Why The North Won The Civil War (1978) by David Herbert Donald (Editor)

Half a century ago some of the nation’s leading Civil War era historians put together this collection of essays seeking to explain, from a variety of perspectives (economic, military, political, diplomatic), why the North prevailed in the epic contest of wills between the states. We have arrived at the sesquicentennial of the great conflict and yet the insights and arguments found in “Why the North Won the Civil War” have lost little of their cogency.

Many could (and have) argue that the southern cause was doomed from the start. Richard Current makes this conventional case in his contribution “God and the Strongest Battalions.” In short, he maintains that northern victory was practically guaranteed owing to the Union’s insuperable advantages in manpower (2.5 times the south), capital (4 times larger), and industrial output (an order of magnitude greater), among other areas of comparative strength. Sure the Confederacy made mistakes, Jefferson Davis and Treasury Secretary Christopher Memminger could have crafted better policies, but the ability to overcome the South’s economic handicaps went far beyond the power of any man or group of men, Current (and many others) argue.

But is that a fair and complete view of the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the competing sides? Did not the American colonists and Vietnamese communists face longer odds in their improbable quests for independence? Did not the Confederacy hold the advantage of interior lines, a long and difficult to blockade coastline, some of the best military officers of the war, a three-million strong involuntary labor pool (i.e. slaves), great natural defenses, and the strategic advantage of being able to win simply by not losing? If neither northern victory nor southern defeat were foreordained, then how to explain the defeat?

The essays by T. Harry Williams and David M. Potter reviewing military strategy and the political leadership of Jefferson Davis, respectively, are learned and forcefully argued, but hardly make a convincing monocausal explanation for the South’s defeat. Nevertheless, Williams’ essay in particular is a gem and recommended to any student of nineteenth century military history. He stresses that Jominian thinking was dominant among the West Point trained officers on both sides of the conflict and it is no accident that two of the three great generals in the war (Lee, Grant and Sherman by his calculation) were northerners who eschewed the Napoleonic concept, Grant even claimed that he had never read Jomini. Rather, the North’s two leading commanders embraced a more Clausewitzean approach of total war, seeking the destruction of the main enemy army wherever it may be found through withering preponderance of force, not a victory of maneuver through superior planning and the capture of critical physical locations as dictated by Jomini.

The most convincing essay, I found, was the largely contrarian contribution by David Herbert Donald, “Died of Democracy,” which argues ironically that the true weakness of the Confederacy was an unwavering commitment to democracy and individualism. He compares and contrasts the democratic/libertarian South to the often dictatorial North. For example, the South continued to elect non-commissioned officers and junior officers throughout the war and many men and entire units refused orders they disagreed with or simply didn’t find personally satisfying. The North, on the other hand, had mostly cooperative, professional troops, especially the large percentage that were recent European immigrants and freed slaves. The South retained freedom of the press throughout the war and only briefly and locally suspended habeas corpus three times. In contrast, over 300 northern newspapers were shut down during the war and Lincoln suspended habeas corpus throughout the Union. The South claimed to be fighting for “states rights” and individual states that made up the Confederacy were just as jealous of their local prerogatives under the new southern form of government as they were under the Union, Donald maintains. It was this dynamic – the North, acting like a pack of dogs in their fight against the South, acting like a group of feral cats – that was the ultimate cause of Union victory and Confederate defeat, and its a theme that Potter further develops in his essay, showing how a collection of fiercely independent states with no two-party system could effectively develop a national policy on how to best leverage the power of “King Cotton” or raise revenue for the war effort through some form of national taxation or allocate the use of the captive slave population to fight the war. All of these potential war power policies were neglected in the face of state and individual property rights that made up the intellectual foundation of secession in the eyes of the South’s political leadership.

All told, this is a nice complement to any Civil War library.