Reviewed by: A War State All Over: Alabama Politics and the Confederate Cause by Ben H. Severance John M. Sacher A War State All Over: Alabama Politics and the Confederate Cause. By Ben H. Severance. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2020. 264 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-2059-1. Given the sheer volume of scholarship on the Civil War, one is hard pressed to declare any aspect of Confederate history to be understudied. One of the few areas that might merit this description is the Confederacy's wartime legislative, congressional, and gubernatorial elections. The absence of parties, incomplete voting results, low turnout, and limited extant newspapers complicate their inves-tigation. Recent years, however, have brought about a significant improvement in our understanding of voters, candidates, and results in several states. Ben H. Severance's A War State All Over adds Alabama to the list of states where we now have a greater understanding of the candidates, voters, issues, and results. [End Page 335] Severance's book challenges previous studies of Alabama which contend that the 1863 elections demonstrated an abandonment of the Confederacy. Severance's reexamination comes to the opposite conclusion: the results revealed that Alabama remained a "war state" committed to the Confederacy. He contends that the flaws of previous works stem from an unsophisticated correlation: the defeat of incumbents equated to a rejection of the war and the Confederacy coupled with a desire for reunion. Severance shows that these earlier studies are flawed as they highlight only a few high-profile races, do not pay enough to the subsequent actions of the men who defeated incumbents, and use inaccurate labels for the candidates. Previous studies often characterized candidates by their prior political affiliation. In those interpretations, in 1863, antebellum Whigs faced Democrats or secessionists squared off against cooperationists/Unionists. Severance convincingly maintains that these labels did not have much meaning by the middle of the war. Instead, he proposes using a new nomenclature: war Confederates and peace Confederates. The former category consisted of men who were committed to military victory and thus accepted all strong government measures—such as conscription and impressment of slaves—that would lead to victory. The latter category was more amorphous, including all those who wanted the war to end. They could range from outright Unionists to Reconstructionists, who unrealistically sought a return to the Union with antebellum southern society—including slavery—intact. In order to analyze the contests between war and peace Confederates, Severance divides his work into four sections: the congressional elections, the gubernatorial contests, the legislative races and subsequent senate elections, and the soldier vote. In each section, he provides not only the results, but also his explanation of how historians have often misinterpreted these results. Additionally, he looks beyond the outcomes of elections to the performance of the new officeholders. For Severance, even when incumbents lost, or did not run, the results changed merely the name of the man in the office but not necessarily the pro-Confederate votes of these officeholders. The conduct of the new officials proves that Alabama remained a [End Page 336] committed war state in the last years of the Civil War. This conclusion is surprising as, at first glance, 1863 represented a sea change in Alabama politics. Leading pro-war congressmen Jabez Curry and Jacob Ralls lost their reelection bids. John Gill Shorter was crushed in his attempt to retain the governor's office. In a rematch of his 1861 defeat of Thomas H. Watts, Shorter captured a stunning 29,133 fewer votes—a seventy-seven percent decrease—from his victory two years earlier. Similarly, state legislators replaced Alabama's fire-eaters in the Confederate senate. The seats of William Lowndes Yancey (who had died in July 1863) and Clement Claiborne Clay would now be occupied by the less bellicose Robert Jemison and Richard Wilde Walker. Severance's revisionist reading of the results warns against drawing simplistic conclusions from these races. While Curry and Ralls lost their races, Alabama's congressional delegation still contained a majority of war Confederates, an assertion which upends previous studies' conclusions that peace Democrats represented the majority of the state's delegation. Having served as attorney...