Dixie's enemy within: how the ideology of white supremacy undermined the south's own war effort.

• Author: Woodard, Colin
• Position: Critical essay

Wars have often unleashed forces the warring parties hadn't expected and couldn't control. The Thirty Years' War began as a struggle between religions but gave birth to the modern system of secular states, while World War I profoundly undermined the legitimacy of the British aristocracy and the stability of that country's global empire.

The U.S. Civil War, University of Illinois historian Bruce Levine argues in his new book, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South, was no exception. Southerners launched the war to preserve slavery, and President Abraham Lincoln responded to save the Union. Ironically, the stresses and necessities of a near-total war quickly began to corrode the Confederate slave system from within and pushed an ambivalent Union to embrace emancipation to ensure victory in the field.

"A war launched to preserve slavery succeeded instead in abolishing that institution more rapidly and more radically than would have occurred otherwise," Levine writes. "[The] ideology of white supremacy, which had always provided critical support for slavery, inhibit[ed] the slaveholders' government from doing what it needed to do to survive."

Many hundreds of books have been written on the Civil War in the century since it began, but Levine feels too many of these have concentrated on the movements of armies, and too few on the effect the war itself had on the societies that were righting it, and on the slave system in particular. The Fall of the House of Dixie is intended "to help fill that gaping hole in our collective memory," tracing how a "great and terrible war undermined the economic, social, and political foundations of the old South, destroying human bondage and the storied world of the slaveholding elite."

The result is a compelling, readable, and informative account of perhaps the war's most significant accomplishment and how it came about. While U.S. history buffs may find many of the details familiar--William Freehling has covered much of this terrain in various volumes, and Steven Spielberg's new film Lincoln shares its theme--it's clarifying to have them assembled in one place. Those less familiar with the conflict will profit from starting their education here.

Levine's title is a play on Edgar Allen Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, which features an outwardly intimidating edifice concealing a fatal structural flaw that brings its collapse. He shows that while the Deep...