Why Did The South Lose The Civil War Analysis

There are constant debates on why did the South lose the Civil War. The Civil War ended 150 years ago but that has not affected historians to question the outcome of the war for the Confederacy. According to Gary Gallagher, many historians work backward starting from Appomattox to explain the failure of the war. He continues by stating that those historians claim the reasoning for the failure was caused by the lack will to win the war by the Confederates. Gary Gallagher disagrees with these methods historians use. Gary Gallagher believes that the best way to understand why the Confederates lost the Civil War takes a different approach. This is Gary W. Gallagher’s thesis in his The Confederate War is “Why did so many Confederates fight for so long? Until this question receives the detailed attention long accorded the first, the history of the Confederacy will remain imperfectly understood” (17).
Gary Gallagher first examines the drive that the Confederates had to fight. Gary Gallagher expresses that it was not just the soldiers on the battlefields that wanted the war it was almost every citizen in the Confederacy. It included women, teenagers, planters, yeoman
Gallagher’s thesis in his The Confederate War is “Why did so many Confederates fight for so long? Until this question receives the detailed attention long accorded the first, the history of the Confederacy will remain imperfectly understood” (17). Gary Gallagher believes that if this question is answered then it will be possible to fully understand why the South lost the Civil War. Gary Gallagher states that historians are going about studying the Civil War wrong; he states that they should not start from Appomattox and go backward to the beginning of the war to try and understand why the South lost. Gary Gallagher disagrees that the South did not have enough will to win the war but rather there a multiple reasons that cause for the South losing the war that has not been studied