Customer Reviews

Why the South Lost the Civil War

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I considered this book to be an interesting and quite a complex book which integrated all facets of Civil War elements to explained why the South lost the Civil War. To fully appreciate this book, you have to be pretty well knowledgable about Civil War and understand it without regional bias. This is a military history book and probably not geared toward the casual reader. I have read the previous reviews and they tell me that these folks probably didn't understand what the authors were trying to do. A good example would be how one of them would complaint about how the authors would compared things with the Napoleonic armies and tactics. Well, to anyone who knows anything about the American Civil War, most of the miltiary commanders who were West Pointers were heavily influenced by the Napoleonic Wars and concepts. The southern commanders especially were heavily influenced by this. Its only logical that some cause and effect reasonings must be shown between the Confederate military effort and Napoleonic influence. Others complaint about lack of nationalism in the Confederacy that book explain. Yes, nationalism was very high at the beginning of the war but it wane considerably by the end. Like the Third Reich, Confederacy fought on beyond a reasonable limit and led to a devastating effects to the region as result. Lack of nationalism definitely made it easier for the North to overcome the south in the end as southern armies were bleeding men who were just walking away from their unit (see that movie Cold Harbor for small example). The hard core Confederate soldiers was heavily outnumbered by the southern population who just wanted the war to end. Was the authors bias against the south? I don't think so. I think the authors were pretty straight forward on the facts why the south lost the war. In defeat, the picture is never very pretty.

Overall, I found the book to be interesting. I supposed it could have been written so it might be easier for the casual readers but since it wasn't intended for such readers, it leaves folks like me to enjoyed what the authors had to say and to understand their perception even if I may agreed or disagreed at my option.

Clearly the above reviewer has no clue to the value of the scholarship in this book. The authors clearly explain the complex combination of factors leading to the confederate defeat. They avoid the easy, single explanation. The discussion is well-organzed and lucid as the four authors write as a single voice. They remind us that the tragedy of the civil war cannot be simply explained.

Beringer, et. al. provide a remarkable synthesis of military, social and cultural factors contributing to Confederate defeat. While much of their material may seem dry to young readers, this work is solid history written by consumate professionals. Although I disagree with their central thesis that a lack of will brought about the South's defeat, I do believe this had a significant effect along with the other factors. Perhaps, Beringer's thesis was a product of the era in which he wrote--the Post-Vietnam Era.

Four professors authored an excellent comprehensive analysis of the Civil War, "Why the South Lost the Civil War" (1986), still pertinent today. Over generations, many military, political, diplomatic, and social factors have been evaluated for impact on Civil War developments. I regard their synthesis of historical writings and their researches have been very commendable, concluding logically that the South lacked the will to win in the Civil War.

That the South lacked the will to win is "quite a firm consensus" by scholars although not accepted by the dean of academic historians, Gary Gallagher, recorded in his "Lee and His Generals in War and Memory" (1998), page 20, footnote 28.

"Why the South Lost the Civil War" related analyses of academic historians on the collapse of the Confederacy: major military battles, noting if generals followed, ignored, or were oblivious to the military theories of Karl von Clausewitz and Baron Antoine Henri Jomini, in particular; a modest naval blockade and combined army-navy operations; the industrialization of the South; the diplomacy of the South; the frequent states-rights disputes ameliorating key political issues in the Confederacy; the inability of combatants to crush an army in battle; Grant seeking to break the military stalemate in the eastern theater; the roles of religion, Southern nationalism, and political will; and the policy to arm the slaves in early 1865. "So the Confederacy succumbed to internal rather than external causes." (Page 439) "Why the South Lost the Civil War" is comprehensive of, and very relevant to, an understanding of the Civil War.

If you are looking for an entertaining book on the American Civil War - this isn't it. The book is very wordy and at times difficult reading. I am saying this as someone who has read hundreds of books on this important era in American history.

However, this book explains in detail many of the reasons central to the concept that the residents of the Confederate States did not have the sense of nationalism necessary to defeat the rest of the United States. If you are a believer in the "Lost Cause", set aside your prejudices and think back to the American Revolution where at least one third of the colonists didn't even care enough about the rebellion to participate on either side. This was a much longer war against an "external enemy," yet most Americans either didn't care for American Freedom or fought against it. How could you expect the residents of the Confederacy to achieve a sense of nationalism in four short years?

If you are a serious student of the American Civil War, this is a must book for your library, even if, at the finish, you disagree with the authors.

The research clearly showed why the South lost. The underlying thesis was that the Confederacy lacked the cooperation and sense of nationalism in order to effectively endure the war. This was due to strife within the government, unionism on part of the populace, and finally dissent on what the Confederacy was actually fighting for.

The only problem I found was the seemingly overeagerness to paint the Southern populace as feeling guilty towards slavery. The majority, 95+%, did not own slaves and therefore had no reason to feel guilty. Also, the question of religion undermining the cause seems a bit redundant.

