The Elements of Confederate defeat

In Why the South Lost the Civil War, four historians considered the dominant explanations of southern defeat. At end, the authors found that states' rights disputes, the Union blockade, and inadequate southern forces did not fully account for the surrender. Rather, they concluded, the South lacked the will to win. Its strength sapped by a faltering Confederate nationalism and weakened by a peculiar brand of evangelical Protestantism, the South withdrew from a war not yet lost on the field of battle.

Roughly one-half the size of its parent study, The Elements of Confederate Defeat retains all the essential arguments of the earlier edition, forming for the student a book that at once follows the events of the war and presents the major interpretations of its outcome in the South.

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 is a professor of history at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and the coauthor with Archer Jones of How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War. Archer Jones is emeritus professor of history and former dean at North Dakota State University. 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.