Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South (Civil War America)

by: R. Douglas Hurt (Author)

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Publication Date: 2015/3/2

Language: English

Print Length: 364 pages

ISBN-10: 1469620006

ISBN-13: 9781469620008

Book Description

In this comprehensive history, R. Douglas Hurt traces the decline and fall of agriculture in the Confederate States of America. The backbone of the southe economy, agriculture was a source of power that southeers believed would ensure their independence. But, season by season and year by year, Hurt convincingly shows how the disintegration of southe agriculture led to the decline of the Confederacy’s military, economic, and political power. He examines regional variations in the Easte and Weste Confederacy, linking the fates of individual crops and different modes of farming and planting to the wider story. After a dismal harvest in late 1864, southeers–faced with hunger and privation throughout the region–ransacked farms in the Shenandoah Valley and pillaged plantations in the Carolinas and the Mississippi Delta, they finally realized that their agricultural power, and their govement itself, had failed. Hurt shows how this ultimate lost harvest had repercussions that lasted well beyond the end of the Civil War.Assessing agriculture in its economic, political, social, and environmental contexts, Hurt sheds new light on the fate of the Confederacy from the optimism of secession to the reality of collapse.

About the Author

In this comprehensive history, R. Douglas Hurt traces the decline and fall of agriculture in the Confederate States of America. The backbone of the southe economy, agriculture was a source of power that southeers believed would ensure their independence. But, season by season and year by year, Hurt convincingly shows how the disintegration of southe agriculture led to the decline of the Confederacy’s military, economic, and political power. He examines regional variations in the Easte and Weste Confederacy, linking the fates of individual crops and different modes of farming and planting to the wider story. After a dismal harvest in late 1864, southeers–faced with hunger and privation throughout the region–ransacked farms in the Shenandoah Valley and pillaged plantations in the Carolinas and the Mississippi Delta, they finally realized that their agricultural power, and their govement itself, had failed. Hurt shows how this ultimate lost harvest had repercussions that lasted well beyond the end of the Civil War.Assessing agriculture in its economic, political, social, and environmental contexts, Hurt sheds new light on the fate of the Confederacy from the optimism of secession to the reality of collapse.