Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship: The Civil War Correspondence of Alabama's Pickens Family

The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship: The Civil War Correspondence of Alabama's Pickens Family

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

Hardcover

Series: Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War

Civil War Period (1850-1877)General World HistoryRegional: South

ISBN10: 0807183679
ISBN13: 9780807183670
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: Apr 11 2025
Pages: 322
Weight: 1.33
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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.

Also from

McKiven, Henry M., Jr.

View All

Also in

Civil War Period (1850-1877)

View All