The Year of Victory

A fascinating account of the final year of the US Civil War and reassessment of the North's victory, written by an esteemed military historian

Why did the North win the Civil War? Traditional explanations for the Confederacy's collapse center on Southern society becoming fatally riven by racial, class, gender, and regional divisions or, alternately, that the Union army brought enormous force to bear on Confederate soldiers. Although the North's manpower advantage and its industrial capacity make Union victory appear inevitable in retrospect, at the time the Confederates saw their territorial size, lengthy coastline, martial superiority, and ability to absorb punishment as clear advantages--factors that had been critical to the colonists' success in the Revolutionary War.

In The Year of Victory, distinguished military historian Brian Holden Reid explores the nature of the Civil War in its final, climactic phase from the spring of 1864 to the collapse of the Confederacy the following spring and reassesses the Union's triumph. He shows that the central factor was the successful employment of a strategy of attrition, by which a force incrementally wears down its enemy, that was expertly directed and managed with vigor, imagination, and determination. By July 1864 things looked to be going well for the South, but, as Holden Reid shows, the Union was saved over the autumn. He highlights how Ulysses S. Grant harnessed attrition warfare as a cumulative, dynamic process involving maneuver, battle, raiding, and harrying through the destruction directed at the Confederate war economy. Confederate successes were incomplete or transitory. William Tecumseh Sherman's brilliant Marches could not have been unleashed on the South unless Grant had pinned down and worn away Confederate military resources in Virginia. Starvation, the collapse of the transport system, hyper-inflation, and an inability to replace what had been lost eroded the South's capacity to resist and fatally undercut its war machine.

By focusing on why the North won, rather than why the South lost, The Year of Victory offers an original and outstanding contribution to Civil War history.