Confederate Home Front (Hardcover)

Drawing from a wealth of historic documents and personal papers, William Warren Rogers, Jr., provides a fascinating and detailed political, economic, social, and commercial history of Montgomery, Alabama, from 1860 to 1865. Rogers's account begins with an examination of daily life in the city before the war and ends with the situation in Montgomery as set against a disintegrating Confederacy and the city's surrender to Union troops.

Montgomery was a young city of nearly 9,000 residents when the Civil War began, with blacks, most of them slaves, slightly outnumbering whites. Montgomerians liked to claim cultivation, but at times an unvarnished frontierlike atmosphere was obvious. The streets of Montgomery were unpaved, cotton and cornfields grew right up to the city limits, and class divisions were distinct. Despite its relatively young age and small size, though, the city was chosen as the first capital of the Confederacy.

During the Civil War, Montgomery became a hub of activity, as Rogers shows in intimate detail and with great narrative thrust. After providing an overview of the events that led to Alabama's secession and the choice of Montgomery as the Confederacy's capital, Rogers arranges his materials topically, examining such subjects as the city's business patterns and administration, efforts to promote the Confederate cause and defend the city from Union forces, and the plight of the small number of Montgomery Unionists who continued to inhabit the city. Rogers concludes with chapters devoted to the final year of the war and the city's fall.

Throughout Confederate Home Front, Rogers demonstrates that Montgomerians generally experienced the same hopes, deprivations, andtragedies that other Southerners did at this time. The Montgomery experience, therefore, offers a microcosm of life on the Confederate home front.