Bitter Fruits of Bondage

The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865

Armstead L. Robinson

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9780813953175
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Bitter Fruits of Bondage is the late Armstead L. Robinson’s magnum opus, a controversial history that explodes orthodoxies on both sides of the historical debate over why the South lost the Civil War.

Recent studies, while conceding the importance of social factors in the unraveling of the Confederacy, still conclude that the South was defeated as a result of its losses on the battlefield, which in turn resulted largely from the superiority of Northern military manpower and industrial resources. Robinson contends that these factors were not decisive, that the process of social change initiated during the birth of Confederate nationalism undermined the social and cultural foundations of the southern way of life built on slavery, igniting class conflict that ultimately sapped white southerners of the will to go on.

In particular, simmering tensions between nonslaveholders and smallholding yeoman farmers on the one hand and wealthy slaveholding planters on the other undermined Confederate solidarity on both the home front and the battlefield. Through their desire to be free, slaves fanned the flames of discord. Confederate leaders were unable to reconcile political ideology with military realities, and, as a result, they lost control over the important Mississippi River Valley during the first two years of the war. The major Confederate defeats in 1863 at Vicksburg and Missionary Ridge were directly attributable to growing disenchantment based on class conflict over slavery.

Because the antebellum way of life proved unable to adapt successfully to the rigors of war, the South had to fight its struggle for nationhood against mounting odds. By synthesizing the results of unparalleled archival research, Robinson tells the story of how the war and slavery were intertwined, and how internal social conflict undermined the Confederacy in the end.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Armstead L. Robinson, Historian of the Confederate States of America, by Joseph P. Reidy
• Armstead L. Robinson, Historian and Discipline Builder, by Barbara J. Fields
• Publisher’s Note
• Introduction
• Chapter One: A “Most Un-Civil War”: Slavery and a Separate Nation
• Chapter Two: “Playing Thunder”: The Impact of Slavery on Confederate Military Strength
• Chapter Three: “A People’s Contest”? Popular Disaffection in the Confederacy
• Chapter Four: “This War Is Our War, the Cause Is Our Cause”: Aristocrats and Common Soldiers in Confederate Camps
• Chapter Five: The Failure of Southern Voluntarism and the Collapse of the Upper South Frontier
• Chapter Six: Invasion of the Heartland and the Failure to Achieve Universal Conscription
• Chapter Seven: In the Wake of Military Occupation: Disaffection, Profiteering, Slave Unrest, and Curbs on Civil Liberties
• Chapter Eight: “The Carefully Fostered Hostility of Class against Class”: Demoralization and the Fall of Vicksburg
• Chapter Nine: “A War Fought by the Weak”: Desertions, Brigandage, Counterinsurgency, Anarchy, and the Rise of an Antiwar Movement
• Chapter Ten: “Every Man Says That Every Other Man Ought to Fight”: Election Losses and the Debacle at Missionary Ridge
• Epilogue: Slavery and the Death of the Southern Revolution
• Notes
• Index
• Series List