Other than that, I highly recommend this book for any student of the Civil War.

Excellent study of the course of civil war and its resolution. Includes detailed critiques of the States Rights, Frontal Assault, and other theories of why the south lost. The books answer: insufficient willpower.

Popular imagination shows the south losing to overwhelming force- Sherman's march devastating Georgia, lack of manpower and industrial resources etc. Through a campaign by campaign review the authors show the south never lost a battle for want of equipment or men. Given the vast territory of the confederacy the South could have resisted occupation indefinitely, consider the Russians against Napoleon or the colonies against the British in the revolutionary war. So the question is, how did the North subdue the south?

In order to resist the North the South had to embrace a strategy of guerilla warfare and it refused to do so. It refused because

1) Violated the romantic notions of chivalry

2) Lack of support for the confederacy in general- desertion rates in winter of 64 around 40%.

3) Continued resistance required freeing the slaves (see below).

4) This is unstated, but I imagine the upper classes had more to lose then gain by the continuation of struggle. They had more physical assets and wealth, normally a position of power. During armed conflict people with guns have power; people with assets tend to lose them. I wonder how much of that occurred in the south during the revolutionary struggle.

The South could not afford slavery. Slaves required guards and overseers, taking manpower from the army. Slaves also acted as a fifth column providing vital support to Union Armies living off the land. By 1865 Jefferson Davis was prepared to offer emancipation to slaves willing to fight, but any emancipation undermined the racial doctrines that justified slavery. If slaves who fought deserved freedom what was the excuse for holding the rest?

The Confederacy had to end slavery to survive, but the Confederacy's principal reason for existing was to defend slavery. Once slavery became untenable most southerners decided they had more to gain by rejoining the Union then by resisting.

I recommend this to anyone interested in the historiography of the Civil War.

This book by a team of academics offers interesting perspective for readers with enough background to grapple with it.

A few reviewers on the Amazon site would have you believe this is biased against the South; in my view, it would take an exceptionally superficial or careless reader to see this as biased against the South. Indeed, a full version of the "why the south lost" question has to include an answer to the question: How was the South able to overcome as many disadvantages in war (smaller population, less industrial and manufacturing development, much lower adult literacy rates, fear of slave rebellions, and many many more) for as long as they did - and this book helps identify a number of ways in which the south exceeded any reasonable prewar expectations. The book's authors cite the surprisingly strong showing of Southern naval forces despite rather minimal resources or naval engineering experience at the beginning of the war.

Although I don't agree with the book's authors exposition of the "lack of will" explanation, I also take issue with several of the harshly critical reviewers who I think have misinterpreted the book's authors concepts of "lack of will" and "insufficient nationalism" as a cause of the Confederate defeat. Reviewers seem to be ready to reinterpret this as a claim that Confederates just didn't have enough "spirit" - which of course is contradicted by the huge death tolls their armies suffered, and - to me - oversimplifies the arguments of the authors. What appears to have been intended with the "insufficient nationalism" is a reworking of the idea that "state's rights" helped kill the confederacy - i.e. that the problem was that states were too powerful and the central government too weak to effectively "win". The decentralized nature of confederate government brought some potential disadvantages, especially during wartime & economic crises, but after the discussions in this book, I think that "over-decentralization" was a rather minor contribution to the Confederate loss. The book's authors also veer away from this explanation, which they claim was more popular in the early 20th century.

"Lack of will" is the authors' answer to a critical set of questions: why didn't the main Confederate armies 'go to ground' and fight an ongoing dispersed guerrilla insurrection, why did desertion rates from CSA forces climb steeply over the last several months of the war, why didn't governors seem to rapidly forward men, money, and supplies from state control to central generals or central government at various points in the war, why there was so much delay and dissension over the somewhat desperate proposed policy, formally adopted in the last weeks of the war, to *officially* enroll slaves as organized armed combatants into CSA armies - with the prospect of emancipation either for meritorious service or ?automatically upon recruitment.

The authors concept of "lack of will" is an imprecise or even incorrect phrase. I think a better, perhaps distantly related, concept would have been "loss of hope", together with a "crisis in confidence". For this latter point, I do think the authors' do a reasonable job in showing how battlefield losses and economic hardships magnified nascent moral and theological concerns in varied Southern minds about the justice of slavery.

The infelicities of the phrase "lack of will" highlights what I feel is a flaw in the authors' arguments - there is an overemphasis on military, industrial, and political issues leading to moral/theological doubts, which the authors then term a 'lack of will'.

Instead, in my view, the South died as a failed state due to multiple failed, mostly intrinsically flawed, policies.

One of these was the flawed currency policy which resulted in as hyperinflation with its usual accompanying demoralization & social devastation - as later seen in Weimar Germany and other examples of hyperinflation.

