The Confederate War (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Confederate War. By Gary W. Gallagher. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. viii, 218. $24.95.) Quietly yet steadily, Gary Gallagher has become one of the most well regarded of our Civil War scholars. The editor of a book series with an important academic press, contributor to a number of popular and academicjournals, and an esteemed member of a university department renowned for its military history program, Gallagher has clearly established a strong reputation in the field. Yet hidebound scholars might argue that Gallagher has achieved such distinction a bit too quietly, that he has not yet proven his scholarly oblation. With the exceptions of one published biography of a Confederate general and a long-awaited biography of another—Jubal Early—the ubiquitous Gallagher's contributions to scholarship are largely in the form of edited volumes devoted to currently esoteric and unfashionable military subjects. Where is the big book, they might criticize, the lasting bequest to the modern Civil War canon, rather than a salvo from yet another more distant cannon? His latest book should put to rest any such doubts as to Gallagher's deserved place in the field. Gallagher has provided a subtle, sound, and thoroughly academic argument for the invaluable contribution that military history, well done, can make to historical scholarship as a whole. More directly, he has rightly challenged the "stunning innocence" of the broad historical community to "the ways in which military events helped shape all the dimensions of American life" during this conflict (8). Drawn from an endowed lectureship delivered to his alma mater, the University ofTexas at Austin, Gallagher's effort sounds the call for an academic renascence of arguments for the centrality of the military effort in the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy. Demonstrating a peerless command ofboth interpretive and primary sources, Gallagher argues convincingly against trends of scholarly contention that a loss of popular will, an imperfectly (if at all) developed sense of national identity (striated by intrasectional allegiances, class divisions, and above all, by slavery ), and a deeply flawed, offensive military strategy contributed in part or in whole to the collapse ofthe Confederate nation. Scholars who have been preoccupied with such claims, in Gallagher's opinion, have not considered the pervasive influence of the fortunes of war in the ebb and flow of the Southern citizenry's support for the Confederacy. "As the war progressed, Confederate 222CIVIL WAR HISTORY citizens increasingly relied on their armies rather than on their central government to boost morale, and Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia became the most important national institution" (8). Until the very last months of the war, popular morale was still high and a large majority of southern soldiers remained in the field, despite the sobering fact that "no other whiteAmericans have lost such a huge percentage of their young men killed or maimed, or have had to withstand such intense pressures for so long" (53). Just as victory had sustained, military defeat alone doomed the Confederacy, for its people, "persevering despite great adversity, . . . surrendered only when their pool of manpower had been ravaged, Union armies stood poised to smash opposing Confederate forces, and much of their country literally lay in ruins" (172). This is an extremely satisfying book. Scholars who might dismiss Gallagher's contentions as ipso facto—that success in war by nature depends upon military victory—will have ignored the lessons drawn from other such civil conflicts, whether earlier or moré recent than the Civil War. Regardless, readers will find their knowledge of the Confederate experience augmented more by this book than nearly any other since Emory Thomas's Confederate Nation. Gallagher deserves praise for that alone, but he will earn it for much more. Christopher Phillips Emporia State University Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making ofSouthern Strategy, 1861-1862. By Joseph L. Harsh. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1998. Pp. xviii, 278. $35.00). This is the first of two studies analyzing confederate military policy and grand strategy in the first two years of the war projected by historian Joseph L. Harsh, whose work has appeared in Civil War History and Military Affairs. Harsh defends Jefferson Davis...