War of Another Kind

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 labourers 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 labourers 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.