Herman Hattaway Books

Selected as one of Civil War magazine's 100 essential titles on military campaigns and personalities.

In this widely heralded 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.