3.5
Look Away!
ByPublisher Description
William C. Davis, one of America's best Civil War historians, here offers a definitive portrait of the Confederacy unlike any that has come before. Drawing on decades of writing and research among an unprecedented number of archives, Look Away! tells the story of the Confederate States of America not simply as a military saga (although it is that), but rather as a full portrait of a society and incipient nation. The first history of the Confederacy in decades, the culmination of a great scholar's career, Look Away! combines politics, economics, and social history to set a new standard for its subject.
Previous histories have focused on familiar commanders such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, but Davis's canvas is much broader. From firebrand politicians like Robert Barnwell Rhett and William L. Yancey, who pushed for secession long before the public supported it; to Dr. Samuel Cartwright, who persuaded many Southerners of the natural inferiority of their slaves; to the women of Richmond, who rioted over bread shortages in 1863, Davis presents a rich new face of the Confederate nation. He recounts familiar stories of battles won and lost, but also little-known economic stories of a desperate government that socialized the salt industry, home-front stories of the rangers and marauders who preyed on their fellow Confederates, and an account of the steady breakdown of law, culminating in near anarchy in some states. Never has the Confederacy been so vividly brought to life as a full society, riven with political and economic conflicts beneath its more loudly publicized military battles.
Davis's astonishingly thorough primary research has ranged across the 800-odd newspapers that were in operation during the war, but also across the personal papers of over a hundred Southern leaders and ordinary citizens. He quotes from letters and diaries throughout the narrative, revealing the Confederacy through the words of the Confederates themselves. Like any society, especially in the early stages of nation-building and the devastating stages of warfare, the Confederacy was not one thing but many things to many people. One thing, however, was shared by all: the belief that the South offered a necessary evolution of American democracy. Look Away! offers a dramatic and definitive account of one of America's most searing episodes.
Previous histories have focused on familiar commanders such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, but Davis's canvas is much broader. From firebrand politicians like Robert Barnwell Rhett and William L. Yancey, who pushed for secession long before the public supported it; to Dr. Samuel Cartwright, who persuaded many Southerners of the natural inferiority of their slaves; to the women of Richmond, who rioted over bread shortages in 1863, Davis presents a rich new face of the Confederate nation. He recounts familiar stories of battles won and lost, but also little-known economic stories of a desperate government that socialized the salt industry, home-front stories of the rangers and marauders who preyed on their fellow Confederates, and an account of the steady breakdown of law, culminating in near anarchy in some states. Never has the Confederacy been so vividly brought to life as a full society, riven with political and economic conflicts beneath its more loudly publicized military battles.
Davis's astonishingly thorough primary research has ranged across the 800-odd newspapers that were in operation during the war, but also across the personal papers of over a hundred Southern leaders and ordinary citizens. He quotes from letters and diaries throughout the narrative, revealing the Confederacy through the words of the Confederates themselves. Like any society, especially in the early stages of nation-building and the devastating stages of warfare, the Confederacy was not one thing but many things to many people. One thing, however, was shared by all: the belief that the South offered a necessary evolution of American democracy. Look Away! offers a dramatic and definitive account of one of America's most searing episodes.
Download the free Fable app
Stay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
Rate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
Curate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesStay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building toolRate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tagsCurate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesLook Away! Reviews
3.5
kristennikki
Created almost 9 years agoShare
Report
Chris Leslie
Created almost 11 years agoShare
Report
smellincoffee
Created almost 12 years agoShare
Report
“While most Civil War histories concentrate on military campaigns, Look Away! chronicles the history of the Confederacy from a political and social perspective. Its attempt to ignore military matters is almost futile given that the Confederacy was born in war and perished amid it, as its every institution (civic, social, economic) was ravaged by the war and driven into failure. The story of Look Away is one of a doomed nation, riven in contradiction from the start. Examining the feuds between the southern Congress and its president, the implosion of slavery, the breakdown of law and order, the trials of women and economic woes, it looks at the southern nation that lay behind the battlefront. Though I initially avoided reading this on suspicion that it was the work of neo-Confederate ideology (I've seen it sold beside titles like The South was Right!), it proved appropriately moderate, neither overtly friendly nor hostile -- not that its presentation of slavery as the driving force of the war pleased the sputtering reviewer who announced that Gone with the Wind was a superior text to consult.
