Volume 44, Number 16 · October 23, 1997
The Heart of the Matter
By James M. McPherson
Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War
by Michael A. Morrison
University of North Carolina Press, 396 pp., $49.95
Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War
by Maury Klein
Knopf, 496 pp., $30.00
Behind the Lines in the Southern Confederacy
by Charles W. Ramsdell
Louisiana State University Press, 156 pp., $11.95 (paper)
The Confederate War
by Gary W. Gallagher
Harvard University Press, 218 pp., $24.95
Two issues that have generated the most animated debates among historians of the American Civil War are the causes of the war and the causes of Confederate defeat. Indeed, these are among the most important questions in all of American history. If the war had never happened, or if it had occurred but the Confederacy had won its independence, the United States would be an incalculably different country today. As Mark Twain put it a few years after Appomattox, the war 'uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.'[1] Five generations later, historians are still trying to measure its influence and explain its origins and outcome.
Review, 4630 words
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