Virginia's Private War

This book tells the story of how Confederate civilians in the Old Dominion struggled to feed not only their stomachs but also their souls. Although demonstrating the ways in which the war created many problems within southern communities, Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865 does not support scholars who claim that internal dissent caused the Confederacy's downfall. Instead, it offers a study of the Virginia home frontthat depicts how the Union army's continued pressure created destruction, hardship, and shortages that left the Confederate public spent and demoralized with the surrender of the army under Robert E. Lee. This book, however, does not portray the population as uniformly united in a Lost Cause. Virginians complained a great deal about the management of the war. Letters to the governor and to the Confederate secretary of war demonstrate how dissent escalated to dangerous proportions by the spring and summer of 1863. Women rioted in Richmond for food. Soldiers left the army without permission to check on their families and farms. Various groups vented their hatred on Virginias rich men of draft agewho stayed out of the army by purchasing substitutes. Such complaints, ironically, may have prolonged the war, for some of the Confederacy's leaders responded by forcing the wealthy to shoulder more of the burden for prosecuting the war. Substitution ended, and the men who stayed home becamegovernment growers who distributed goods at reduced cost to the poor. But, as the case is made in Virginias Private War, none of these efforts could finally overcome an enemy whose unrelenting pressure strained the resources of Rebel Virginians to the breaking point. Arguing that the state of Virginia both waged and witnessed a "rich man's fight" that has until now been downplayed or misunderstood by many if not most of our Civil War scholars, William Blair provides in these pages a detailed portrait of this conflict that is bold, original, and convincing. He draws from the microcosm of Virginia several telling conclusions about the Confederacy's rise, demise, and identity, and his study will therefore appeal to anyone with a taste for Civil Warhistory—and Virginia's unique place in that history, especially.

"Recipient of the Nevins Prize for dissertations, this compact work re-examines whether domestic strife led to the Confederacy's defeat. By focusing on a single state, William Blair provides a perspective that broader national studies have been unable to achieve....Blair's provocative interpretation about the role civilians played in the war's outcome will interest both scholars and students of this era."—Civil War History, "Well researched, readable, and highly interpretative. Recommended for both academic and larger public libraries."—Library Journal, "Bill Blair has made an important addition to the growing literature on the home front in the Civil War, which adds a crucial dimension to our understanding of that conflict. He demonstrates that, whatever their opinion of the Confederate government and its measures, most Virginians remained loyal to the cause of Southern independence to the bitter end. Instead of sapping the will to win, as some scholars have maintained, white civilians helped to sustain army morale. In Virginia the Confederate cause did not collapse internally; it was crushed externally by a determined enemy."—James M. McPherson, Princeton University, "One of the most important studies of any state in the Confederacy and one of the most important and innovative books on the Civil War published in the past decade. William Blair shifts the focus on Confederate political leadership from the national to the state and local levels and finds that the Confederacy was far more flexible than is usually suggested and far more responsive to the demands of its citizens." —Reid Mitchell in The Virginia Magazine, "Virginia's Private War is a work of creative research, brilliant analysis, and breathtaking originality. Blair has explored the forging of Confederate identity at the local and state levels more thoroughly and perceptively than any previous scholar. There is fresh information and insight on nearly every page. Facile generalizations about such familiar topics as 'loss of will' fall right and left. This is far and away the best study ever done of a southern state during the Civil War."—George C. Rable, University of Alabama

Formerly Assistant Professor of United States History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, William Blair is now Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he is also the Director of the Civil War Era Institute. He won the 1996 Allan Nevins Prize (given by the American Society of Historians for the best American History dissertation) and served as the co-editor of A Politician Goes to War: The Civil War Letters ofJohn White Geary (1995).