What must first of all be said about Gallagher's The Confederate War is that it deliberately challenges what the author says are prevailing views about why the South's rebellion against the Union failed. The short form of his principal thesis is that, contrary to assertions made by other historians, the Confederate national ideal seized and held the hearts and minds of Southerners throughout the course of the war and that it was principally military defeat that compelled the South to surrender.
Gallagher develops his thesis in four chapters that give an account of how the notions of secession and confederacy took hold of and remained prominent in the popular imagination in the South in the years of the Civil War. In the chapter titled "A People's Will," the main evidence is what is on the record, namely, the fact that some 80% of all able-bodied and age-appropriate (white) men volunteered for military service in the Confederacy. Gallagher discounts the view that the material hardship that the war worked on the populace of the South caused Southerners to lose morale in the Confederate war effort. Rather, he takes the view that hardship hardened the "resolve" of the great mass of people in the South: "By the end of 1863, prolonged resistance against an enemy with seemingly unlimited manpower and industrial capacity had created among many Confederates a sense of accomplishment against long odds and a determination to carry on the fight" (p. 157). He cites commentary to this effect by none other than General Sherman and other contemporaneous observers of the South's condition.
Underpinning the South's resolve, according to Gallagher, were "strong feelings of national identity" (p. 63). In the chapter devoted to this subject, Gallagher makes use of letters and journals kept by (white) Southerners of all classes to show that civilians and military men alike identified with the cause. Indeed, Gallagher makes the case that the residue of...