Why The North Won The Civil War By David Henry Donald

Six authors. Six points of view. In David Henry Donald’s book Why the North Won the Civil War, Donald uses the views of five authors and himself on the tactics of the North compared to the South. In my opinion, this book should really be called “Why the South Lost the Civil War” because most (not all) of the people who contributed to the book write about the faults of the South. Even though this book was written in 1960, its topics are still heavily debated by today’s historians-- and even people who are merely curious about the causes and effects of the Civil War. The main idea of this book is how different people view the topic on the Confederacy’s defeat: why, how, and what happened? Most of the authors whose work contributed to this book

Henry Steele Commager’s main topic is historical causation-- moreover, why we need need to know the cause of history. “Though it is not given to us to know the causes of things, we cannot conclude therefrom that history is chaos, or that it is wholly without meaning” (13). Commager says the South should have won because they had “trump cards,” such as “grand strategy” and “foreign intervention” (Commager 16). He also goes into detail about the reasons for the Confederacy’s collapse, giving reasons such as the South being hopelessly outnumbered, not having decent transportation, a blockade of all their waterways, having a political leader who didn’t account for anything (Jefferson Davis), and the way they ran their political system (Commager 18-19). After going into much detail about the possible reasons for the Confederacy’s defeat, Commager explains what he means by saying things such as “...Or perhaps it was all of these things combined, something which, for want of a better term, historians call loss of nerves” (Commager 20). Commager’s leading essay was one that was easy to follow and gave an interesting insight to the beginning of my understanding of the Civil

Graebner. This article is basically a summary of the different relationships held between different ally countries during the Civil War. To me, this had nothing to do with the overall idea of the book because what I was able to perceive from this section was mainly how the relations between the North and different countries varied compared to the South and different countries. In the article, the author, Graebner, explains how the U.S. was a “nation of consequence in world affairs” (Graebner 59) to most European leaders during the time of the Civil War. Although this essay provides some insightful ideas through the companionship of the U.S. both before and during the Civil War, there really was no clear relevance to the main idea. It is understood that the North and the South, or the Union and the Confederacy, respectively, had different allies-- this was understood when King Cotton became popular around the globe-- and it is understood that different allies meant having different powers to back them up, but this excerpt didn’t do much for me in terms of hard-core reasonings behind the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil