Chapter 22 Franklin, Nashville, and Disintegration
Part VIII "The Holocaust"
Chapter 23 "Ne-Gotiation" or "Ne-Grotiation"
Chapter 24 "The Day of Jubilee Am Come!"
Chapter 25 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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