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The South Vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War

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William Freehling's book argues that one of the key reasons for the defeat of the American South was that it was internally divided amongst itself. It could therefore not fully raise the measure of support needed to ward off the stronger North, even given the rather awkward and men-consuming strategy the North produced. This is a plausible thesis, and it is an accurate one, and general readers will find it useful to study.

Specialized readers, however, are likely to be disappointed. Much of the recent discussion of the divided south concentrates on the views of rural whites within the Confederacy. This is not where Freehling concentrates. Instead he deals with the much more obvious fact that the border states of Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky and Delaware did not join the Confederacy, and the 150,000 Black Southerners who joined the Union army. With the 200,000 border state Union soldiers, and the 100,000 whites from the Confederacy proper, a third of all Southerners fought for the Union in the Civil War.

This is all well and good, but it is also rather obvious. The fact that the Border South did not join the Confederacy was after all startlingly clear at the time, and has been clear to all historians since then. There was a time when the African-American contribution to the war and to the slaves' own liberation was ignored, but for the last four decades that has been clearly rectified. Freehling does little more here than quote such established scholars as Leon Litwack, Benjamin Quarles, the documentation provided by Ira Berlin and his colleagues, and the unpublished dissertation of the late Armstead Robinson.

Moreover, much of the work has a padded feel, as Freehling fills space discussing well known battles. He argues that runaways slaves were a major threat to its survival, though its not clear whether it was their flight or the fact that the South irritated the North by demanding illiberal Fugitive Slave Laws. Whether discussing what he considers Lincoln's equivocal and cold attitudes towards slaves, or whether slaves could have been mobilized for the Confederacy, Freehling does not really advance the discussion on these issues. At the end he argues that contrary to some scholars, there was little danger that the British would intervene to help the south, or that General McClellan would have agreed to an independent Confederacy if he had been elected President in 1864, or that a viable campaign of guerilla warfare could have been launched in 1865. These views are probably correct, but one wishes that Freehling could have provided more evidence to support them.

From the day after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, most historians, Civil War buffs, history teachers, and everyone else always said and wrote that the South lost the Civil War due, mainly, to a shortage of manpower and the fact that the North had more industry. Recently, though, several historians have started to say while those reasons are true, there are other factors to look at. Freehling, along with David J. Eicher, is one of the leading proponents of the thought that the anti-Confederate Southerners, as well as politics, played a large role in the South's losing the war. Freehling focuses on the idea of a non-unified South to explain the Confederate loss. While Freehling does point out some eye-opening statistics, most of what he writes will be old news to most well-read Civil War followers. The book is useful for the theory Freehling espouses as well as the chapters on the role of African Americans both North and South. Freehling also does an excellent job of agreeing with some of Gary Gallagher's points (who, he asserts in the prologue, gave him in the inspiration to write the book after Gallagher published a book about how the South lost due to inferior manpower, etc.) despite the fact he does not agree with Gallagher's overall hypothesis. This is good because it shows that Freehling is open to ideas besides his own and isn't doggedly pursuing his goal without doing any real research. The negative, though, is that Freehling's book could have been half the size as he seemed to restate many of his facts. Whether you agree with Freehling's idea or not, the book is still a useful, and well written, work.

Sometimes, people need to be reminded of the basics. pnotley of Canada thinks it's obvious that the Border States didn't secede, but I never saw a Civil War volume before that made the simple point that more Southerners fought with the Federal Army and Navy than the entire Union death toll.

Meanwhile, 'a reader' from Mobile thinks that Kentucky and Missouri joined the Confederacy! This is another example of people needing to be reminded of the obvious: despite the propoganda of the times, it wasn't KY and MO that seceded, it was their governors, plus a minority of the legislators. Nor is it true that Maryland would have seceded if Lincoln hadn't arrested Maryland legislators. The disloyal ones were arrested after the state made the decision to stay in the Union.

If you can bear to have illusions punctured, Freehling's book is filled with fascinating facts on Lincoln's racism, the reluctance of the Union to free slaves, and the way the unsucessful war against secession became a succesful war against both secession and slavery.

Recommended.

Dr. Freehling argues, most persuasively, that dissension from within the states that should have comprised the Confederacy was of greater effect in defeating it than any other factor. He points especially to the failure of the Confederacy to "jell" in Kentucky, where Gen. Bragg had to take back to Tennessee the rifles he had planned to distribute to the thousands who should have answered the call.

He is the first historian of this period in whose work I have found an explanation of the term "filibustering" in its Civil War context. "Filibustering fantasies remained alive only on the Union side by 1863." However, in October of 1863, they must have still been alive. This is certainly the best explanation I have ever read for the Battle of Westport, MO, in which an attempt by Confederate General Price to filibuster there was defeated. This battle occurred less than 50 miles from where I grew up. I have Freehling to thank for the fact that I now understand it, having heard about it many times as a youngster.

Many other events you've read about before will suddenly make sense as you read this book. His coverage of the role of blacks in defeating the confederacy is both even-handed and as near definitive as any I've seen.

Sometimes, people need to be reminded of the basics. pnotley of Canada thinks it's obvious that the Border States didn't secede, but I never saw a Civil War volume before that made the simple point that more Southerners fought with the Federal Army and Navy than the entire Union death toll.
Meanwhile, 'a reader' from Mobile thinks that Kentucky and Missouri joined the Confederacy! This is another example of people needing to be reminded of the obvious: despite the propoganda of the times, it wasn't KY and MO that seceded, it was their governors, plus a minority of the legislators. Nor is it true that Maryland would have seceded if Lincoln hadn't arrested Maryland legislators. The disloyal ones were arrested after the state made the decision to stay in the Union.

