The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War

by William W. Freehling

Book Overview

Why did the Confederacy lose the Civil War? Most historians point to the larger number of Union troops, for example, or the North's greater industrial might. Now, in The South Vs. the South, one of America's leading authorities on the Civil War era offers an entirely new answer to this question.
William Freehling argues that anti-Confederate Southerners--specifically, border state whites and southern blacks--helped cost the Confederacy the war...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195156293
• ISBN13: 9780195156294
• Release Date: November 2002
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Important like the rest of his work

This like the rest of Freehling's work is important. In recent years a trend has developed to submerge the central issue of the civil war--slavery--in a myriad of other issues leading to the war and thus diminishing the importance of the war for the US and the World. Part of this slide from confronting the central issue is a tendency to be cosier to attitudes justifying or defending the slaveholders Confederacy in the war. This book is very clear that within the South, the majority of the population did not support the Confederacy and probably a plurality of the South at first and then a majority actively worked to destroy the Confederacy. The Confederacy was not a Southern republic, it was a slaveholders republic. Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri were slave states, but they went with the union. Considerable portions of Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina supported the Confederacy throughout the war, and large groups of white people throughout the South opposed the Confederacy. This book explains that without this opposition, the Union would have never been able to enter the South and attack the Confederacy's military and political centers so easily and would have had to mobilize many more troops were there more Confederate support in the areas the Union liberated. For the most part, the Union liberated rather than occupied the South because as the author explained, African Americans overwhelming supported the union and selflessly through themselves into the war, working first to build defenses, transport materials, tend to the sick, guide the troops, and forage for food and supplies. Later, hundreds of thousands of African Americans volunteered to serve in the Union Army, providing a ready made force available right in the South to support the Union lines against slaveholder terrorism. What I found unique here was his analysis of the 1864 election and his view that had Mclellan, the Democrat who ran against Lincoln won, the South would have still been defeated, although he leaves open whether slavery would have been obliterated the way it was under the Republicans. This is a good read, and not as ponderous as his other work, although his new work is decisive to understanding American history as a whole.

Much Needed Book

This book is typical of William Freehling's writings: smooth style, intriguing research, and interesting, prpvpcative conclusions. It is a great read and well worth close study.

The Union's Southern Soldiers

Sometimes, people need to be reminded of the basics. pnotley of Canada thinks it's obvious that the Border States didn't secede, but I never saw a Civil War volume before that made the simple point that more Southerners fought with the Federal Army and Navy than the entire Union death toll.Meanwhile, 'a reader' from Mobile thinks that Kentucky and Missouri joined the Confederacy! This is another example of people needing to be reminded of the obvious: despite the propoganda of the times, it wasn't KY and MO that seceded, it was their governors, plus a minority of the legislators. Nor is it true that Maryland would have seceded if Lincoln hadn't arrested Maryland legislators. The disloyal ones were arrested after the state made the decision to stay in the Union.If you can bear to have illusions punctured, Freehling's book is filled with fascinating facts on Lincoln's racism, the reluctance of the Union to free slaves, and the way the unsucessful war against secession became a succesful war against both secession and slavery.Recommended.

The Union's Southern Forces

Sometimes, people need to be reminded of the basics. pnotley of Canada thinks it's obvious that the Border States didn't secede, but I never saw a Civil War volume before that made the simple point that more Southerners fought with the Federal Army and Navy than the entire Union death toll.Meanwhile, 'a reader' from Mobile thinks that Kentucky and Missouri joined the Confederacy! This is another example of people needing to be reminded of the obvious: despite the propoganda of the times, it wasn't KY and MO that seceded, it was their governors, plus a minority of the legislators. Nor is it true that Maryland would have seceded if Lincoln hadn't arrested Maryland legislators. The disloyal ones were arrested after the state made the decision to stay in the Union.If you can bear to have illusions punctured, Freehling's book is filled with fascinating facts on Lincoln's racism, the reluctance of the Union to free slaves, and the way the unsucessful war against secession became a succesful war against both secession and slavery.Recommended.

A most persuasive argument

Dr. Freehling argues, most persuasively, that dissension from within the states that should have comprised the Confederacy was of greater effect in defeating it than any other factor. He points especially to the failure of the Confederacy to "jell" in Kentucky, where Gen. Bragg had to take back to Tennessee the rifles he had planned to distribute to the thousands who should have answered the call.He is the first historian of this period in whose work I have found an explanation of the term "filibustering" in its Civil War context. "Filibustering fantasies remained alive only on the Union side by 1863." However, in October of 1863, they must have still been alive. This is certainly the best explanation I have ever read for the Battle of Westport, MO, in which an attempt by Confederate General Price to filibuster there was defeated. This battle occurred less than 50 miles from where I grew up. I have Freehling to thank for the fact that I now understand it, having heard about it many times as a youngster.Many other events you've read about before will suddenly make sense as you read this book. His coverage of the role of blacks in defeating the confederacy is both even-handed and as near definitive as any I've seen.