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HistorySuccess in war is as much related to the will of the people to endure hardships as it is to capable leadership or the dedication of troops in the field. In "The Confederate War", Gallagher seeks to disprove the notion Southerners did not support secession or the Confederate government or that they wavered in their support, especially when the war turned against the Confederacy. Gallagher argues civilian support for the war...
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Gary Gallagher, an eminent history professor at the University of Virginia, argues convincingly that the will of the southern people held out to the very end of the Civil War. The reason they lost was not due to a loss of will to fight on or due to a loss of national pride in the Confederacy. Rather, they were overwhelmed by a superior force that had better industrial resources and a larger population. Gallagher cites numerous...
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Among historians, the dominant view of the Confederacy since the 1960s was the "lack-of-will" thesis, which offers the vision of a failed CSA collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions. A Southern government abandoned by its people, rejected and repudiated by every non-slaveholding white person, fighting with an army of disgruntled draftees: That is some people's estimation of the CSA.Since the early 1990s,...
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Gary Gallagher has written an excellent and insightful book that presents novel interpretations and raises insightful questions; this book should be required reading for all Civil War historians. In The Confederate War, Gallagher discusses the historiography and different interpretations of important themes in Confederate history--popular will, nationalism, military strategy, and ultimately defeat. One of Gallagher's main...
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I can generally subscribe to Gallegher's premise that The South was defeated because it was defeated, period. Though I admire his somewhat iconclastic view of conventional historical wisdom, I cannot accept that will was not decisive. This is particularly the case in the industrial and agricultural powerhouses of Georgia and North Carolina. Both these states were at times as much at war with the Confederacy as the...
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