Georgia Lee Tatum taught for many years at Mississippi Delta State Teachers College (now Delta State University). Introducing this Bison Books edition is David Williams, a professor of history at Valdosta State University in Georgia. He is the author of Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley.

"Disloyalty in the Confederacy definitely puts to rout the belief, once common, that ‘every man, woman and child stood behind Jefferson Davis and the Stars and Bars in support of the Confederacy.' . . . [It] brings to light much hitherto unrevealed information about the activities of those who carried on what might be called a counter-rebellion during the War between the States."—New York Times Book Review

"Though 600,000 men out of a population of 8,000,000 whites offered their services to the Confederacy in the first year of the Civil War, before its close disaffection and active disloyalty in every Confederate state had seriously weakened the Southern cause. The reasons for this disaffection were many: loyalty to the Union and apathy toward secession, the resentment of poor whites at being drafted to fight 'a rich man's war,' an intense sectionalism within the seceding states themselves, the pacifist influence of certain foreign and Quaker groups. . . . A solid and well documented study.”—New Republic

"This is the sort of book necessary to balance accounts of the Southern Confederacy. Heretofore, the impression has been too often left that the South fought as a unit with a common purpose."—Journal of Southern History