Historian Bud Bowie looks at economic miscalculations by Confederate President Jefferson Davis and other Southerners that in effect doomed their cause even as it was winning on the battlefield.

Foremost among these was the belief that the North would never risk ruining the immensely important cotton trade by waging war on secessionist states.

Bowie is a professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.