*A Short Look At The American Civil War- Professor David's View

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Confederacy President Jefferson Davis.


BOOK REVIEW

APRIL IS THE 147TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE START OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR- HONOR THE UNION SOLDIERS- WHITE AND BLACK

Why the North Won The Civil War, Donald Herbert David, Simon and Schuster, New York,
1962, 1996

I have used this space over the past couple of years to commemorate many events important in working class history, leftist history and just plain democratic history (hey, that is our heritage too). My idea, as explained in my profile, is to try to transmit to the younger generation of leftist militants a sense of the rich, if many times misunderstood, history of our movement. With that in mind, I have noticed recently that while I have spilled a certain amount of justifiable ink on honoring John Brown and his band at Harpers Ferry and on the personage of Abraham Lincoln, also justifiable, I have not spent nearly enough time on some of the other great issues of the Civil War period itself. I begin to rectify that error here. And it is an error. A lot of what the United States have become in the world, for good or evil, stems from the events of that period.

Some of the books that I review in this space as I introduce subjects that I think will be of interest are those that first got me interested in the subject. Thus, the books tend to have older copyright dates and, in many cases, have been superseded by more recent (and generally, better) work on the subject. But I still see value in them as a starting point. That is the case here. I distinctly remember, after having gone through the basics of the American Civil War in my high school history class, going out to buy this book in order to better understand the question posed by the title of this book- why did the North win the Civil War? Although this book does not directly address some of the reasons that I would give now for why the North succeeded it nevertheless gave some, to me, provocative thoughts about the issues then.

This short book is a result of a conference held in the late 1950’s at Gettysburg, in preparation for celebrating the Civil War Centennial, which discussed various historical points of view as to the basis for the Northern victory. Now there have been innumerable books on every conceivable aspect of the Civil War, from songs to sewing, so by this year 2008 so it is hard to say that this book sticks out. However this book represented the best thinking of the last generation of Civil War scholars on the general trends of the times.

The subjects delved into-Northern and Southern economics, generalmanship, diplomacy, effects of war- weariness, and Southern character defects have all been expanded on since. But here is a place to start an outline of the subject. This book also helps to understand one of the positive consequences of the Northern victory-the consolidation of a unitary trans-continental state. Of course, readers, let us keep our eyes on the prize- the real import of studying about the Civil War is to see how the great social issue of that day-the abolition of slavery got fought out to the finish.