The Failure of Our Fathers: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Alabama by Victoria E. Ott (review)

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• The Failure of Our Fathers: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Alabama by Victoria E. Ott
• David T. Gleeson

The Failure of Our Fathers: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Alabama. By Victoria E. Ott. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 209. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-2147-5.)

Victoria E. Ott seeks to understand the role of family in the lives of Alabama’s “common whites” (those who, for the most part, did not own slaves) and in their relationship with the Confederacy (p. 2). The Failure of Our Fathers: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Alabama takes readers through prewar, wartime, and postwar experiences to highlight that “family remained the central focus” of these common whites (p. 175). Loyalty to their state and its participation in the Civil War ebbed and flowed depending on the conflict’s effect on their families. Despite most not having a direct interest in slavery, the majority supported the Confederacy. As Stephanie McCurry has discovered in South Carolina, Ott finds in Alabama that the “shared belief [between elite and non-elite white southerners] that outsiders threatened to undermine their liberties, invade their communities, and, in the process, harm their families brought poor whites and yeomen to join the [secessionist] cause” (p. 5).

These new Confederates, however, expected substantial support from the state and central governments in return, especially proper treatment (equipment, food, pay, and so on) in the army and support for their families left at home. For these soldiers, as mostly nonslaveholders, departing for war meant a [End Page 433] serious removal of labor from farms. Ott clearly shows that as Confederate authorities failed to meet expectations of aid, patriotism waned. First, soldiers and their families at home complained to each other, and eventually to government officials, about their hardships. The Confederate government’s introduction of conscription in April 1862 brought a further loss of agricultural labor and of important skilled workers such as millers and blacksmiths. Revisions to conscription through the rest of the war, especially expanding the age range for compulsory military service (more so than the exemptions for overseers who supervised more than twenty slaves), raised discontent among non-elite white Alabamians. The Confederate “tax-in-kind” law, which obliged producers to give up 10 percent of their “agricultural products,” only exacerbated resentment (p. 125). With families already facing serious food shortages, the extra levy made their lives even more difficult. There were some private and public phil-anthropic efforts to help soldiers’ wives, but they were never sufficient to ease all distress. Many common white Alabamians felt then that the key to their restored prosperity was the return of their major breadwinner from the army.

Ott chronicles declining support for the Confederacy well. Though there were no major rebellions in Alabama akin to the one in Jones County, Mississippi, these non-elite white southerners longed for peace, with or without victory. When defeat finally came, most accepted it and focused more on reconstructing their families than on politics. The state of Alabama, having introduced some forms of relief during the war, sought to extend support to former Confederate soldiers and their families after it. Though such efforts were underfunded and piecemeal, they did indicate that the state had to respond to the economic needs and demands of poorer white residents, reasoning it were better they got aid from their former white leaders than from the federal Freedmen’s Bureau. These gestures from the anti-Reconstruction elite (and the end of the bureau itself) helped keep most white Alabamians united against any Radical Republican appeals. Thanks to their Civil War experience, however, common white southerners still expected help from their government and could rebel politically, supporting, for example, Populism and Progressivism later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ott concludes that the Confederate experience meant that common whites “claimed the same dignity and honor as a man or woman that shaped elite culture while creating a sense of self unique to their socio-economic class” (p. 178). By centering the voices of common white Alabamians in her work, Ott provides an excellent analysis of not only why so many nonslaveholders supported the slaveholders...