Borrowing directly from Edgar Allen Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, author and historian Bruce Levine chronicles the fall of the Southern slave power. Professor Levine argues that the slavery-based lifestyle and economy of the southern United States was imbued with fatal flaws. The source of the South’s greatest power and prestige had built within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

The book opens with a dynamic chapter on the nature of slavery and the hold it had upon both master and slave. The master used the slave and was, in turn, used up by him. Even before the Civil War, the social and moral hypocrisy of the slave system was evident with the appearance of mixed race children, sired by slave mothers and their white masters/owners. This dirty little secret was apparent to any with open eyes, and some chose to deal with it by selling off the tell-tale offspring. To deal with this moral dilemma, masters found a way to justify slavery as a necessity. Southern slavery was viewed as the kindest means of dealing with the enslaved, and as the means by which the owner could attain a sense of importance, even nobility. Slavery was “the unique basis of the particular outlook, assumptions, norms, habits, and relationships to which master as a social class had become deeply and reflexively attached.” This empowerment was as addictive as it was seductive, and when challenged by a rising abolitionist movement, was grasped ever so tightly. Slavery and all of the subsidiary benefits that accompanied it were more important to the masters than the slaves themselves.

When the secession crisis reached its zenith, the slave states left the Union because of the results of the presidential election and their fears that Lincoln’s election portended the doom of slavery. Their fears proved all too accurate, Levine demonstrates, but not in the way they feared. Ironically, it was by their hands that slavery went to its destruction. Levine outlines slavery’s demise against a broad backdrop of the Civil War. As battles were won and lost, the Lincoln administration began an ever increasing assault on slavery, beginning with the First and Second Confiscation Acts and culminating with the Emancipation Proclamation and the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

The Confederate leaders and people refused to accept the reality of slavery’s demise. They also failed to comprehend, as Levine ably demonstrates, that their own actions, secession, the precipitation of the war and the refusal to accept defeat actually accelerated the fall of slavery.

One of the strengths of the narrative is the weaving in of contemporaries’ views, both military and civilian. The downright inability or refusal of southerners to see the nature of slavery exposed to them is remarkable. Many could not comprehend how their loyal slaves could pick up and leave, become impudent or even turn upon them. From the women, like Mary Chesnut and Katherine Stone who remained on the plantations, to the Confederate political leadership in Richmond, that blindness to reality was epidemic.

To those who still refuse to admit that slavery is intertwined with any study of the Civil War, this book will not be welcome. Levine clearly illustrates the unpleasant reality that there would have been no Southern Confederacy without slavery, no secession except for fear that slavery would be threatened and no war without secession. Once war was adopted as the means to save the “peculiar institution,” the Southerners armed Lincoln with his most potent weapon to wield against it: emancipation as a war measure. This allowed Lincoln to legally ignore the inherent protections to slavery manifested in the Constitution. Lincoln did not fail to exploit this advantage to its fullest effect.

The immediacy of emancipation—the speed with which slaves fled their homes or repudiated their masters—left the slave owners befuddled. And despite the evidence that their system was failing, Southerners continued to try to find ways to salvage slavery. Even after the war was clearly lost and the 13th Amendment was being ratified, Southerners tried to hang on, looking for ways to forestall the inevitable. Confederate peace commissioners and even generals as they surrendered were still engaged in this endeavor. Some, like fire-eater Edmond Ruffin, who had delightfully fired one of the first shots against Fort Sumter, were unable to cope with the reality of a world where they were not masters. Ruffin, after draping a Confederate flag around his shoulders, committed suicide. Levine argues that the Confederacy did much the same thing by going to war. Not everyone will agree with Levine’s thesis, but The Fall of the House of Dixie is an informative, provocative read.

Robert I. Girardi, a past president of the Civil War Round Table of Chicago, is on the Board of Directors of the Illinois State Historical Society and has written or edited ten books on the American Civil War, including The Military Memoirs of General John Pope, Campaigning with Uncle Billy, The Civil War Memoirs of Sgt. Lyman S. Widney, 34th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, and Gettysburg in Art and Artifacts.