The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship

The Civil War Correspondence of Alabama's Pickens Family

Henry M. McKiven, Jr., T. Michael Parrish

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807184295
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• ONE ◆ Origins
• TWO ◆ Secession and War: January–June 1861
• THREE ◆ Loyal Confederates, Reluctant Soldiers: April–June 1862
• FOUR ◆ Maintaining the Ties That Bind: November 1862–March 1863
• FIVE ◆ Reckoning with the Cost of War: April–July 1863
• SIX ◆ Defeat, Despair, and Renewal: July–December 1863
• SEVEN ◆ The Government Demands More: January–May 1864
• EIGHT ◆ The Shadow of Death: May–December 1864
• NINE ◆ The End: January–June 1865
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index