Essay On Confederate Reckoning

Many know the story of the Confederate States of America and how this nation was created by slaveholders who wanted to protect their property. From the novel Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in The Civil War South we are able to gain an insight on how the ideologies that the confederacy were based on contributed to its downfall. These slaveholders might have created a powerful empire but they did not realize that they had excluded most of their population of white-women and slaves. The confederacy tried to succeed and they failed and what we see from Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in The Civil War South is that in this political battle women and slaves played a huge role in the confederacy and its fate and also played a …show more content…
The Confederate need for slave labor threatened the use of slave labor for the master’s. Master’s believed that slaves were their property however, they ran in to interference with the government as the government asserted their power over the master’s. This would cause an argument between slaveholders and government officials as they needed to share slaves. The government would call on slaves to help with the war effort and the slaves now had the opportunity resist the request or fix their connections with the government. As the war went on the relationship between the government and slaves would change drastically. Originally slaves were just needed to dig trenches and help fix forts as well as other simple tasks. This would soon change as the Confederate Army became more desperate for soldiers. Close to half of the men who were military-age were not eligible for military service because they were enslaved. During the second half of the war the Union began to use black soldiers most of whom were escaped southern slaves. This would cause the Confederacy to consider the same idea during the final days of the war. We see from this that the enslaved had a major influence on the politics and war effort of the