Consequences of Confederate Citizenship
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A01=Henry M. McKiven
Author_Henry M. McKiven
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=WQH
Confederacy
cotton
CSA
elite
enslaved
enslaver
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
governor of Alabama
history
Isreal Pickens
James Pickens
Jr.
letters
loyalty
plantation
primary source
Samuel Pickens III
Samuel Pickens Jr.
slaveholder
slavery
South
Umbria
wealthy
Product details
- ISBN 9780807183670
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 11 Apr 2025
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship is a vast collection of Civil War correspondence from the affluent Pickens family of Greene County, Alabama. Unlike nearly all published letter collections from the era, the Pickens family correspondence includes letters written on the home front as well as those penned by family members serving in the Army of Northern Virginia. The correspondence provides rare insight into the mutual dependence of family on the home front and kin at war to sustain morale and foster the formation of Confederate national identity.
Expertly edited, annotated, and contextualized by Henry McKiven Jr., the correspondence between Mary Gaillard Pickens, a widow, and her two sons in Lee's army reveals the challenges she faced managing three plantations with at least two hundred enslaved people while struggling with anxiety and despondency brought on by fear that her sons would die in the war. The dispatches from Sam and James Pickens reveal much about their emotional struggle to maintain a commitment to the Confederacy, while their sister Mary's letters show how she grappled with the emotionally devastating impact of her fiancé dying in battle.
As the letters attest, apprehension, dread, and despair were constants in the lives of the Pickens family. That emotional burden only served to bind the family together in defense of a way of life dependent upon the labor of enslaved people. The Pickens clan continued to grasp flickering hopes for victory until the bitter end, believing that somehow the Confederacy and the world they had known before the war would survive and ultimately flourish.
Expertly edited, annotated, and contextualized by Henry McKiven Jr., the correspondence between Mary Gaillard Pickens, a widow, and her two sons in Lee's army reveals the challenges she faced managing three plantations with at least two hundred enslaved people while struggling with anxiety and despondency brought on by fear that her sons would die in the war. The dispatches from Sam and James Pickens reveal much about their emotional struggle to maintain a commitment to the Confederacy, while their sister Mary's letters show how she grappled with the emotionally devastating impact of her fiancé dying in battle.
As the letters attest, apprehension, dread, and despair were constants in the lives of the Pickens family. That emotional burden only served to bind the family together in defense of a way of life dependent upon the labor of enslaved people. The Pickens clan continued to grasp flickering hopes for victory until the bitter end, believing that somehow the Confederacy and the world they had known before the war would survive and ultimately flourish.
Henry M. McKiven Jr. is associate professor of history at the University of South Alabama and the author of Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875–1920.
