Keith Benson

2.16.2007
Dr. Dorwart
Military/Diplomatic History

Response to Why the North Won the Civil War

Why the North Won the Civil War is a collection of essays submitted by five

professors, and edited by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Herbert Donald. While

conducting brief research on Dr. Donald, I read that he was politically conservative and

was not a neo-abolitionist (a denouncer of slavery and celebrator of the Civil Rights

Movement on moral grounds during the 1950s and early 1960s). Further noting this book

was published during the Cold War in 1961, by the Louisiana State University Press, and

after reading the book’s introduction, by Major General U.S. Grant III, I was expecting to

read a book blatantly sympathetic to the South and their cause. To my surprise and

delight, this book was nothing what I expected. Why the North Won the Civil War offers

informative, un-emotional analysis as to the hindered the South from a successful

campaign, and what aided the North to victory. While Donald’s preface to the book does

acknowledges that no one essay in the book is likely to put this controversial question to

rest, this book does accomplish the goal in laying out the South’s weaknesses and the

North’s strengths which led to the outcome of a Northern victory.

The book’s first essay, Dr. Richard Current’s “God and the Strongest Battalion”, is

the only submission that suggests an inevitable Northern victory. Systematically, Current

lays out his case that the overwhelming economic, population, industrial, and

transportation advantages in favor of the North ensured Union success. Current’s article

also denounces the possibilities of Southern victory because of the supposed economic
power of cotton, or a moral/ psychological edge in fighting the invading North. Current’s

essay communicates the South had no likely chance at beating the North due to their

combined deficiencies and the combined Northern strengths.

T. Harry Williams, in the “Military Leadership of the North and South”, writes

about the similarities and differences between the generals of the Union and Confederate

armies. Williams notes the Civil War was a West Pointers war. “Of the sixty biggest

battles, West Point graduates commanded both armies in fifty-five, and in the remaining

five, a West Pointer commanded one of the opposing armies.”(27) Furthermore, Williams

describes how most of the Civil War generals had the same professors at West Point, and

all studied and were heavily influenced by the writings of Baron Jomini. In essence,

Williams surmises the Civil War employed old-style European tactics and strategies, and

was commanded by classmates who virtually knew and studied by the same material and

writings. Further in the essay, the generalship of the Civil War, often heralded in glowing

terms, is wholly discounted with only Grant and Lee being praised as truly great generals.

Williams also argues that until Lincoln made Grant his commander, the Confederate

generals out-executed their Union counterparts in applying the Jominian principles they

had all learned in West Point. Finally, Williams writes the Northern generalship was too

often motivated by capturing territory, not defeating the Confederate Army as Lincoln

desired; and finally received once Grant took command. This shift in war strategy,

Williams concludes, won the war for the Union.

“Northern Diplomacy and European Neutrality”, by Norman Graebner, outlines

the position that had European powers, France or Great Britain, intervened on behalf of

the South, the Civil War would have ended in a Confederate victory. Graebner explained
that Napoleon desired to see a Confederate States of America come to fruition because he

desired to conquer lands in Mexico; and that the Southern states would act as a buffer

from an eventual Union intervention. Also, Graebner asserts that following the American

Revolution and the War of 1812, conservatives in Great Britain viewed the United States

as a threat to their own status as world superpower, thus, desiring to see England

intervene on behalf of the Confederates. Finally, Graebner concludes that the diplomatic

works of William Seward, the miscalculation of the South’s cotton embargo, the current

beneficial trade relations between England and the United States’ North, and the inability

to display that “it could overcome the power and purpose of the North”, ultimately kept

Europe neutral and out of the war. Their neutrality, though not always certain Williams,

was necessary for a Union victory.

David Donald’s “Died of Democracy”, and David Potter’s “Jefferson Davis and

the Political Factors in Confederate Defeat” focus on the similar issue of inept leadership

by the Confederates, and Jefferson Davis. Donald believes the Confederates truly were

practicing their democratic rights by leaving the Union; and it was their intense desire for

personal democracy, and extreme support for individual rights that ultimately lead to their

eventual demise. Militarily, Donald describes the Confederate Army as an undisciplined,

cantankerous lot of men who loathed taking orders, following protocol, and often defied

and insulted officers. Similar to Donald, Potter describes Jefferson Davis as wholly

ineffective. Mocking Davis’ plan to lure England into the war by withholding cotton, his

insistence on one political party, his refusal to limit negative press and suspend habeas

corpus as Lincoln had done, refusal to relocate the Confederate capital from Richmond

further south, decision to impress supplies from southern citizens, Donald and Potter
assert the South was doomed to lose due to faulty leadership. Donald writes, “Davis’s

political record as president is almost exclusively negative.” Potter finally argues had the

South had Lincoln as its president and the North had Davis, all things remaining the

same, the South would still have been victorious in the Civil War.

Overall, thi