Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War

Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War by Williams, David. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781595581082.

From the author of the celebrated A Peoples History of the Civil War, a new account of the Confederacys collapse from within. The American Confederacy, historian David Williams reveals, was in fact fighting two civil wars—an external one that we hear so much about and an internal one about which there is scant literature and virtually no public awareness. From the Confederacys very beginnings, Williams shows, white southerners were as likely to have opposed secession as supported it, and they undermined the Confederate war effort at nearly every turn. The draft law was nearly impossible to enforce, women defied Confederate authorities by staging food riots, and most of the time two-thirds of the Confederate army was absent with or without leave. In just one of many telling examples in this rich and eye-opening narrative history, Williams shows that, if the nearly half-million southerners who served in the Union military had been with the Confederates, the opposing forces would have been evenly matched. Shattering the myth of wartime southern unity, this riveting new analysis takes on the enduring power of the Confederacys image and reveals it to be, like the Confederacy itself, a hollow shell.