This collection of thirteen essays examines the leaders of the southern states during the Civil War. Malcolm C. McMillan writes of the futile efforts of Alabama's wealthy governors to keep the trust of the poor non-slaveholding whites. Paul D. Escott shows Georgia Governor Joseph Emerson Brown's ability to please both the planter elite and the yeoman farmers. John B. Edmunds, Jr. examines the tremendous problems faced by the governors of South Carolina, the state that would suffer the highest losses. Each of the contributors describes the governor's reaction to undertaking duties never before required of men in their positions--urging men to battle, searching for means to feed and clothe the poor, boosting morale, and defending their state's territories, even against great odds.

In January 1861 a state convention voted by a narrow margin to secede from the Union. Thus did the state of Georgia begin its often rebellious participation in the Civil War. While Georgia troops fought far away, back at home Governor Joseph Emerson Brown, a strict advocate of states' rights, increasingly bristled at the centralizing impulses of the Confederate government. In this popular treatment of the Civil War in Georgia, F. N. Boney tells the story of how the strain of this modern, total war relentlessly ravaged the state's resources and weakened its resolve to fight for the Confederate cause. Heavy casualties on the battle field and accelerating inflation on the home front combined to undermine the morale of the Confederacy and the citizens of Georgia.

Boney vividly describes these effects and shows how in response Governor Brown and other Georgia leaders clashed more frequently and more bitterly with President Jefferson Davis. Following their governor's lead, white Georgians complained about Confederate policy decisions they believed were destroying their chances of winning the war. As Northern armies knifed through their state, whites feared the devastation the Yankees left in their wake. At the same time Georgia's slaves, almost half the total population, grew increasingly restive as they greeted the bluebellies' arrival as the coming of liberation and the day of Jubilee.

Narrating Sherman's pivotal capture of Atlanta on 2 September 1864 and his crushing march to the sea, which ended with the fall of Savannah in late December, the author recounts the effects of this slow death of the Confederacy on the psyche of Georgians black and white. In the process, Boney shows howrebel Georgia gradually overcame its grief and was eventually reunited with the north in a national reconciliation.