Virginia's Private War : Feeding Body And Soul In The Confederacy, 1861-1865 - 98 edition

Blair, William : Pennsylvania State University

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 of John White Geary (1995).

"William Blair's Virginia's Private War must surely rank among the best studies of a Confederate state at war. He presents a complex and multifaceted picture of the stresses and strains of a society very much in the front line, and of the discontents, shortages and sufferings which many of its people endured."

--Times Literary Supplement

"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

Oxford University Press Web Site, March, 2002

Introduction
1. A Slave Society Goes to War
2. Problems of Labor and Order, April 1861-April 1862
3. A Growing Sense of Injustice, April 1862-April 1863
4. Toward a Rich Man's Fight, April 1863-April 1864
5. Between Privation's Devil and the Union's Blue Sea, March 1864-April 1865
6. The Problem of Confederate Identity

Notes
Bibliography