This book deals with coming of age in the 1850s and '60s. Challenging the popular conception of Southern youth on the eve of the Civil War as intellectually lazy, violent, and dissipated, Peter Carmichael looks closely at the lives of more than one hundred young white men from Virginia's last generation to grow up with the institution of slavery. He finds them deeply engaged in the political, economic, and cultural forces of their time. Carmichael argues that their experiences force us to reexamine the nature of Southern manhood and shed new light on the formation and reformation of Southern identity during the turbulent last half of the nineteenth century.