Intro -- Contents -- Prologue: The Beginnings of a Plantation Community -- 1. Secession -- 2. The Yeoman Challenge -- 3. Removal: The First Crisis in Paternalism -- 4. A Question of Sovereignty -- 5. The Emancipation Proclamation: Beginnings of a Property War -- 6. Refugeeing: The Second Crisis in Paternalism -- 7. Guerrilla War -- 8. The Battle of Plymouth -- Epilogue: The End of a Plantation Community -- Statistical Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliographic Note -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.

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 laborers, 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 laborers 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.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.