Doyle applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Carolinian Crucible: Reforging Class, Family, and Nation in Confederate South Carolina, with the following results:
If one were to open up Carolinian Crucible: Reforging Class, Family, and Nation in Confederate South Carolina on page 99, they would find themselves on the final page of Chapter 3, which deals with conscription and its consequences. Although only half a page of text, I think it would give the reader a good idea of the book and its wider claims. The page picks up my point that conscription and its operation in South Carolina reveal much about the state’s society and its responses to the demands of the Confederate war effort; in particular, it demonstrates how certain class-based privileges linked to conscription generated frustration among lower-class whites but did not foster a fundamental rejection of the Confederate cause. As I write,Learn more about Carolinian Crucible at the Cambridge University Press website.Tensions of course existed, and one can find gripes about “big men” during the war. The critical point, though, is that conscription was not popularly interpreted as the rich shirking their duty while callously forcing the poor into the military. The many sons of wealthy enslavers in the armies of the South, the efforts of the Confederate government to correct defects or areas of abuse within its conscription legislation, and the identification of most South Carolinian whites with key tenets of Confederate nationalism all helped ensure that momentary frustrations never coalesced into a more tangible and sustained opposition to the central government.While page 99 of the book would give a browser a good sense of my wider takes on class, nationalism, and Confederate loyalty in the Palmetto State, the experiment would be less effective in other respects. Seeing as it brings you to the concluding paragraph of a chapter, it doesn’t meaningfully introduce the reader to the rich material the book has regarding the lived experiences of lower-class whites in the Civil War South. Where possible, I strive to foreground the perspectives and lives of this class in South Carolina, often through close consideration of their correspondence, but page 99 only reveals the outcomes of this analysis rather than the more quotidian insights and intimate stories pertaining to common white folk that can be found throughout the book. Put another way, jumping to page 99 of Carolinian Crucible is rather like looking over the final calculations of a math student but not their intricate workings. Nonetheless, the Page 99 Test certainly seems like a useful shortcut for glimpsing a book’s core claims.
--Marshal Zeringue
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