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The attempt to repress a majority of its own population backfired on the Confederate States of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. Women and slaves became critical political actors as they contested government enlistment and tax and welfare policies, and struggled for their freedom. Wartime scarcity of food, labor, and soldiers tested the Confederate vision at every point and created domestic crises to match those found on the battlefields. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people - white women and slaves - and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise. When the grandiosity of Southerners' national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives.