Bitterly Divided

The South's Inner Civil War

David Williams

paperback

$19.95 / £15.99

In an eye-opening book that Booklist praised as “impressively documented, essential Civil War reading,” historian David Williams lays bare the myth of a united confederacy, revealing that the South was in fact fighting two civil wars—an external one that we know so much about and an internal one about which there is scant literature and virtually no public awareness.

Bitterly Divided skillfully shows that from the Confederacy’s very beginnings white Southerners were as likely to have opposed secession as supported it, and they undermined the Confederate war effort at nearly every turn. In just one of many telling examples in this rich and surprising narrative history, Williams shows that when planters grew too much cotton and tobacco and exempted themselves from the draft, plain folk called the conflict a “rich man’s war” and rioted. Many formed armed anti-Confederate bands. Southern blacks, in what W.E.B. DuBois called “a general strike against the Confederacy,” resisted in increasingly overt ways, escaped by the thousands, and forced a change in the war’s direction that led to emancipation.

This immensely readable and riveting new analysis takes on the Confederacy’s popular image and reveals it to be, like the Confederacy itself, a fatally fractured edifice.

David Williams is the author of A People’s History of the Civil War, Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War, Johnny Reb’s War, and Rich Man’s War. A native of Miller County, Georgia, he holds a PhD in history from Auburn University. He is a professor of history at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia, where for the past twenty years he has taught courses in Georgia history, the Old South, and the Civil War era.