Visions and Revisions: Some Recent Books on Why the South Lost the Civil War

VISIONS AND REVISIONS: SOME RECENT BOOKS ON WHY THE SOUTH LOST THE CIVIL WAR Beringer, Richard E., Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones and William N. Still, Jr. Why the South Lost the Civil War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. xi + 582 pp. Ramage, James A. Rebel Raider: the Life of General John Hunt Morgan. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986. xi + 306 pp. Ballard, Michael B. A Long Shadow: Jefferson Davis and the Final Days of the Confederacy. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. xi + 200 pp. Harwell, Richard and Philip N. Racine, eds. The Fiery Trail: A Union Officer's Account of Sherman's Last Campaigns. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. xliv + 238 pp. Ronald G. Haycock The first major problem of any review essayist is how to reconcile the usual radical differences among the books examined. In this case the pursuit is made easier because all four deal with some aspect of why the Confederacy lost the Civil War. Indeed, central to this review is Beringer, Hattaway, Jones and Still's Why the South Lost the Civil War. Historians have, as Ludwell Johnson pointed out in 1971, provided decades of interpretation of the reasons why the South lost. Many of them have dwelt on single causes such as the numerical supremacy of the North in human and material resources, in industries, and in strategy and command; others have looked at the less tangible reasons of good and evil and inevitability. Over the years they have been influenced by contemporary events like the First or Second World Wars or the Vietnam War which in tum acted as catalysts for reinterpretation .1 All of this historiography was no doubt predictable, but what makes the Beringer team's efforts so important is that their long but well~written, thorough and sophisticated book is at once both a single- and multi-causal view of events; it is a study tra~itional yet imaginatively revisionist. Like other historians, the authors believe that the Cause was lost for many reasons, but that there is one reason first among the equals: the weakness of Southern nationalism. By means of comparative history, including examples from the Napoleonic era and from the twentieth century, the authors explore the physical and moral factors, the military stalemate, the internal Confederate problems, the dissolution of military power, and finally the loss of public will as the South reconciled itself to defeat. The reader learns how the Secession states' original goal of preservation of slavery and 106 Ronald G. Haycock winning of independence fell victim to the emancipation of slavery and to a centrist government's need to meet worsening military problems. In defeat, the former goals were replaced by a belief in white supremacy, states' rights and honour. As the supposedly sacrosanct original tenets crashed, there was not a sufficiently Confederate nationalist distinctiveness to ward off a dismal collapse. Nor was it enough to keep the states fighting, even though sufficient military effectives were present to sustain war indefinitely. Thus the Lost Cause, born in the Confederacy's last days, became during the reconstruction the civil religion of the Southern states whose tenets were white supremacy, honour and states' rights within the Union. To the vanquished, it was a salvaged victory of a sort. The brillance of this book is not in its new interpretations, but rather in the way some existing ones are exposed as invalid and others neatly synthesized into a new general hypothesis to answer the old question: "why defeat?" By far the most important of the former is Frank L. Owsley's "States' Rights" thesis, first published in 1925. According to this theory, the Confederacy foundered on the inherent independence of its component states. But the evidence of the present authors' systematically pokes holes in Owsley's findings, conclusively showing that most of the Secession states cooperated readily with Davis's central government . Along with Owsley's position goes its modem variant, the "overdose of democracy'' theory. And so does T. Harry Williams' s claim that zealous faith in Jominian principles of mass, concentration and confrontation, rather then in Clausewitz's more flexible and less sanguine ideas, made Confederate generals blind and ultimately into victims...