So, I thumbed through it, and hemmed and hawed about buying it. Then I stopped near the back of the book and saw a paragraph about Lee and Johnston disobeying direct orders from Davis ordering them turn the war into a guerilla war, the writer wrote so differently about this subject that I made up my mind right there to get it.
Here is a snippet on another topic...
"By the fall of 1864 little was left to sacrafice, and many Southerners despaired. Yet even as the nation came apart and some Southerners ceased to resist their enemies, the Confederacy lived on in the steadfastness of its soldiers and energy of national debate over slavery. In the end Southerners themselves decided for emancipation in the vain hope of national survival. Like so many other creative decisions which the Confederates made or to which they assented, the decisions to arm and free black Confederates is open to more than one interpretation. Both then and now, many have said that Confederate emancipation was the desperate measure of a dying people. Like the other transforming aspects of the Confederate experience- political, economic, social, and cultural- the emancipation debate in the Confederate South is analogous to an eight-ounce glass in which there are four ounces of liquid. Of course the glass is half empty- the Confederacy was doomed from the outset by its archaic polity, society, ecomomy, and "peculiar institution." But the glass is also half full- the Confederate experience was a positive attempt to transcend a "peculiar" past in order to achieve Southern self-determination."
The foreward is interesting, it is by the original author...apparently in 1979, this book was considered "revisionist history". He writes... "All history worthy of the name is revisionist history", Emory M. Thomas.
I can't wait to see what other treasures will be availble during this sesquicentennial.
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David Upton