Quick: Name one universally accepted opinion about the American Civil War. C'mon, I'm waiting....

There aren't many. But I can think of one: That the Confederates performed much better on the Virginia front than they did on the Western front from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. It's generally felt that the Confederates lost the war because they performed so poorly in the West that they first lost control of New Orleans, then most of Tennessee, then access to the areas west of the Mississippi, and eventually to everything west of Georgia. This was mostly the responsibility of the major army west of the Appalachians, called for most of its existence the "Army of Tennessee" or some variation on that.

This book is an attempt to evaluate why. It gives a great deal of attention to geography -- e.g. it points out that the Virginia front was narrow and easy to control, and offered significant defensive positions between Washington and Richmond, whereas in the West there was a front too wide to be defended by a single army and with relatively few places with the transport facilities to set up a good defensive position anyway. Then, too, the rivers in the west flow mostly north and south, giving the northerners easy routes into the south. The effect of this was to make it much harder for the western Confederates to choose the time and place of their battles.

Also the eastern Confederacy had more men with military training available on a per capita basis, and a stronger militia tradition; in effect, author McMurry argues that it was easier to turn their individual men into an army. I'm not sure I buy the militia argument, but I do accept the value of the greater resources of command.

McMurry argues a few other points, none of that degree of importance, but in the end, he argues one other point: Virginia had Robert E. Lee, and the West didn't.

This is, I think, where the work falls down. Oh, I am not arguing for a moment that Lee wasn't a better commander than (e.g.) Braxton Bragg, and that that made a tremendous amount of difference. But I don't think it makes all the difference. What if Albert Sidney Johnston hadn't been killed at Shiloh, or if P.G.T. Beauregard had simply set up the army so that the three Confederate "corps" had each attacked in a single sector rather than being spread out in waves that were too large for their commanders to control. What if Benjamin McCulloch had not been killed early at Pea Ridge and the Confederates had not botched that thoroughly winnable battle? What if Jefferson Davis had named someone other than the incompetent John Pemberton to command at Vicksburg? If there is one thing that history teaches us, it's that war involves a tremendous number of blunders and accidents, and a good case could be made (Lee's Lost Order notwithstanding) that much of the difference between the two Confederate armies lay in luck.

And, too, Lee made his mistakes. Malvern Hill. Antietam. Pickett's Charge. McMurray asks what might have happened had Lee had 15,000 more men at Mine Run in late 1863. Good question. Where could he have found those 15,000 men? Well, he could have found at least 5,000 of them by not making a nitwit charge into an obviously impregnable Federal position and getting those 5,000 men killed, disabled, or captured!

This book asks an important question, and it tries to give an answer -- and some of its suggestions (e.g. the geography and command resources points) are very good. The appendix -- about the training and availability of generals, state by state -- is also fascinating and very useful. But I can't feel that McMurry has added a whole lot to the debate. If he has had any success, it lies in reminding us of what issues we should be considering. ( )