Bitter Fruits of Bondage
The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861-1865

This controversial history explodes orthodoxies over why the South lost the Civil War. Robinson contends that the process of social change initiated during the birth of Confederate nationalism undermined the social and cultural foundations of the southern way of life built on slavery, ultimately sapped white southerners of the will to go on.

Confederate leaders were unable to reconcile political ideology with military realities, and, as a result, they lost control over the important Mississippi River Valley during the first two years of the war. The major Confederate defeats in 1863 at Vicksburg and Missionary Ridge were directly attributable to growing disenchantment based on class conflict over slavery. Because the antebellum way of life proved unable to adapt successfully to the rigors of war, the South had to fight its struggle for nationhood against mounting odds. By synthesizing the results of unparalleled archival research, Robinson tells the story of how the war and slavery were intertwined, and how internal social conflict undermined the Confederacy in the end.