War of Another Kind - A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion

This book describes in graphic detail the disintegration of southern plantation society in a coastal county in North Carolina during the Civil War. It involves the struggles among planters, slaves, yeoman farmers, landless white labourers, and two armies that produced in the end a major battle and massacre that destroyed all that remained of the county's social structure. By 1865 the society had been drastically transformed by war.

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.