Why the South Lost the Civil War (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Why the South Lost the Civil War. By Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr. (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press. 1986, Pp. xi, 582. $29.95.) Although they reject P. G. T. Beauregard's explanation for Confederate defeat, the authors of Why the South Lost the Civil War agree with the general's contention that more than a "mere material contrast" was involved . Their book, a thorough and sophisticated analysis of the reasons why the struggle ended as it did, constitutes a major contribution to Civil War scholarship. The volume is also an important historiographical survey. In developing the thesis that defective nationalism caused the Confederate failure, Beringer and the others criticize much of the pertinent historical literature , paying special attention to the works of Frank L. Owsley, David Donald, T. Harry Williams, Grady McWhiney, and Perry D. Jamieson. Yet Why the South Lost the Civil War is more than a revisionist exercise. The authors use an imaginative combination of comparative history, social psychology, statistics, and cultural history to argue their own case as well as to challenge the premises of other scholars. An intriguing example of this interpretative skill is the way Beringer and his colleagues dispatch the Jominian myth espoused by T. Harry Williams, David Donald, and others. For far too long historians have accepted the false proposition that Jomini and Clausewitz, his Prussian rival, had derived antithetical principles from their studies of Napoleonic warfare. Scholars have applied this inaccurate generalization to the Civil War, claiming that unwavering devotion to Jomini's teachings ruined the Confederates, whereas their Union counterparts, though starting from the sameJominian base, finally won by unwittingly adopting Clausewitz's precepts. Beringer et al. expose this fallacy by demonstrating that the two military philosophers' views were more harmonious than commonly supposed. They also show how both sides fought according to principles that were as much Jominian as Clausewitzian. Indeed , Grant, whom historians usually portray as an inadvertentherald of Clausewitz, emerges in this study as an exemplar of Jomini. Why the South Lost the Civil War also attacks Frank L. Owsley's states'-rights thesis and its modern derivative, excessive democracy. The BOOK REVIEWS89 authors maintain that personal bias, together with the bombast of President Jefferson Davis's opponents, led Owsley to overestimate the strength of southern particularism. Actually, the state governments, despite occasional clashes with and protests against the administration in Richmond, rendered crucial support to the cause not only by providing troops and materiel to the Confederate field armies but by shouldering the onerous tasks of local defense and civilian welfare. Even Governors Zebulon Vance and Joseph Brown, Owsley's pet villains, cooperated with Davis to a much greater extent than for which they receive credit. In this regard the authors make a significant point: the states'-rights issue served as a needed safety valve in a political system which lacked an opposition party. In Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage , Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson call on comparative history and statistics to assert that ethnic characteristics drove the Confederates to "murder themselves" in repeated frontal assaults. Beringer and his colleagues employ the same weapons to dispute that theory. According to them, McWhiney and Jamieson mistakenly assumed the style of warfare practiced by the Celtic ancestors of the Confederates was unique. Moreover, when the sample of battles is expanded and the number of casualties more precisely classified, it becomes apparent that southerners were no more addicted to the offensive than their enemies. Likewise, the rebels suffered heavier relative losses, not because of a proclivity for headlong assaults, but because Union forces had greater combat power. In responding to the question of why the South lost, the authors resort to a mixture of social psychology, religious history, statistics, and common sense. As they see it, manpower shortages, the blockade, the loss of the Mississippi, and industrial inferiority were at most secondary factors . The basic cause was a nationalism too feeble to withstand the strains of protracted war. The southern people were insufficiently committed to the concept of a Confederate nation to carry on the fight past the spring of 1865...