The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South
Bruce Levine, Random House
Accolades come easily for Bruce Levine’s latest book. His research is exhaustive, his arguments erudite, his anecdotes illuminating and his prose crystalline. The result is an exemplary work of historical synthesis, tracing “the origins and development of America’s ‘second revolution.’”
Levine sets antebellum Southern society firmly on the shoulders of slavery. His spokespeople, many of them well-to-do Southern women, describe a system they deemed benevolent, permanent, ordained by God and sustained by economic necessity. But the social and political fissures that brought down the House of Dixie, Levine argues, were part and parcel of the region’s economy and culture long before the war.
Sustaining a long and bloody conflict stressed these fissures to the breaking point. “A war launched to preserve slavery,” Levine observes, “succeeded instead in abolishing [it] more rapidly and more radically than would have occurred otherwise.”
Southern elites failed to comprehend their slaves’ indomitable spirit. As the war dragged on, white supremacy and a rigid caste system led non– slaveholding families and poor whites to question why they were fighting to sustain a planter aristocracy of privilege and pride. And the doctrine of states’ rights ensured that the parochial interests of the individual states regularly trumped the collective needs of the Confederate nation.
The Union’s evolving war policy also contributed to Dixie’s fall. Levine traces Abe Lincoln’s conservative social and military war aims, which evolved into a revolutionary policy to liberate America’s slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued as a war measure, allowed former slaves and free blacks to fight for the Union. Many Northerners likewise changed their views, believing that only by destroying slavery could a more perfect Union be created and preserved. Was it worth all the spilled blood and expended treasure? Levine quotes Frederick Douglass, who proclaimed that those who fought to bring down the House of Dixie were “writing the statutes of eternal justice and liberty in the blood of the worst tyrants as a warning to all aftercomers.”
Originally published in the April 2013 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
