Why the South Lost the Civil War [Paperback]

Richard E. Beringer (Author)
RICHARD E. BERINGER is a professor of history at the University of North Dakota and the coeditor of a volume of The Papers of Jefferson Davis.

Herman Hattaway (Author)
HERMAN HATTAWAY is a professor of history at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and coauthor, with Archer Jones, of How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War.

Archer Jones (Author)
ARCHER JONES is emeritus professor of history and former dean at North Dakota State University.

William N. Still Jr. (Author)
WILLIAM N. STILL JR. is a professor of history at East Carolina University and the author of several books, including Odyssey in Gray: A Diary of Confederate Service, 1863-1865.

In this widely heralded book first published in 1986, four historians consider the popularly held explanations for southern defeat—state-rights disputes, inadequate military supply and strategy, and the Union blockade—undergirding their discussion with a chronological account of the war's progress. In the end, the authors find that the South lacked the will to win, that weak Confederate nationalism and the strength of a peculiar brand of evangelical Protestantism sapped the South's ability to continue a war that was not yet lost on the field.

[The authors] show that the Southern states were not united around a single leader or cause. . . . In the end, they discovered that God did not wear gray.

The most comprehensive, sophisticated, and well-informed [book on this subject] I have ever read.

Should be required reading for anyone interested in the Confederate experiment. Its superb analysis of the previous literature, including respectful disagreement with manyls)