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Title: Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (Southern Classics Series (Paper)) by Albert Burton Moore, John S. Sproat ISBN: 1-57003-152-5 Publisher: University of South Carolina Press Pub. Date: November, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: A classic
Comment: Albert Burton Moore in his 45-year teaching career was the embodiment of a Southern scholar-gentleman. Born and raised in Alabama, he was a descendant of Confederate veterans, and he wrote and taught at a time when many of them were yet alive. His teaching career, except for four years in Iowa, was entirely in the South (as a footnote, he also served two terms as president of the NCAA).

"Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy" did not have to be an interesting book, but it is one because Moore's writing style is assured, easy, understated. He has a keen eye for the pithiest quotes from his sources. And he knows his Latin. His Southerners regarded their battlefield victories with sincere "gratulation," and Moore cannot bring himself to write "conscripted" when he knows Cicero would only have approved "conscribed."

Moore's book is still valued by historians for both parts of its title. The 1996 introduction to the University of South Carolina edition rightly praises the book as still the fundamental introduction to Confederate conscription, as well as a groundbreaking exploration of internal divisions in the CSA. That was a topic which had been given short shrift by the Lost Cause version of the Civil War which prevailed in America at that time.

Moore views Southern conscription as a flawed, but ultimately successful system that kept the Confederacy's will to fight for independence focused in an effective military effort for four hard years. He finds no inherent shame to the Confederate cause in the mere fact of conscription. "President Davis told the Mississippi legislature that there was no more reason to expect voluntary service in the army than voluntary labor upon the public roads or the voluntary payment of taxes," he writes.

Yet he appreciates the challenge of applying a system of compulsory service "among a proud and free people." He writes that the South's general public was "gradually reconciled" to the idea, though "strong opposition" remained.

His assumption that secession was principally about states' rights is no longer shared by most historians. But because Moore felt the South's cause was states' rights, the "conflict" in the book's title is largely that between Davis' central government and state authorities, notably the states'-rights governors Brown and Vance.

The book avoids statistics as much as possible, and the author always alerts his reader, if he delves into numbers, that all the figures are estimates at best, that they are often in dispute, and that surviving Confederate records are very incomplete.

Moore does not compare Southern conscription with the North's parallel messy venture in it, and he makes no attempt to place the CSA's experience in the flow of military history. This is, to me, a serious oversight.