Product Description

Many allege that the Confederacy lost the Civil War because of internal division or civilian disaffection; others point to flawed military strategy or ambivalence over slavery. But, argues distinguished historian Gary Gallagher, we should not ask why the Confederacy collapsed so soon but rather how it lasted so long.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77729 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Library Journal
Historians have often looked backward from the surrender at Appomattox to explain the failure of the Confederacy. They have concluded that the Confederacy's defeat was due mainly to decay from within resulting from internal strife among different factions of Southern society. Gallagher (American history, Pennsylvania State Univ.; editor of Lee the Soldier, LJ 4/15/96) disputes that interpretation. While he concedes that there were disagreements, he points to numerous letters and diaries that support his contention that Confederate society rallied around the Stars and Bars until Appomattox. Popular will gave rise to national sentiment whose morale depended on the battlefield victories won by Lee's army. Only Lee's surrender convinced many that the Confederate cause was indeed lost. The author makes a fine case for a new look at an old argument. Recommended for academic libraries and public libraries with Civil War collections.?Grant A. Fredericksen, Illinois Prairie Dist. P.L., Metamora
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A revisionist examination of the Confederate experience, as much concerned with historians and their methods as with history itself. ``Any historian who argues that the Confederate people demonstrated robust devotion to their slave-based republic, possessed feelings of national community, and sacrificed more than any other segment of white society in US history,'' frets Gallagher (American History/Penn. State Univ.), ``runs the risk of being labeled a neo-Confederate.'' He's right to worry. Making precisely that argument, his history of Confederate military and civilian experience veers dangerously close to hagiography of an entire culture. Challenging the current historical consensus that lack of will, absence of national unity, and flawed military strategy doomed the Confederacy, Gallagher presents contemporary letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts that rhapsodize about the true grit of rebel soldiers and civilians. To his credit, he resists the urge to backtrack from Appomattox when explaining military failure (as he accuses other historians of doing) and instead puts the Confederate war effort in a larger historical framework--namely the successful rebellion of the American Revolution. He poses a number of intriguing questions for fellow historians, suggesting most notably that scholars ask not why an uprising viewed as ``a rich man's war but a poor man's fight'' failed, but why so many non-slaveholders fought for so long. But his parade of testimonials to the nobility of the Lost Cause, unchallenged by critical questioning, sticks in the craw. Soldiers' letters, reenlistment figures, and editorials--which all suggest high morale when taken at face value by Gallagher--could easily be viewed as propaganda. At least their bombastic language enlivens an otherwise stiffly formal academic text. A work of more interest to historians than general readers, and more important for the questions it raises than any it answers. (40 photos, not seen) (History Book Club selection) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
His perceptive and engaging new book, The Confederate War, maintains that historians have got off the track in recent years by attributing Confederate defeat to weakness on the homefront rather than to performance on the battlefield.... Gallagher sees a more obvious--and more traditional--reason. "The Confederate military," he writes, "ultimately proved unable to win enough victories at crucial times to carry their nation to independence." -- The New York Times Book Review, Daniel E. Sutherland

Customer Reviews

"A mere question of time"
This quotation from Lee's analysis of Confederate prospects in Virginia in 1864 might be applied to the overall military picture in the South argues Gallagher. Bucking revisionists who blame Confederate defeat on a lack of popular support for the war effort, the author attempts to show how the agrarian South mustered a heroic effort against overwhelming odds, much as the "Lost Cause" supporters originally held. He counters Alan Nolan's argument that Lee's aggressive strategy was at fault with contemporary reports about the effect of this strategy on civilian morale. While the evidence on both sides of this argument is less than convincing, Gallagher finds the mark with statistics comparing the losses in men and property suffered by the Confederates compared with those suffered by U.S. forces in both this and all other wars involving American forces. He points out that a proportional Federal loss of 850,000 men during a conflict in which Northern war weariness led even Lincoln to the brink of despair might have found the Northern populace lacking in will. Although much of his argument is necessarily anecdotal, Gallagher presents a strong case that civil war buffs will spend a long time attacking or defending.

Bold and persuasive
Among historians, the dominant view of the Confederacy since the 1960s was the "lack-of-will" thesis, which offers the vision of a failed CSA collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions. A Southern government abandoned by its people, rejected and repudiated by every non-slaveholding white person, fighting with an army of disgruntled draftees: That is some people's estimation of the CSA.

Since the early 1990s, however, this fixation with Southern "lack of will" has been questioned by some of the most active and able historians, who believe we have replaced one unbalanced view (the old "Lost Cause" thesis) with another.

Such questioning invites a charge of "neo-Confederate," or worse, from people who have some political or personal investment in the prevailing paradigm. Yet this questioning is not the work of "moonlight-and-magnolia" sentimentalists. Many of them are not Southern-born; many have no ancestors who fought the war.

Gary W. Gallagher is among them. This handsome little book, engagingly written, summarized the work that has been done to date in correcting the historical view of the South's war effort.

Gallagher, in an interview, has said, "Common sense should play more of a role in historical evaluation than it often does. To be able to wage war, the Confederacy was willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of its young men and suffer the destruction of its economy. In terms of military casualties, Confederates sacrificed far more than any other generation of white Americans in U.S. history. Yet the South still fought. This would suggest broad popular support for the war."

Among the points he makes: The battle losses the South took would translate into six million U.S. battle casualties in World War II (instead of 961,977, the actual figure); nearly a million in Vietnam, instead of 201,000. Yet the "lack-of-will" partisans call the Confederacy a failed society. Gallagher points out that there's a danger of circular reasoning in this, because it sets the bar of "commitment to the cause" awfully high. Is total victory or total annihilation the only proof of "commitment"? Half of the Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded. How many more would have had to take a bullet to qualify as "commitment"?

The Confederate War
This is an interesting study, really more of an essay than a fully-fledged work of research. It asks relevant questions of other current scholarship and proposes topics for further study.

Gallagher's thesis is essentially that the South did not, as some scholars have proposed, lose the war because of a lack of will to fight, but because of military defeats. I found his thesis, and his criticisms of the lack-of-will scholarship, convincing. However, I did find some elements of Gallagher's argument questionable. He gives the Army of Northern Virginia an absolutely central role. What about other Confederate armies, in which many men suffered under much worse leadership? And Gallagher pretty much chooses not to discuss the existence of substantial numbers of people in the Southern mountains who never supported the Confederacy at all.

Nevertheless, the question which Gallagher proposes for future study -- why did so many people support the Confederacy for so long and at such cost -- I think is a vital one, and I hope to see it addressed.