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Book: Dixie's divide before its fall swift
By Steve Bennett : January 24, 2013 : Updated: January 26, 2013 4:00pm
“The Fall of the House
|« Back to Article|
Book: Dixie's divide before its fall swift
By Steve Bennett : January 24, 2013 : Updated: January 26, 2013 4:00pm
“The Fall of the House of Dixie,” a new book by historian Bruce Levine, is an exhaustive study of how Southern society was transformed by slavery and the Civil War.
The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South
By Bruce Levine
Random House, $30
“We won't know ourselves anymore,” says Jackie Earle Haley as Alexander Stephens near the end of Steven Spielberg's “Lincoln,” after the Great Emancipator has assured the Confederate vice president that slavery is no longer on the negotiating table.
It is the underlying theme of Bruce Levine's absorbing new book “The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South,” a concept that, many would argue, still haunts us today.
“For most masters,” Levine, a Civil War scholar at the University of Illinois, writes, “slaveholding was not simply an economic necessity... It was, instead, the unique basis of the particular outlook, assumptions, norms, habits and relationships to which masters as a social class had become deeply and reflexively attached. It defined their privileges and shaped their culture, their religion and even their personalities.”
Katherine Stone, a fairly despicable Louisiana plantation daughter quoted throughout the 299-page book, acknowledges that slavery led to “a race of haughty” and “waited-upon people” who were quick to take offense at any perceived attack on their honor.
“The cast of mind here described included a quickness to react harshly to any challenge from any quarter, a casual attitude toward employing brutality generally, and an angry indignation when either neighbors or public officials tried to interfere with their prerogatives, especially concerning their human property,” Levine writes.
As in Spielberg's “Lincoln,” there are few battle scenes in “House of Dixie.” Working in chronological order, with the important battles — Bull Run, Vicksburg, Gettysburg — in the background, Levine explores the foundation on which the South's agrarian slave culture and economy were built, and its erosion over four bloody years.
Many wounds were self-inflicted. The planter class, so honor-bound and generous at the beginning of the war, quickly began to bristle at directives coming out of the Confederate capital of Richmond, refusing, for example, to provide slave labor for the war effort. It's the ultimate irony because Levine returns over and over to the theme that slavery, not “state's rights,” led to war. What, after all, caused secession?
Rebel soldiers came to see the class war in the South's cause. As Alabama planter Benjamin H. Micou warned, “some poor men” believed that “the war is killing up their sons & brothers for the protection of the slaveholder.” As antagonism between rich and poor grew, planters openly defied the government of Jefferson Davis, an attitude unthinkable at the start of the war.
“Cracks in the House of Dixie's façade of seamless white unity widened further with each passing year,” Levine writes.
Just as Daniel Day-Lewis brings Lincoln to life in the Oscar-nominated film, Levine humanizes the president. He delineates Lincoln's complicated view of race (his “abhorrence” of slavery qualified by a belief in the “inherent” inequality of blacks and whites), which was tempered by political reality at the start of the war (appeasing border states such as his native Kentucky), leading to the bold stroke of the Emancipation Proclamation. What began as a strategic military thrust became a sacred legacy.
For many whites today, collective Civil War memory is blue and gray, tinged with a “Gone With the Wind” sentimentality. Levine probes the gray areas while starkly illustrating the cause of the war: slavery.
Levine's language can devolve into scholar-ese, and, as in many works of popular history, redundancies abound.
Overall, “The Fall of the House of Dixie” is a compelling, valuable and eye-opening work of solid scholarship that will inform and entertain the most discerning student of “the second American revolution.”