Table of Contents

Contents List of Maps Introduction Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson The Last Function of Government: Confederate Collapse and Negotiated Peace Steven E. Woodworth Learning to Say "Enough": Southern Generals and the Final Weeks of the Confederacy Mark Grimsley Facilitating Defeat: The Union High Command and the Collapse of the Confederacy Brooks D. Simpson Jefferson Davis and the "Guerrilla Option": A Reexamination William B. Feis Despair, Hope, and Delusion: The Collapse of Confederate Morale Reexamined George C. Rable Did Confederate Women Lose the War? Deprivation, Destruction, and Despair on the Home Front Jean V. Berlin Index

Promotional Information

Six essays by preeminent Civil War scholars explore the factors facing the Confederacy during the final months of conflict

About the Author

Mark Grimsley is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University. Brooks D. Simpson is a professor of history at Arizona State University. Grimsley and Simpson are coauthors of Gettysburg: A Battlefield Guide (Nebraska).

Reviews

"Collectively, these essays serve as both a case study for strategic studies in the problem of what political scientists now call "war termination." They also, however, should be of interest not only to historians of the Civil War itself, but especially as an introduction for those interested in the historical problems of Reconstruction."--Journal of Military History

"The essays are of uniformly excellent quality."--Civil War Book Review

"The six essays of this volume make for splendid, provocative reading and, clich� as it has become, make a significant contribution to the biography of the fall of the Confederate States of America."--Civil War History

"Challenging the arguments that the Confederacy was destroyed from within and that it was the superior military strength of the Federal army that defeated the South, this volume provides further interpretation of the final months of domestic strife and is a welcome addition to our understanding of the end of the American Civil War."--Carole Bucy, American Nineteenth Century History