Gary W. Gallagher. The Confederate War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. viii + 218 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-16055-X. Reviewed by Mark Grimsley, Ohio State University. Published by H-CivWar (March, 1998) A great pastime among Civil War historians has been the composition of epitaphs for the Confederate States of America. Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr. assembled a number of them in Why the South Lost the Civil …
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…efore and after the war. The new social historians reached their conclusions about the fault lines in Confederate society not by concentrating on 1861-1865 alone but by tracing antebellum patterns through the Civil War and into the postwar era. Historians persuaded of Gallagher's thesis should do the same. The popular will and nationalist spirit he identifies had to come from somewhere, and surely they did not just vanish once the guns fell silent. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography**