ABSTRACT
The nationalization of the United States, the professionalization of the American military and the United States involvement in a series of major conventional wars have helped create an intellectual and moral ambience conducive to the definition of the Confederate war effort in conventional terms. Use of the model of conventional war to organize Civil War data is due to a number of factors, of which several are of paramount importance. Perhaps most significant, the Confederate leadership itself insisted that the Confederacy was a legitimate nation fighting a legitimate war in a legitimate way. Use of the model of the war of national liberation involves something more than the assertion that the Confederacy's experiments in national centralization were revolutionary. Application of the model of the war of national liberation places the Confederacy's strategy, military organization, logistical arrangements and administrative problems in a new light.
