Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment

by Willie Lee Rose

Overview

Just seven months into the Civil War, a Union fleet sailed into South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound, landed a ground force, and then made its way upriver to Beaufort. Planters and farmers fled before their attackers, allowing virtually all their major possessions, including ten thousand slaves, to fall into Union hands.

Rehearsal for Reconstruction, winner of the Allan Nevins Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Charles S. Sydnor Prize, is historian Willie Lee Rose’s chronicle of change in this Sea Island region from its capture in 1861 through Reconstruction. With epic sweep, Rose demonstrates how Port Royal constituted a stage upon which a dress rehearsal for the South’s postwar era was acted out.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820320618
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	03/01/1999
Series:	Brown Thrasher Books Series
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.17(d)

About the Author

WILLIE LEE ROSE is the author of Rehearsal for Reconstruction, A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (both Georgia), and Slavery and Freedom. The Willie Lee Rose Prize, sponsored by the Southern Association for Women Historians, was established in her honor. It is awarded annually for the best book on any topic in southern history written by a woman (or women).

WILLIE LEE ROSE is the author of Rehearsal for Reconstruction, A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (both Georgia), and Slavery and Freedom. The Willie Lee Rose Prize, sponsored by the Southern Association for Women Historians, was established in her honor. It is awarded annually for the best book on any topic in southern history written by a woman (or women).

Editorial Reviews

A disturbing, beautifully told story.

New York Review of Books

A marvelous book.

New Yorker

A triumph of historical analysis [and] a detailed recreation of some of the Civil War's noblest hopes and greatest tragedies.

David Brion Davis

First-rate history.

Journal of American History

A definitive work.

New York Times Book Review

A marvelous book.

New Yorker

"A marvelous book."—New Yorker

"A definitive work."—New York Times Book Review

"A disturbing, beautifully told story."—New York Review of Books

"A triumph of historical analysis [and] a detailed recreation of some of the Civil War's noblest hopes and greatest tragedies."—David Brion Davis

"First-rate history."—Journal of American History

From the Publisher