If you can bear to have illusions punctured, Freehling's book is filled with fascinating facts on Lincoln's racism, the reluctance of the Union to free slaves, and the way the unsucessful war against secession became a succesful war against both secession and slavery.

Recommended.

This like the rest of Freehling's work is important. In recent years a trend has developed to submerge the central issue of the civil war--slavery--in a myriad of other issues leading to the war and thus diminishing the importance of the war for the US and the World. Part of this slide from confronting the central issue is a tendency to be cosier to attitudes justifying or defending the slaveholders Confederacy in the war.

This book is very clear that within the South, the majority of the population did not support the Confederacy and probably a plurality of the South at first and then a majority actively worked to destroy the Confederacy. The Confederacy was not a Southern republic, it was a slaveholders republic.

Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri were slave states, but they went with the union. Considerable portions of Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina supported the Confederacy throughout the war, and large groups of white people throughout the South opposed the Confederacy. This book explains that without this opposition, the Union would have never been able to enter the South and attack the Confederacy's military and political centers so easily and would have had to mobilize many more troops were there more Confederate support in the areas the Union liberated.

For the most part, the Union liberated rather than occupied the South because as the author explained, African Americans overwhelming supported the union and selflessly through themselves into the war, working first to build defenses, transport materials, tend to the sick, guide the troops, and forage for food and supplies. Later, hundreds of thousands of African Americans volunteered to serve in the Union Army, providing a ready made force available right in the South to support the Union lines against slaveholder terrorism.

What I found unique here was his analysis of the 1864 election and his view that had Mclellan, the Democrat who ran against Lincoln won, the South would have still been defeated, although he leaves open whether slavery would have been obliterated the way it was under the Republicans.

This is a good read, and not as ponderous as his other work, although his new work is decisive to understanding American history as a whole.

The main thesis of this book is that the most important determinant concerning the outcome of the American Civil War was the hundreds of thousands of "Southerners" who fought for the Union instead of the Confederacy. Here, some definitions might be helpful for understanding Freehling's claim. Freehling includes all those from the Upper South (or the Boarder States, as most people know them by; Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia) in his group, "Southerners". Insofar as these states were slave states before the war, and shared a lot in common with the South, his labeling of the people as "Southerners" requires not too large a stretch of the imagination. Freehling also includes black anti-Confederates (i.e., fugitive slaves) as "Southerners", which of course he should.

When one includes escaped slaves and whites from the Upper South, then indeed roughly 300,000 "Southerners" fought for the Union in the American Civil War. Freehling's thesis is that these Unionist Southerners are the most important factor in the outcome of the war. I think he is correct, and he defends his thesis in a number of different ways, from simple numerical comparisons to examinations of some key or illuminating battles.

One thing I really enjoyed about this book is that Freehling makes some claims that I either initially found hard to accept or simply had never thought about. For example, Freehling deals with the Union presidential election of 1864, claiming that even if McClellan had won the North probably would have completed the war, rejecting disunion. This has been a very debatable topic among historians, and Freehling here provides some new insight that I found convincing.

However, Freehling's writing is fairly poor for an academic of his stature. At times it was very difficult to follow what he was saying, and yet at other times he would go on and on with simple comparisons with no end in sight. I would say that three-fourths of the book is accessible enough, but the remaining one-fourth is a big headache to read.

Aside form poor writing, I have to dock another star in my review for Freehling's poor citation. I noticed that many times he didn't provide proper citation when making a big claim, and in one case he mad a huge claim (that fire-eating radicals in South Carolina were able to sweep their state out of the Union even though too small a percentage of the population actually supported secession) and then cited a book that he was in the process of writing but hadn't been published! Surely Freehling can do better than this...

Pick this book up if you're specifically looking for a work that makes a synthetic argument concerning the importance of Unionist Southerners. If you're looking for just any Civil War book for pleasure reading, you can probably get away with skipping this one.

This is yet another captivating work by Freehling. Scholarly, yet accessible; Informative and engaging. This really gets into many details on the internecine warfare that took place within the South. Having grown up in the South, these are things that I was never told about or taught. Since then I have found pieces of what he discussed in the book, but never all in one place. He lays out the evidence and his case very convincingly - the facts really do that for him. Wonderful!

n this short and easy-to-read book, Dr. Freehling continues his thesis about the malign effects of the division of the south explored in his Road To Disunion series into the Civil War itself, demonstrating that the division of the south was a critical element in its defeat. Though Dr. Freehling sometimes plays a little fast and loose in his estimates of which proportion of the south opposed the Confederacy (his best guess, including runaway slaves who fought with the Union and Union soldiers from the Middle and Upper South, is about 1/3 of the south, a pretty fair estimate), the book demonstrates that the division among white Southerners (particularly in the Border states and the mountainous country in West Virginia and Eastern Tennessee) and black Southerners (especially when Union armies approached) was crucial in leading to the decisive defeat of the Confederacy. May that benighted region never rise again.

This book is typical of William Freehling's writings: smooth style, intriguing research, and interesting, prpvpcative conclusions. It is a great read and well worth close study.