Virginia's Private War Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865

This book tells the story of how Confederate civilians in the Old Dominion struggled to feed not only their stomachs but also their souls. Although demonstrating the ways in which the war created many problems within southern communities, Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in theConfederacy, 1861-1865 does not support scholars who claim that internal dissent caused the Confederacy's downfall. Instead, it offers a study of the Virginia home front that depicts how the Union army's continued pressure created destruction, hardship, and shortages that left the Confederate publicspent and demoralized with the surrender of the army under Robert E. Lee. This book, however, does not portray the population as uniformly united in a Lost Cause. Virginians complained a great deal about the management of the war. Letters to the governor and to the Confederate secretary of war demonstrate how dissent escalated to dangerous proportions by the spring andsummer of 1863. Women rioted in Richmond for food. Soldiers left the army without permission to check on their families and farms. Various groups vented their hatred on Virginias rich men of draft age who stayed out of the army by purchasing substitutes. Such complaints, ironically, may haveprolonged the war, for some of the Confederacy's leaders responded by forcing the wealthy to shoulder more of the burden for prosecuting the war. Substitution ended, and the men who stayed home became government growers who distributed goods at reduced cost to the poor. But, as the case is made inVirginias Private War, none of these efforts could finally overcome an enemy whose unrelenting pressure strained the resources of Rebel Virginians to the breaking point. Arguing that the state of Virginia both waged and witnessed a "rich man's fight" that has until now been downplayed or misunderstood by many if not most of our Civil War scholars, William Blair provides in these pages a detailed portrait of this conflict that is bold, original, and convincing. Hedraws from the microcosm of Virginia several telling conclusions about the Confederacy's rise, demise, and identity, and his study will therefore appeal to anyone with a taste for Civil War history--and Virginia's unique place in that history, especially.

Formerly Assistant Professor of United States History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, William Blair is now Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he is also the Director of the Civil War Era Institute. He won the 1996 Allan Nevins Prize (given by the American Society of Historians for the best American History dissertation) and served as the co-editor of A Politician Goes to War: The Civil War Letters of John White Geary (1995).