Another was the unsuccessful tariff and taxation policy. The confederate tariff - only slightly lower yet also applying to a much broader range of imports than the 1857 federal tariff in force at the start of the war, was instituted soon after secession, despite Southern complaints over high tariffs being one of the major conflicts which stoked secession.

Another was the daring, but failed and tactically flawed attempt to financially and diplomatically exploit the South's dominant position as cotton producer. Many textile manufacturers were far better prepared to deal with the South's attempt to limit supply. To some small extent, wool goods absorbed some of the demand for cotton goods. Other producers could fill some of the gap in cotton supply. By the time cotton shortages began to "bite", the Union's initially ineffective blockade had considerably tightened - and the vital port of New Orleans was no longer in Confederate control.

Another was the necessity but unworkability of the 'impressment' of crops, labor, and other goods for the war effort, which was not well administered and too easily exploited for corruption and abuse; one likely explanation for the increasing desertion rate was the competing need for soldiers and militia to plant/harvest crops & support their families - defending against Union army incursions, but also defending against burdensome impressment by the Confederate government agents.

Another may have been poor performance by market forces to rapidly balance between cash crops (cotton) and adequate food crops for civilians & soldier's needs; here I think the authors' criticism - which I slightly exaggerate as the notion that the South would have been better served by dictatorial economic control - seems a bit strained; as the authors point out, the Confederate government did make some moderately effective efforts to help supply labor and raw materials for key war industries.

Less convincingly, the lack of formal political parties in the Confederacy may have weakened the debate over policy and the broad acceptance of adopted policies.

Did the above cause battle losses? I think that one of the authors errs when he summarily dismisses the role of hunger/malnutrition of Lee's troops by claiming that none (or virtually none) of Lee's troops died of hunger/malnutrition. This may well be, but persistent or recurrent problems with food supply (& fodder for horses/mules) had ample opportunity to degrade the effectiveness of CSA armies - and encourage desertion. (Desertion issues are somewhat more cogently discussed by McPherson in his "Battle Cry of Freedom" book; I conclude from that discussion that if CSA desertion rates had been similar to Union rates, Grant could have faced a considerably stronger Lee over the final months of the campaign).

Battle losses don't fully explain "why the South lost" - but the pervasive breakdown of the economy, Confederate currency, Confederate finance system and the accompanying social and political crises combined to make these battle losses decisive.

There is at least one other major issue raised by this view - or many of the alternatives proposed by the authors or others: was there a more fundamental Confederate strategic military flaw in not conducting a strictly war to "defend" the secessionist "independent" states, to merely survive Union attacks - somewhat more like Washington's campaigns in 1776. In this view, Lee suffered unnecessary, overly costly losses for his incursions into Pennsylvania (Gettysburg) and Maryland (Sharpsburg/Antietam). One counterargument could be that food/fodder supply issues for Lee's large army mandated these campaigns - his army was too hard to supply yet too large to live off the farms of Virginia, especially in light of the tactical movements of both Union and Confederate armies. But this is so counterfactual - it may be interesting to think what might have been different if the South had taken a radically different strategy, but, in reality it - and especially Lee's army - didn't. Additionally, the "Western" theater - especially along the Mississippi, Cumberland, Tennessee rivers and later the Georgia/Carolinas campaigns (i.e. Grant/Buell/Rosecrans/Thomas and eventually Sherman's campaigns) show that the Union did counter this approach, showing that eschewing offense was not predestined to succeed.

Nonetheless, questionable strategic and tactical decisions were made - repeatedly - by both sides in the war, not the least of which was the persistent use of increasingly obsolescent battlefield tactics adapted for the pre-rifle era. Pickett's charge at Gettysburg was just one of multiple examples - in both armies - of the failure to adapt to how rifles reshape the battlefield. The use of these old tactics was one of the reasons even the "best" generals suffered such huge casualties. There was also very little development of effective new tactics to counter the new realities. One exception was the (relatively) novel evolution of cavalry as a highly mobile (dismounting) infantry force by the Confederacy's Forrest was an early influence that seems to eventually lead to blitzkrieg techniques. Although the Gatling gun debuted during the war years, machine guns - which would later again necessitate dramatic changes in battlefield tactics - made essentially no impact on civil war battlefields.

As a history major at Purdue University, I was required to read this for a Confederacy History class. Too many quotes and too little original thought made this a terrible text. It also seems to be highly antagonistic towards the South - very unprofessional for an historical text, as this purports to be. The writing style was very high-flown, and not at all engaging. The authors were also found to contradict themselves on several occasions. About 90% of my class-mates were dissatisfied with the book.

While I am sure Civil War history buffs who really enjoy detail may find this book interesting, I found it to be almost unreadable. It seemed to me that this was a PhD thesis that the authors felt had to be lengthy to get accepted. And after an enormous amount of redundant material, I felt like they didn't prove their views. If you want something readable, look to Battle Cry of Freedom by McPherson.