Although many Civil War reference books exist, Civil War researchers have until now had no single compendium to consult on important details about the combatant states (and territories). This crucial reference work, the sixth in the States at War series, provides vital information on the organization, activities, economies, demographics, and laws of Civil War South Carolina. This volume also includes the Confederate States Chronology. Miller enlists multiple sources, including the statutes, Journals of Congress, departmental reports, general orders from Richmond and state legislatures, and others, to illustrate the rise and fall of the Confederacy. In chronological order, he presents the national laws intended to harness its manpower and resources for war, the harsh realities of foreign diplomacy, the blockade, and the costs of states’ rights governance, along with mounting dissent; the effects of massive debt financing, inflation, and loss of credit; and a growing raggedness within the ranks of its army. The chronology provides a factual framework for one of history’s greatest ironies: in the end, the war to preserve slavery could not be won while 35 percent of the population was enslaved.

How is the state produced? In what ways did enslaved African Americans shape modern governing practices? Ryan A. Quintana provocatively answers these questions by focusing on the everyday production of South Carolina's state space—its roads and canals, borders and boundaries, public buildings and military fortifications. Beginning in the early eighteenth century and moving through the post–War of 1812 internal improvements boom, Quintana highlights the surprising ways enslaved men and women sat at the center of South Carolina's earliest political development, materially producing the state's infrastructure and early governing practices, while also challenging and reshaping both through their day-to-day movements, from the mundane to the rebellious. Focusing on slaves' lives and labors, Quintana illuminates how black South Carolinians not only created the early state but also established their own extralegal economic sites, social and cultural havens, and independent communities along South Carolina's roads, rivers, and canals. Combining social history, the study of American politics, and critical geography, Quintana reframes our ideas of early American political development, illuminates the material production of space, and reveals the central role of slaves' daily movements (for their owners and themselves) to the development of the modern state.