8 The American Civil WarThe authors make clear that this outcome
was not inevitable. Although the North
had superior numbers and resources, these
did not assure victory. To win the war,
Union forces had to invade, conquer,
occupy, and control key parts of the Souths
750,000 square miles and destroy its armies
and infrastructure. The Confederacy, by
contrast, began the conflict in political and
military control of this territory. To win the
war, it needed only to defend what it already
had in 1861 and to wear out the will of its
enemy to continue fighting. In these terms
the Confederacy came close to winning on
several occasions, as this book makes clear.
There were many twists and turns in the
four years of war. many reversals of
momentum that frustrated imminent victory
by one side or the other. This book identifies
the four major turning points of the war. The
first came in the summer of 1862 when
counter-offensives by Confederate
commanders Robert E. Lee and Stonewall
Jackson in Virginia and Braxton Bragg and
Kirby Smith in Tennessee and Kentucky
reversed the previous four months of Union
naval and military success. These Northern
victories had gained control of much of the
vital interior network of the Cumberland,
Tennessee, and Mississippi Rivers and of the
South Atlantic coast, had captured New
Orleans, Nashville, and Memphis, and had
approached to within five miles of the
Confederate capital of Richmond, whose
fall seemed imminent in May 1862.
The Southern counteroffensives prolonged
and intensified the war and created the
potential for Confederate success, which
appeared imminent before each of the next
three turning points. The first of these
occurred in the fall of 1862, when battles
at Antietam and Perryville blunted
Confederate invasions, forestalled European
mediation and recognition of the South,
perhaps presented a Democratic victors in
the Northern congressional elections that
might have inhibited Lincoln's ability to
carry on the war, and set the stage for the
Emancipation Proclamation which enlarged
the scope and purpose of the war.
The third critical point came in the
summer and fall of 1863 when Gettysburg.
Vicksburg, and Chattanooga turned the tide
toward ultimate Northern victory. But one
more reversal of that tide seemed possible in
the summer of 1864 when appalling Union
casualties and apparent lack of progress,
especially in Virginia, brought the North to
the brink of peace negotiations and the
election of a Democratic president. But
Sherman's capture of Atlanta and Sheridan's
victories in the Shenandoah Valley turned
the tide one last time. Only then did it
become possible, after Lincoln's reelection, to
speak of the inevitability of Northern victory.
The consequences of that victory have
profoundly affected the course of American
history—indeed, world history—since 1865.
This volume provides the essential
foundation for an understanding of those
consequences.James M. McPherson,
George Henry Davis '86 Professor of
American History, Princeton University