Bibliography
for the Confederacy.

General works

One-volume histories

• McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. The one-volume history, and still unmatched thirty-five years on. Start here.
• Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Updated ed. 2014. The companion volume for what came after, and the book that replaced a century of bad history.
• Gallagher, Gary W. The Confederate War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Argues, against the internal-collapse school, that Confederate nationalism was real and resilient. The best case for that side.
• Levine, Bruce. The Fall of the House of Dixie. New York: Random House, 2013. The war as a social revolution that destroyed the slaveholding order from within.
• Rable, George C. The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
• Thomas, Emory M. The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. The standard political history of the Confederacy as a state.

Chapters I–II

Causes, and the secession crisis

• Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, 2007. The fullest account of how the South talked itself into it.
• Dew, Charles B. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Short, devastating, and the single best answer to the states'-rights claim: it reads what the secession commissioners actually said to each other.
• Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Completed after Potter's death by Don Fehrenbacher; still the standard narrative of the 1850s.
• Fehrenbacher, Don E. The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
• Oakes, James. The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.
• McCurry, Stephanie. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. On a republic founded to exclude the majority of its own population, and what that did to it. Outstanding.

Chapters III–VII

The war itself

• Guelzo, Allen C. Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. The best single-battle book of recent decades.
• Sears, Stephen W. Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam. New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1983.
• Ballard, Michael B. Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
• Cozzens, Peter. This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
• Hess, Earl J. In the Trenches at Petersburg. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
• Grimsley, Mark. The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. The corrective to the Sherman-as-barbarian literature, and carefully argued.
• Hattaway, Herman, and Archer Jones. How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
• Woodworth, Steven E. Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. The western theatre, which is where the war was decided and which most readers skip.

The Confederate state

Government, economy and the home front

• Ball, Douglas B. Financial Failure and Confederate Defeat. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. On the 9,000 per cent inflation and how it was produced.
• Escott, Paul D. After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.
• Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
• Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. On what a country does with 750,000 dead. One of the finest books on the subject.
• Wills, Brian Steel. Inglorious Passages: Noncombat Deaths in the American Civil War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017.
• Hahn, Steven. A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003.

Slavery and emancipation

The subject of the war

• Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Contested on some of its economics, and indispensable on the domestic slave trade.
• Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Berlin, Ira, et al., eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982–. The Freedmen and Southern Society Project. The documents themselves, and the foundation of modern emancipation scholarship.
• Oakes, James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.
• Glatthaar, Joseph T. Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers. New York: Free Press, 1990.
• Levine, Bruce. Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. The documentary answer to the black-Confederate-soldiers claim.
• Gudmestad, Robert H. A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003.

Chapter VIII

Reconstruction, memory and the Lost Cause

• Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001. How reconciliation between white northerners and white southerners was purchased at the expense of the freed people. The essential book on memory.
• Janney, Caroline E. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Qualifies Blight, and should be read alongside him.
• Cox, Karen L. Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.
• Cox, Karen L. No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.
• Gallagher, Gary W., and Alan T. Nolan, eds. The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
• Downs, Gregory P. After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
• Lemann, Nicholas. Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. The paramilitary overthrow of Reconstruction in Mississippi, told as narrative.
• Southern Poverty Law Center. Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy. Montgomery, AL, 2016; revised 2019 and 2022. The census behind the dating of the monuments. An advocacy organisation's report, and the underlying counts have held up.

Lives

Biography

• Pryor, Elizabeth Brown. Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters. New York: Viking, 2007. The indispensable Lee book, by a sympathetic biographer who went to the letters and found what was there.
• Cooper, William J. Jefferson Davis, American. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
• Chernow, Ron. Grant. New York: Penguin Press, 2017.
• Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.
• Oakes, James. The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
• Symonds, Craig L. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997.

Contemporary sources

Written at the time

• The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 128 vols. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901. The Official Records. Free online at Cornell's Making of America, and the foundation of everything.
• Declarations of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession (South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas), December 1860 – February 1861. Four short documents. Read them before reading anything else about the causes of the war.
• Stephens, Alexander H. “Cornerstone Speech.” Savannah, 21 March 1861. As reported in the Savannah Republican; reprinted in Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens in Public and Private (1866).
• Chesnut, Mary Boykin. Mary Chesnut's Civil War. Ed. C. Vann Woodward. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. The great diary of the Confederate elite — in Woodward's edition, which distinguishes the wartime journal from the 1880s rewriting.
• Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Boston, 1861.
• Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Hartford, 1881; rev. 1892.
• Grant, Ulysses S. Personal Memoirs. 2 vols. New York: Charles L. Webster, 1885–86. Finished days before his death, and one of the best memoirs written by any soldier anywhere.
• Federal Writers' Project. Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States. 17 vols. Washington: Library of Congress, 1941. Some 2,300 interviews conducted in the 1930s. Read with care about who was asking and who was answering, and read them.