New Book suggests Southerners defeated Confederacy

[Kire]

Historian suggests Southerners defeated Confederacy
Valdosta State professor pens ‘Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War’
By JIM AUCHMUTEY

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Generations of students have been taught that the South lost the Civil War because of the North’s superior industry and population. A new book suggests another reason: Southerners were largely responsible for defeating the Confederacy.

In “Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War” (New Press, $27.95), historian David Williams of Valdosta State University lays out some tradition-upsetting arguments that might make the granite brow of Jefferson Davis

“With this book,” wrote Publishers Weekly, “the history of the Civil War will never be the same again.”

Actually, historians have long fallen into two camps in explaining the Confederacy’s demise — one stressing the Union’s advantages, the other the South’s divisions. Williams gives vivid expression to the latter view, drawing on state and local studies done primarily in the past two decades.

The 49-year-old South Georgia native discussed his interpretations in an interview from Valdosta.

More: http://www.ajc.com/living/content/living/stories/2008/08/24/south_confederacy_civil.html

[raccoon]

1. I posted about this on GD, and got no response. Maybe some folks here may be interested.

(From an interview of historian David Williams of Valdosta State University, who wrote “Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War”)

Q: You write that most Southerners didn’t even want to leave the Union.

A: That’s right. In late 1860 and early 1861, there were a series of votes on the secession question in all the slave states, and the overwhelming majority voted against it. It was only in the Deep South, from South Carolina to Texas, that there was much support for secession, and even there it was deeply divided. In Georgia, a slight majority of voters were against secession.

Q: So why did Georgia secede?

A: The popular vote didn’t decide the question. It chose delegates to a convention. That’s the way slaveholders wanted it, because they didn’t trust people to vote on the question directly. More than 30 delegates who had pledged to oppose secession changed their votes at the convention. Most historians think that was by design. The suspicion is that the secessionists ran two slates — one for and one supposedly against — and whichever was elected, they’d vote for secession.

http://www.ajc.com/living/content/living/stories/2008/0...

[ThoughtCriminal]

2. Question about Southern whites fighting for the Union

The author states in the interview that 300,000 Southern whites served in the Union army. I wonder if this is counting whites from slave states the did not succeed (KY, MO, MD, DE, WV), or were the 300,000 soldiers from Confederate states?

[RoyGBiv]

3. IIRC ...

That number is associated with whites from slave states, which would include both seceded states and those that remained loyal to the Union. West Virginia was of course created out of a chunk of Virginia where support for secession was extremely low. A lot of these soldiers came from Kentucky, which was heavily split. There were others from places like Alabama, North Carolina, and especially Tennessee.

I haven't read this book, but the subject itself is an old one.

[NoPasaran]

4. I think you have to be correct

Looking through Dyer's Compendium, there just don't seem to be enough Unionist regiments from the eleven seceded states to account for 300,000 men. Add in Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri and the rest of the Border South and the number makes more sense.

Of course other Southerners need to be added into the balance as well: the two hundred thousand or so former slaves who served in the US Colored Troops, as well as unnumbered thousands more who worked on fortifications, maintained roads, chopped wood for railroads and steamboats, etc., tasks that the Union Army otherwise would have had to deduct from its combat strength to perform.