Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley. By David Williams. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. xvi, 288 pp. $34.95, isbn 0-8203-2033-1.)

Who—or what—killed the Confederacy? Historians have argued about this for a long time. The disputants divide generally into two camps. Some insist the South lost the Civil War on the battlefield, its armies overwhelmed or outmaneuvered by the North's. Others insist that the Confederacy's inherent weaknesses brought it to its knees before it was defeated militarily. 1

David Williams's study of one Southern region unequivocally endorses the latter thesis. Extrapolating from the experience of the lower Chattahoochee River valley of Alabama and Georgia, he argues that the Confederacy collapsed because it lacked the support of the mass of its people. 2

In Williams's view, the Old South was an undemocratic regime ruled by big slaveholders. Secession, he says, was an aristocratic coup intended simply to protect the economic and political power of the planter class. He thus argues against those historians who believe Southern whites as a whole welcomed secession due to their republican fear of Northern threats to liberty and their racist fear for the safety of a slave system that benefited whites of all classes. . . .

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