The Collapse of the Confederacy (review)

The Collapse of the Confederacy. By Charles H. Wesley. New Introduction by John David Smith. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xli, 225. Paper $16.95.)

What killed the Confederacy? Did the grinding force of an immense Yankee military juggernaut beat it into submission, or did its citizens capitulate prematurely, losing their will to fight even as they still possessed the material means to do so? The first answer indicates a lack of manpower and industrial capacity. The second answer suggests a failure of national character, an explanation most white Southerners avoided. Confederate general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard observed that the South would be open to discredit as a people if material conquest explained the defeat of the Confederacy. This perspective became a staple of the Lost Cause mythos that white Southerners wrapped around the war like a protective blanket.

Charles H. Wesley was one of the first historians who questioned the received Lost Cause wisdom concerning the reasons for Confederate defeat. An African American professor of history at Howard University, Wesley wrote The Collapse of the Confederacy in 1937, in which he was able to bring a detached, rational perspective to the subject, a perspective that was untainted by the need to use the history of the Confederacy as a means to soothe white feelings.

Wesley rejected the Lost Cause image of the starving, ragged, noble Johnny Reb who surrendered only when all the food and ammunition was gone. Concerning the state of the Confederacy's food supply, for example, he marshaled detailed statistical evidence as well as anecdotal observations from a wide variety of sources to conclude that "there was an abundance of food in 1865, not only in the lower South but in the very areas in which the armies were in operation" (14). Those armies were adequately supplied with guns, ammunition, and powder and were quite capable of sustained military operations after April 1865. "The collapse of the South was not due directly to inadequate resources in men and materials," he concluded (46). Wesley understood that there were hardships, shortages, and systemic breakdowns in the Confederacy's economic and military institutions. Distribution of materials was a particularly acute problem, given the manifest shortcomings of the Confederate railroads and road networks. Still, he argued, these problems were not insurmountable.

What then was the ultimate source of the Confederacy's demise? Wesley believed that part of the problem lay with poorly coordinated efforts by Confederate authorities to use what few industrial and technical resources the region did possess. But the foundation of failure, Wesley believed, was political and ideological. Jefferson Davis and the Richmond authorities performed poorly in their efforts to foster a sense of national unity and identity in a white Southern populace that by nature was excessively bellicose and individualistic. "The quarrels of the Cabinet, the Congress, the growing opposition to the [Davis] administration and the state's rights controversy were heading the Confederate craft towards the rocks," Wesley wrote (72).

Deeper still, Wesley believed, was the corrosive influence of slavery. White Southerners were much too selfish to cooperate fully in prosecuting a vigorous war effort, and this was so because they possessed the deeply ingrained habits of combative individualism that formed the heart of planter society. "The master of a slave plantation was a feudal lord, a monarch of all he surveyed," Wesley wrote. "There was a great need for a spirit of self-abnegation in the South, but as long as the masterful spirit could recognize no submission to a common ideal and to a cooperative endeavor, there could be no successful endeavor" (78). Thus was the Confederacy's strength sapped by the nature of the very society it was created to preserve.

This is an interesting but rather simplistic argument, offering a limited view of the complex nature of Southern society. Still, there is much of value to be found in The Collapse of the Confederacy. It offers an interesting and well-researched perspective on the...