Interesting review.
From it
Allen Guelzo says
Mr. Gwynne is at his most unpersuasive when he repeats the canard—beloved of both early 20th-century Progressives and modern neo-Confederates—that the war saw “the rapid growth of a large, industrialized Northern nation” and the creation of “a highly centralized federal government.” In truth, the Civil War pitted not an agrarian against an industrial society but against each other, one of them based on plantation slave-labor and the other on the small-scale family farm. In 1860, the United States, as a whole and not just the South, was an overwhelmingly agricultural nation; 72% of the North’s congressmen represented farm districts. And far from creating a highly centralized federal government, the Lincoln administration managed its war with a White House staff of just five people and a budget—a wartime budget—that amounted to only 1.8% of GDP.
This lay historian thinks Guelzo oversimplifies. A pure conflict between
two agricultural societies would have been either a stalemate or Southern victory because of the advantage of slave labor. It took an industrial supply line and abundant industry to generate arms, munitions, and material plus the logistical pipeline of railroads as well as the ability to produce iron ships to defeat the South. Certainly, the US was much more centralized during and after the Civil War than before, a lot less than today, but ignoring that is another simplification I object to.