| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865. By Armstead L. Robinson. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. xx, 352 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8139-2309-3.)
Armstead L. Robinson died in 1995 before he completed the revision of his doctoral dissertation for book publication. He had submitted three parts of the manuscript between 1982 and 1991, and these and other drafts were melded to create the important book we have here. Unfortunately, the editors were unable to find some important footnotes and tables, and the discussion is largely confined to 1861–1863.	1
Robinson pointed to race and class as the "fault lines of the Confederacy's social structure" (p. 8) as "class conflict based on defense of slavery eroded the Southern will to national independence" (p. 10). The Mississippi Valley states were most affected. The "slaveholders' pursuit of wartime profits," Robinson claimed, "was one of the principal sources of class resentment in the Confederacy" (p. 132). Numerous yeomen in both upper and lower South feared "that a triumphant slaveholders' republic might pose a threat to the survival of popular democracy" (p. 81). Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston's complaint in December 1861 that he lacked the manpower to defend the northern border of Tennessee because slaveholders refused laborers for fortifications illustrates the problem. Johnston's mistake was "his honest belief that the antebellum ethics of noblesse oblige would induce slaveholders to donate the essential private arms and slave laborers" (p. 119). Other Confederates naïvely believed that planters would grow more foodstuffs and less cotton. Combined with unfavorable weather and "declining discipline among slave labor" (p. 127), this behavior resulted in food shortages on the home front and motivated many yeoman volunteers to refuse to reenlist at the end of their initial one-year commitment.	. . .

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