Davis begins with the crisis leading to the secession of the southern states, and their gathering together to create a new constitution. The form of their confederate government makes plain slavery's role as a cause of the war; even if one ignores all of the defensive rhetoric from the time, the fact that no Confederate state could ever dispense with slavery within its borders has challenges the "states' rights" crowd who maintain slavery was incidental. The southerners attempted to create a modified version of the US Constitution which emphasized the sovereignty of the individual states, but the stresses of war would the dream.
Attempting to forge a nation from scratch in the midst of a war is no easy feat; while the Continental Congress accomplished it, their task was somewhat easier. Their foes was an ocean away, its resources and attention scattered, its means of communication and transport largely the same as in the days of William the Conqueror. The north and south, however, were intimate neighbors with intertwined borders: both could and would field armies in the hundreds of thousands, supported by the best of modern technology -- trains, telegraphs, and a robust factory system. The war would be total from the beginning, as Davis' account bears out.
His examination of the home front demonstrates how widespread military enlistment and conscription led to much of society simply failing apart for want of the men needed to maintain it. Not only were civil servants like postmen, peace officers, and the like taken, but so many men were absent either through enlistment or conscription that the farms were left undermanned and vulnerable not only to slave insurrections but raids from bands of highwaymen and deserters.
Complicating matters from the start was the divided political sentiment of the southrons who, though avowing agrarian democracy and political liberty, were led by a plantation elite jealous of their own power and dependent on slavery. The Confederacy was an oligarchy in the form of a democracy, Davis writes, and as the war continued the form of democracy wore off. Civil order collapsed, leaving parts of the south running on martial law, naked power, and the government proved no less dangerous to struggling farmers than raids as it began seizing crops as quickly as they could be grown. Not only was the army of little use in countering the violence of highwaymen, beset on all sides by the Union force, but the state it served had become an agent of abuse itself. The best of the south's political class had fled Congress for the Army (war being less distasteful than the tenor of debate), leaving the government in the hands of woefully inferior personalities who were only too happy to spend their time bickering while Rome burned, and corrupted by all of the power coalescing in their hands. The longer the war wore on, the more power Richmond collected; not only through self-willed expansion, but by people depending on it as a last resort. The Confederacy, having begun as a decentralized confederacy, was by war's end a welfare state; an astonishing journey that only war could taken a nation.
Although it offers brief military recaps to give readers an idea for the general course of the war, Look Away! is first and foremost a history of the southern country at home as it attempted to be a people and a nation at war. Not only does it offer readers a view of the chaos that the average family would have been enduring through the war years, it imparts an understanding of the Confederate government far different from the one which exists in popular myth. It's a grimmer view, but one softened by the fact that Davis is plainly sympathetic to his subjects. Look Away should definitely be of interest to anyone fascinated by the Civil War or southern politics.
Related:
Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War, David Williams”
Aloysius Okon
Created over 12 years agoShare
Report
“A good overview of the different issues that faced the Confederate States of America on the home front during its four years of existence. Davis doesn't just talk about the battles or the status of slavery (though there is plenty of that) but also expands his survey to include such things as the status of women in society, Unionist dissent, military vs. civilian control, political rivalries and personal animosities, states rights, and government control of the economy.”
About William C. Davis
William C. Davis is a prolific historian, retired history professor from Virginia Tech, and was for more than twenty years a magazine and book publishing executive. He is the author or editor of more than forty books, including Three Roads to the Alamo and Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America.
Other books by William C. Davis
Start a Book Club
Start a public or private book club with this book on the Fable app today!FAQ
Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?
Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?
How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?
Do you sell physical books too?
Are book clubs free to join on Fable?
How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?
