44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bold and persuasive, October 27, 2002
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"?
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"A mere question of time", January 21, 2000
By A Customer
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.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Vital for a Civil War Collection, December 31, 2002
In this short but very important work, Gallagher challenges the notion that the Confederacy did not develop a sense of nationalism and also many of the notions of the "lost cause" theory as well as a notion that the Confederacy was "stabbed in the back" by extensive internal tension among the populace as well as desertions. Gallagher uses many diaries and letters to bring home his points that the citizens of the CSA did in fact develop an extensive sense of nationalism and supported their cause right up until the end at Appomattox and even beyond. Gallagher also proves that while there were extensive disertions among some troops during many points in the war, many of those same troops rejoined their units after taking care of affairs at home. He also shows that rather than encouraging disertion because of problems at home, many Confederate women encouraged their men to stay with the army and not shirk their responsibilities to the CSA. Many historians also have recently concluded the CSA would have been better served to adopt a strategy of guerilla warfare against Union troops, Gallagher shows why this strategy would have been detrimental to southern society and the slave holding republic it wished to establish and therefore many recent historians miss the mark in asserting this strategy would have been proper and acceptable to the southern populace which wanted victories over Union forces.
My only gripe with this book is that it is really a compliation of several lectures by Dr. Gallagher that have been footnoted and extended. Therefore they really don't form an interconnected narrative and read like seperate small books. Had Dr. Gallagher attempted to form a more complete narrative with each of his sections of the book it would have been much better. However this is still an outstanding book and necessary for any serious student of the Civil War.
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