Why the South Lost the Civil War (Brown Thrasher Books) - Softcover

Should be required reading for anyone interested in the Confederate experiment. Its superb analysis of the previous literature, including respectful disagreement with many of the conclusions of Owsley, McWhiney, Jamieson and other prominent historians, makes it an ideal starting point for any discussion of Confederate defeat. --Dallas Times-Herald The most comprehensive, sophisticated, and well-informed [book on this subject] I have ever read. --New York Review of Books [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. --New York Times

In this 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.