Diehard Rebels

Here's some excerpts from a review of Jason Phillips's Diehard Rebels that was published on H-CivWar. Phillips asks the question: Why did Confederate soldiers fight so hard for so long? I can't wait to read this book.

"Diehard Rebels has what every good book should have: a compelling problem. Why on earth did Confederate soldiers fight on until the spring of 1865, in the face of mounting evidence that their cause was doomed? It is all too easy to assume that they were either "insane, delusional, or bombastic," but Jason Phillips provides a much more persuasive and richly documented answer (p. 4). Soldiers "submitted to unending carnage and squalor," he says, "because they expected to win" (p. 2). As Phillips observes, we will never properly understand soldiers' motivations if we view them through the lens of hindsight, with the outcome of the war in mind. It is impossible, of course, for historians completely to disregard such a towering and inescapable fact as the Confederacy's defeat, but Phillips succeeds to an admirable degree in his effort to approach the second half of the Civil War through the eyes of the soldiers themselves, who saw things from a "worm's-eye" rather than a "bird's-eye view" (p. 90). Even at ground level there were signs that the Confederacy was in trouble. But committed Confederate soldiers--"diehard rebels"--simply refused to see them. Instead, as Phillips puts it, they "focused on the thinnest silver linings and chased rainbows until the war's end" (p. 34)."...

"Diehard Rebels forces a rethinking of existing interpretations of Confederate soldiers' motivations, making very careful use of an impressive range of soldiers' writings to probe the important but often overlooked question of why Confederates continued their fight. Phillips is to be commended for taking these soldiers seriously and for genuinely trying to understand--not to glorify, not to mock, but to understand--their view of the war and the world. The stakes involved are far from trivial; the intensity of these diehards' commitment extended the war and in so doing sealed the fate of hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides who might otherwise have survived. "

Full review.