Road To Appomattox

Originally published forty years ago, Bell Irvin Wiley’s The Road to Appomattox marked one of the first efforts by a Civil War scholar to identify the internal causes of the South’s defeat. Today this elegant little book remains one of the most penetrating, thought-provoking works on the subject.

In the book’s three chapters, Wiley treats three broad reasons for the failure of the Confederacy: weak political leadership, low morale among the populace, and four “internal influences” in the So...