Description: In this groundbreaking study, Barton A. Myers analyzes the secret world of hundreds of white and black Southern Unionists as they struggled for survival in a new Confederate world, resisted the imposition of Confederate military and civil authority, began a diffuse underground movement to destroy the Confederacy, joined the United States Army as soldiers, and waged a series of violent guerrilla battles at the local level against other Southerners. Myers also details the work of Confederates as they struggled to build a new nation at the local level and maintain control over manpower, labor, agricultural, and financial resources, which Southern Unionists possessed. The story is not solely one of triumph over adversity but also one of persecution and, ultimately, erasure of these dissidents by the postwar South's Lost Cause mythologizers.
Brief description: Barton A. Myers is Assistant Professor of Civil War History at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. His first book on American Civil War guerrilla warfare Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861-1865 won the 2009 Jules and Frances Landry Award for the best book in southern studies published by Louisiana State University Press. Myers has written articles and/or book reviews for George Mason University's History News Network (HNN), H-Net's H-CivWar and H-South, the Civil War Book Review, the Journal of American History, Common-Place, the Civil War Monitor, the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of the Civil War Era, Army History, the North Carolina Historical Review, the Journal of American Nineteenth Century History, and Civil War History. He is the recipient of a grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, a Russell Weigley grant, and a Mellon research fellowship.
Review Quotes: "A well-researched, lucidly written, and convincing exploration of southern Unionism during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Highly recommended."
Mark Grimsley, Ohio State University