Following the suggestion of the historian Peter Parish, these essays probe "the edges" of slavery and the sectional conflict. The authors seek to recover forgotten stories, exceptional cases and contested identities to reveal the forces that shaped America, in the era of "the Long Civil War," c.1830-1877. Offering an unparalleled scope, from the internal politics of southern households to trans-Atlantic propaganda battles, these essays address the fluidity and negotiability of racial and gendered identities, of criminal and transgressive behaviors, of contingent, shifting loyalties and of the hopes of freedom that found expression in refugee camps, court rooms and literary works.

A broad and eloquent study on the relatively overlooked population of single women in the slaveholding South Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth- Century American South investigates the lives of unmarried white women-from the pre- to the post-Civil War South-within a society that placed high value on women's marriage and motherhood. Marie S. Molloy examines female singleness to incorporate nonmarriage, widowhood, separation, and divorce. These single women were not subject to the laws and customs of coverture, in which females were covered by or subject to the governance of fathers, brothers, and husbands, and therefore lived with greater autonomy than married women. Molloy contends that the Civil War proved a catalyst for accelerating personal, social, economic, and legal changes for these women. Being a single woman during this time often meant living a creative and nuanced life, operating within a tight framework of traditional gender conventions while managing subtle changes that worked to their advantage. Singleness was often a route to autonomy and independence that over time expanded and reshaped traditional ideals of Southern womanhood. Molloy delves into these themes and their effects through the lens of various facets of the female life: femininity, family, work, friendship, law, and property. By examining letters and diaries of more than three hundred white, native-born, Southern women, Molloy creates a broad and eloquent study on the relatively overlooked population of single women in both the urban and plantation slaveholding South. She concludes that these women were, in various ways, pioneers and participants of a slow but definite process of change in the antebellum era.