The Fall of the House of Dixie

In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting

story of how that conflict upended the economic, political, and social life of

the old South, utterly destroying the Confederacy and the society it

represented and defended. Told through the words of the people who lived it,

_The Fall of the House of Dixie_ illuminates the way a war undertaken to

preserve the status quo became a second American Revolution whose impact on

the country was as strong and lasting as that of our first.

In 1860 the American South was a vast, wealthy, imposing region where a small

minority had amassed great political power and enormous fortunes through a

system of forced labor. The South’s large population of slaveless whites

almost universally supported the basic interests of plantation owners, despite

the huge wealth gap that separated them. By the end of 1865 these structures

of wealth and power had been shattered. Millions of black people had gained

their freedom, many poorer whites had ceased following their wealthy

neighbors, and plantation owners were brought to their knees, losing not only

their slaves but their political power, their worldview, their very way of

life. This sea change was felt nationwide, as the balance of power in

Congress, the judiciary, and the presidency shifted dramatically and lastingly

toward the North, and the country embarked on a course toward equal rights.

Levine __ captures the many-sided human drama of this story using a huge trove

of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, government documents, and more. In

_The Fall of the House of Dixie,_ the true stakes of the Civil War become

clearer than ever before, as slaves battle for their freedom in the face of

brutal reprisals; Abraham Lincoln and his party turn what began as a limited

war for the Union into a crusade against slavery by issuing the Emancipation

Proclamation; poor southern whites grow increasingly disillusioned with

fighting what they have come to see as the plantation owners’ war; and the

slave owners grow ever more desperate as their beloved social order is

destroyed, not just by the Union Army, but also from within. When the smoke

clears, not only Dixie but all of American society is changed forever.

Brilliantly argued and engrossing, _The Fall of the House of Dixie_ is a

sweeping account of the destruction of the old South during the Civil War,

offering a fresh perspective on the most colossal struggle in our history and

the new world it brought into being.

_From the Hardcover edition._