It is no exaggeration to say that the literature on the Confederacy has long been characterized — and limited — by a preoccupation with the matter of military defeat and related questions about the strength or weakness of Confederate nationalism. The question of why the South lost the Civil War is hardly a minor one. But the preoccupation with defeat has made it difficult to ask other questions about the slaveholders’ war and the profound changes it propelled in Southern and American political history. Even the rare scholar who emphasizes the revolutionary nature of the Confederate experience has cast it as an aberrant episode in the long continuity of Southern history, a discrete and self-contained experiment entirely comprehensible within the history of the region and of significance primarily to itself.
From my perspective, the social and political transformations into which the nation was propelled, including the enlistment of slave men, are best understood in an international context. In terms of causes, dynamic, and consequences the entire history of the C.S.A. was part of a far larger set of historical struggles over the future of slave and servile systems, the political survival of slave states, the terms of emancipation, and the democratic imperatives of male citizenship in societies at war that erupted across the Western world in the age of emancipation. Far from working within national boundaries, what happened in the C.S.A. really only makes sense in light of related developments in other times and places. As a result, I adopt a broad set of coordinates for the history of the Confederacy and draw on an abundance of literature on comparative slavery and emancipation, state formation, agrarian and subaltern studies, and women’s and gender history to write it.
This book is also a political history of the unfranchised. This approach, it seems to me, is virtually mandated by the particular proslavery and antidemocratic objectives of the Confederate political project. For if “policing the interior frontiers of a national community” — fencing off those disqualified from membership — is a key function of political systems everywhere, it was the very raison d’être of the C.S.A. The relationship between state actors and the nation’s vast population of free women and slaves thus necessarily emerges as a central focus of the analysis and in that the broad perspective was crucial. These were people, after all, in a formally democratic society, excluded from the official domains of political life, with no rights by which to levy claims but possessed of other means by which to engage in the act of making history. To write that story I have borrowed liberally from historical and theoretical literatures on other times and places.