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The Fall Of The House Of Dixie: The Civil War And The Social Revolution That Transformed The South (2013)

by Bruce Levine(Favorite Author)

4.03 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1400067030 (ISBN13: 9781400067039)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Random House

review 1: I was hoping this would be something different: Neither a rehashing of the same Lincoln worship that government textbooks indulge in, nor the Davis/Lee worship that we in the South can be guilty of. But no, this book is no different than all of those government published textbooks that tell us that the U.S.Government is virtuous and that without the government we'd all be dead. We also get the same old good/bad split: Southerners who wanted succession are depicted as all bad; Northerners who wouldn't allow it are depicted as all good. "History is written by the victors" (Winston Churchill) is just another way of saying "might makes right." It's easy and takes no courage to criticize the Confederate Government. The author shows no willingness to question the official v... moreersion of events at all. Southerners who romanticize the antebellum South need to cut it out. So do all Americans who romanticize war, any war, as this book does.
review 2: A very well-written and somewhat different perspective on the progress of the Civil War in the Southern United States; a lot has been written about the planter aristocracy of the antebellum South and their reactions to the war, since many of them (particularly the ladies) kept wartime diaries and memoirs, but Levine has tried to include the perspectives of slaves and of the poor whites who made up the bulk of the Confederate army. And his use of quotes from newspapers, memoirs, letters and public statements by leaders of the Confederacy emphasizes the point, again and again, that "states rights" was a smokescreen to hide the true goal of the South in seceding: the only state's right that was of interest to Confederate leaders was the right to carry on their system of chattel slavery and thereby deprive millions of individuals of their most basic human rights. Levine also points up some very interesting paradoxes - it was Sherman, who was a racist and quite sympathetic to the Southern slaveowners, who created the "forty acres and a mule" regulation (largely to stop the thousands of ex-slaves who had begun to follow his army, which they saw as an army of liberation.) And for those who like to say that the North only fought to preserve the Union, Levine meticulously documents the evolution of the North's war-aims, the positions of leading Republicans, and especially of Abraham Lincoln. What may have begun as a fight to preserve the Union (though clearly, the only reason the Union was tottering in 1861 was because of the election of Lincoln and a political party that had expressed its hostility towards the extension of slavery!) turned into something far different, in part because of how fiercely black men, women and children fought for their own freedom. less

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