War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion

By Wayne K. Durrill

Book Overview

In this book Durrill describes in graphic detail the disintegration, during the Civil War, of Southern plantation society in a North Carolina coastal county. He details struggles among planters, slaves, yeoman farmers, and landless white laborers, as well as a guerrilla war and a clash between two armies that, in the end, destroyed all that remained of the county's social structure. He examines the failure of a planter-yeoman alliance, and discusses how yeoman farmers and landless white laborers allied themselves against planters, but to no avail. He also shows how slaves, when refugeed upcountry, tried unsuccessfully to reestablish their prerogatives--a subsistence, as well as protection from violence--owed them as a minimal condition of their servitude.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195089235
• ISBN13: 9780195089233
• Release Date: April 1994
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

A real eye opener.

I found this to be the best civil war documentation so far for this region. My own research turned up a great great uncle who fought for the Union Army after my great great grandfather was imprisoned. The Unionist side has never been told as well as Durrill's studies have brought it to light. Too much time has been spent studying the great battles, but the Battle of Plymouth ranks right up there in importance. How many yankees think that all southerners agreed and fought for the south, only God knows. They should read this one.

An observation of economic division in the South, 1861-1865.

A book not fully appreciated without a first hand knowledge of the Albemarle region of North Carolina, Mr. Durrill certainly delves into the (sometimes remote) interests of social historians. The author chose as the location for his study, a small town inside a very rural county in North Carolina. The town, Plymouth, located in Washington County, was not only a military objective of two opposing armies, but a focus of division between many economic classes. Mr Durrill presents the county very accurately as a region of very rich and very poor struggling for political and social power during the period immediately prior and during the 1861-1865 war. Presented as a war within a war, the book documents many conflicts betweeen planters and yeoman farmers, between civilians and soldiers, and not most inconsequentially, between armies. Tracing the removal of the planters' slave labor forces from the Albemarle region behind Confederate lines and showing the effects of a social upheaval, the author has shown the importance of all classes of people in maintaining the inequities of the Southern agricultural antebellum economy. Wayne Durrill has presented the economic ideals that each social group manipulated in their own interests through the war years, and shown how ideals changed with each advance or retreat of a military force.