Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861-1865

Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861-1865 by Adams, Michael C.C.. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780674646438.

Here is a bold, new interpretation of the military conduct of the Civil War that sheds new light on the cultural and intellectual life of antebellum America. Adams challenges the prevailing view that in the Virginia campaigns superior Southern military skills led to Confederate victories. The union armies, he argues, defeated themselves by assuming Southern superiority. Northerners saw in the South, which they defined as an area ruled by aristocracy, many values that they believed were lacking in their own newly developing bourgeois and commercially oriented society. Too, they held inflated notions about the martial capacity of their foe and their leaders enforced this view. Even after the war, the Southern military tradition bewitched Northerners. Grant’s hammering tactics and Sherman’s destruction made Northerners guilty and led them to believe that they had not outfought the South but only trampled them down by numbers. Thus the idea of the Lost Cause was born and the romantic myth of the South was reinforced in a harsh Northern workaday world. Only in our day have the historical layers been stripped away to yield harsher truths and reality.