The Road to Appomattox.

Memphis, Tennessee:: Memphis State College Press, 1956.. 1st Edition.. Hardbound . BINDING/CONDITION: light turquoise cloth; a mended tear on the front free endpaper; a Very Good book, with a Very Good dust jacket; publisher's price on the jacket flap is intact.. 8vo (8.75 inches tall) . Description: Includes a section of black and white plates. The publisher's blurb reads: ''Since the curtain fell on the Confederate States of America in 1865, many people on both sides of the Mason and Dixon line have speculated on the cause of the South's defeat. Hundreds of books and articles have been devoted to this question. In this book, originally presented as the J P Young lectures at Memphis State College in October, 1954, Bell Irvin Wiley, professor of history at Emory University and one of the foremost authorities in the field, sketches the course of the Confederacy's decline and reappraises the influences leading to its defeat. The first chapter, devoted to Jefferson Davis, has been pronounced by a top student of the period as the most concise and best balanced evaluation of the Confederate president ever to appear in print. Another chapter traces the decline of public morale in the Confederacy from its dizzy heights of the war's first months to the hopeless depths of the last dreary winter. The final chapter points up the internal influences that impeded the South's effort to establish its independence and, in the author's view, ultimately did as much, if not more than external forces to defeat that effort. The deficiency which the author considers most crippling and to which he devotes most attention is disharmony. He attributes the quarrelsomeness to exaggerated individualism deriving from the South's way of life, frustration, habit acquired from denouncing the Yankees, and a sense of guilt about slavery. Among the book's illustrations is a diagram designed by the author representing graphically the course of Confederate morale.''