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5. The Confederacy's War

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About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we think about the course of the war from the point of view of the Confederacy, focusing in particular on: (i) the importance of the fact that the southerners were fighting on home soil; (ii) the extent to which the disintegration of slavery disproportionately impacted by the southern states; (iii) the extent to which the southern states formed a coherent bloc that supported the war; (iv) what the south said it was fighting for, and what it was in fact righting for; (v) the difference between the political leadership in the north (Abraham Lincoln) and south (Jefferson Davies), and the impact this had on the course of the war; (vi) the extent to which the north were better prepared to prosecute a war than the south, and the impact this had on the course of the war; (vii) the extent to which the southern states were self-delusional in their attitudes towards the war and (especially) slavery; and (viii) the question of whether the south could in fact have won the war and, if so, how.

Course

In this course, Professor Susan-Mary Grant (Newcastle University) explores the American Civil War (1861-65). In the first module, we think about the immediate background to the secession of South Carolina from the United States in December 1860, including the impact of the Dred Scott case and the rise of Abraham Lincoln. In the second module, we explore the idea that the American Civil War was a second American Revolution, before turning in the third module to look more closely at the issue of slavery and emancipation. In the fourth and five modules, we consider the course of the war from the perspective of the Union and the Confederacy, respectively, before turning in the sixth module to think how the historiography relating to the American Civil War has changed since the 1960s, as well as thinking about the war's legacy to this day.

Lecturer

Professor Susan-Mary Grant is Professor of American History at Newcastle University. She is the author of North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (2000), The War for a Nation: The American Civil War (2006) and editor of Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War (2003) and Themes of the American Civil War: The War Between the States (2010).