Confederate States of America

This book is the trade edition of Volume VII of A History of the South, a ten-volume series designed to present a thoroughly balanced history of all the complex aspects of the South's culture from 1607 to the present. Like its companion volumes, The Confederate States of America is written by an outstanding student of Southern history, E. Merton Coulter, who is also one of the editors of the series and the author of Volume VIII.

The drama of war has led most historians to deal with the years 1861 to 1865 in terms of campaigns and generals. In this volume, however, Mr. Coulter treats the war in its perspective as an aspect of the life of a people

.The attempt to build a nation strong enough to win independence naturally drew Southerners' attention to such problems as morale, money, bonds, taxes, diplomacy, manufacturing, transportation, communication, publishing, armaments, religion, labor, prices, profits, race problems, and political policy. Mr. Coulter balances these phases of the struggle in their relation to war itself, and the whole is dealt with as a period in the history of a people

.And finally, Mr. Coulter deals with the ever-recurring questions: Did secession necessarily mean war? Was the South from the very beginning engaged in a hopeless struggle? And, if not, why did it lose?

E. Merton Coulter is emeritus professor of history at the University of Georgia. He received the A.B. degree at the University of north Carolina (1913), the M.A. degree (1915) at the Ph.D. degree (1917) at the University of Wisconsin. His teaching career began at Marietta College (Ohio), but in 1919 he moved to the University of Georgia, where he has remained save for several intermissions when he taught in other institutions. Professor Coulter has served as president of the Agricultural History Society and of the Southern Historical Association. He is the author of The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky; College Life in the Old South; William G. Brownlow, Fighting Parson of the Southern Highlands; A Short History of Georgia; Thomas Spalding of Sapelo; John Jacobus Flournoy, Champion of the Common Man in the Antebellum South; Georgia's Disputed Ruins (editor); The Other Half of Old New Orleans (editor); and numerous articles in historical journals.