Richard E. Beringer: Why the South Lost the Civil War [1991]

In this widely heralded book first published in 1986, four historians consider the popularly held explanations for southern defeat-state-rights disputes, inadequate military supply and strategy, and the Union blockade-undergirding their discussion with a chronological account of the war's progress. In the end, the authors find that the South lacked the will to win, that weak Confederate nationalism and the strength of a peculiar brand of evangelical Protestantism sapped the South's ability to continue a war that was not yet lost on the field.