The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

There is something to be said for a book whose opening chapter includes the passage: "Since ancient Greece and Rome, republican thinkers had worried and warned about the dangers inherent in conferring full citizenship upon those who performed the republic's hardest, most disagreeable labor in return for the meanest standard of life. Wouldn't such poor and unhappy citizens use their freedoms and civic rights to cause trouble? Wouldn't they protest and act collectively to change their condition? Wouldn't they elect to public office either one of their own - or some adventurer , some demagogue, some Caesar, who appealed to the mob's resentments and frustrations in order to gain power for himself? Wouldn't any of these outcomes doom the republic, just as it had repeatedly done in the ancient world?" [emphasis mine] Looking around today, I can't but think more prescient words have seldom been written.

The Fall of the House of Dixie, in addition to musing on the political leanings of the lower classes, examines the social and political cracks that existed in the Confederate States of America before, during, and immediately after the American Civil War. Far from being a closely united and firmly committed entity, the Confederacy was, in many ways, a loosely confederated block of states, whose only real point of agreement was on the supremacy of the white race over all others.

Bruce Levine mines rich material to paint a detailed portrait of a South in chaos: state government fighting one another, planters fighting the state governments, the state governments and the planters fighting the "national" government at virtually every turn. In much the same way that Michael Korda's Hero was a revelation to me as regards the Middle East, a single thought recurred to me throughout Dixie: ungovernable. The Confederates, and especially the planters, were ungovernable, working against their best interest at every turn, undermining anyone in a position of authority.

The greatest strength of The Fall of the House of Dixie is that it explores an aspect of the Civil War that is relatively unknown, as Levine discusses in the Acknowledgements at the end of the book. The South is almost always portrayed as a cohesive union in which the citizenry supported Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis to the last man. Levine reveals this "truth" for the myth that it is and explores many others along the way.

Leaving off as it does at the beginning of Reconstruction, this book makes an excellent precursor to After Appomattox: How the South Won the War, which completes the story of how the ungovernable were allowed to govern over all.