The Collapse of the Confederacy.

Edited by Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson. Key Issues of the Civil War Era. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, c. 2001. Pp. [x], 201. $47.50, ISBN 0-8032-2170-3.)

"Nothing in his life became him, / Like the leaving it," said Malcolm about the Thane of Cawdor, who lived treacherously but died valiantly (Macbeth, 1.4.8-9). In a somewhat similiar spirit, Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson observe regarding the American Civil War that "the way in which a war ends matters nearly as much as who wins and who loses" (p. 11; emphasis in original). That is the rationale for this collection of six essays about The Collapse of the Confederacy. "The final months of the Confederacy thus offer fascinating opportunities--as a case study in war termination, as a period that shaped the initial circumstances of Reconstruction, and as a lens through which to analyze Southern society at its moment of supreme stress" (p. 2). This is indeed a worthy premise, but the essays offered here vary enormously in fulfilling its promise. Here follow summaries and observations about each.

Jean V. Berlin contributes "Did Confederate Women Lose the War? Deprivation, Destruction, and Despair on the Home Front." Using printed primary materials and secondary sources, Berlin catalogs troubles and tribulations behind the battle lines in the Confederacy and discovers that women had it tough during wartime. This is not exactly news. Perhaps Berlin began this project intending to speak to the question posed in her title and to the conclusion of Drew Gilpin Faust's significant article, "Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War" (Journal of American History, 76 [March 1990], 1200-1228). But by the time she confronts the obligation to conclude her essay, Berlin asks another, perhaps related question: Whom did Confederate women blame for all their trials? She answers this question in two very different, mutually exclusive ways. "It was better," she asserts, "to blame defeat on their own error or omission than to acknowledge the enemy's superiority" (p. 188). On the same page, however, Berlin insists that Confederate women "focused their rage and disappointment solely on the North, not on the institutions that failed them at home. And it would be this preoccupation with defeat at the hands of a demonized North, combined with a refusal to examine the failures of their beloved Confederacy, that would keep these women trapped among the ghosts of the past" (p. 188).

In "Jefferson Davis and the `Guerrilla Option': A Reexamination," William B. Feis contends that the Confederate president did not proclaim partisan war in his final address to the Confederate people on April 4, 1865. Davis, according to Feis, did not really mean "new phase" when he wrote, "new phase."

Brooks D. Simpson tells the story of the end of the American Civil War from the perspective of the winners in "Facilitating Defeat: The Union High Command and the Collapse of the Confederacy." His hero is Ulysses S. Grant, who understood the necessity of a military solution to a military situation. What Simpson ignores is the nature of the peace Grant orchestrated. Peace meant an end to the fighting, and peace meant reunion. But what about emancipation and equality, issues that had become war aims and augured against peace as "business as usual"?

Mark Grimsley produces "Learning to Say `Enough': Southern Generals and the Final Weeks of the Confederacy." He argues that the Confederate high command badly mismanaged the final campaigns and failed to concentrate remaining forces in the Carolinas, the only strategem that offered any hope of prolonging the conflict. Joseph E. Johnston is Grimsley's hero because he possessed the courage and good sense to disobey Jefferson Davis's order to disburse his army in order to continue the fight. Grimsley suggests that Robert E. Lee would have done otherwise and "thereby led the South to some other, probably more bloody and destructive, outcome" (p. 75). The fact that Lee did ponder such a course of action and rejected it seems to matter not at all to Grimsley.

Steven E. Woodworth contributes "The Last Function of Government: Confederate Collapse and Negotiated Peace." Some sort of peace short of a military conclusion was possible, Woodworth contends, and he rehearses copious missions and moments when a negotiated peace might have happened. But Confederates--government officials and common folk alike--proved unwilling to accept reunion and emancipation. And this intransigence, the product of "two centuries of Southern society" (p. 36), dictated peace by conquest.

George C. Rable's essay, "Despair, Hope, and Delusion: The Collapse of Confederate Morale Reexamined," along with Woodworth's piece, render this book worth its considerable cost. Rable provides significant evidence that Confederate southerners never understood what was happening or what was at issue. He describes "the persistence of unrealistic expectations, wild fantasies, and false hopes" (p. 155). "Many comments made and arguments offered during the final months of the war took on a surreal quality that ill-prepared people for the Confederacy's demise" (p. 155). And those same people, "[b]y refusing to admit even to themselves that the cause was being lost, ... were already laying the foundation for the cult of the so-called Lost Cause" (p. 155). And, I add, that this was the sort of surreality that conditioned attitudes of most ex-Confederates during Reconstruction. Rable's insights help sustain the book's premise that the way a war ends is extremely important. The epigraph to his essay also shows that among white southerners, in this moment of supreme stress, William Shakespeare anticipated the process: "Thy wish was father ... to that thought" (p. 129).

EMORY M. THOMAS
University of Georgia