The miracle is that the South held out as long as it did. That's an incredible testament to the courage and self-sacrifice of the people of the South–both the men in the armies and the people at home who sustained them, with nothing but continuing and expanding destruction all around them.

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The South lost the war because the North and Abraham Lincoln were determined to win it.

ROBERT KRICK

Historian and author of ten books about the war.

The South lost because it had inferior resources in every aspect of military personnel and equipment. That's an old-fashioned answer. Lots of people will be scornful of it. But a ratio of twenty-one million to seven million in population comes out the same any way you look at it.

The basic problem was numbers. Give Abraham Lincoln seven million men and give Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee twenty-one million, and cognitive dissonance doesn't matter, European recognition doesn't matter, the Emancipation Proclamation and its ripple effect don't matter. Twenty-one to seven is a very different thing than seven to twenty-one.

BRIAN POHANKA

Consultant for the weekly series "Civil War Journal" on the Arts and Entertainment network, on-set history advisor for the movie Gettysburg, a staff writer and researcher for Time-Life Books' The Civil War series, and a founder of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites.

The South certainly did not lose for any lack of idealism, or dedication to its cause or beliefs, or bravery and skill on the battlefield. In those virtues the Confederate soldier was unexcelled, and it's my belief that man-for-man there was no finer army in the history of America than the Army of Northern Virginia.

But of course the factors that enter into the South's ultimate defeat are those things that you hear time and time again, and with a great amount of validity: the North's industrial base; the North's manpower resources; the fact that foreign recognition was denied the Confederacy. In time these things would tell on the battlefield, certainly on the broader level. The North was able to bring its industry and its manpower to bear in such a way that eventually, through sheer numerical and material advantage, it gained and maintained the upper hand.

That's when you get into the whole truly tragic sense of the Lost Cause, because those men knew their cause was lost, they knew there was really no way they could possibly win, and yet they fought on with tremendous bravery and dedication. And that's, I think, one of the reasons why the Civil War was such a poignant and even heart-wrenching time. Whether or not you agree with the Confederacy or with the justness of its cause, there's no way that you can question the idealism and the courage, the bravery, the dedication, the devotion of its soldiers–that they believed what they were fighting for was right. Even while it was happening, men like Union officer Joshua Chamberlain–who did all that he could to defeat the Confederacy–could not help but admire the dedication of those soldiers.

NOAH ANDRE TRUDEAU

Author of three books about the war's final year, including the recent Out of the Storm: The End of the Civil War (April-June 1865).

One main reason why the South lost (and this may seem offbeat because it flies in the face of the common wisdom) is that the South lacked the moral center that the North had in this conflict. Robert Kirby in his book on Florida's Edward Kirby Smith and the Trans-Mississippi suggests that the South's morale began to disintegrate in the Trans-Mississippi in about 1862.

The North had a fairly simple message that was binding it together, and that message was that the Union, the idea of Union, was important, and probably after 1863 you could add the crusade against slavery to that.

Ask the question, "What was the South fighting for; what was the Southern way of life that they were trying to protect?" and you will find that Southerners in Arkansas had a very different answer from Southerners in Georgia or Southerners in Virginia. And what you increasingly find as the war continued is that the dialogue got more and more confused. And you actually had state governors such as Joe Brown in Georgia identifying the needs of Georgia as being paramount and starting to withhold resources from the Confederacy and just protecting the basic infrastructure of the Georgia state government over the Confederacy. In the North you certainly had dialogue and debate on the war aims, but losing the Union was never really a part of that discussion. Preserving the Union was always the constant.

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