Historian: The vast majority of scholars studying the American Civil

the question stems seems confusing to me, or maybe its just me, anyways, let me put my fwd my contention
It never mentions in the stem that union and confederate fought each other, it simply says confederate prevailed, they could be fighting alongside with another group
Though it doesn't change the reasoning to strengthen Union's position pre war, it does confuse the reader, I was trying to strengthen the argument by psearching for an option which might put more weight confederate's involvement with foreign power, thus on selected B

Nityanshu1990
In the thick of the moment i did chose B like you did. But on reassessing i found that I made a silly error. So this is how i see it.
Historian says scholars believe in two things about C's - they were superior than U's and they were more committed. Do take a note of comparatives 'superior' and 'more' and finally 'fighting harder'. This suggests C's to have an advantage over U's. Thereafter, the argument takes a turn(note the word 'however') and historian says that most of the scholars also believed to that historian him/herself believed - that at the beginning of the war in 1861, it was known that C's would not be able to prevail the war without the help of foreign powers.

So, we need to find something which supports this convention(conclusion of the argument in this passage) - something that suggests C's were at disadvantage or U's were at advantage.
By that logic, A and D were somewhat opposite to what we are looking for. B is opposite. E is the most confusing because goes in the similar direction but if you pay a little more attention it talks of a time in 1865 which is different than 1861. Thus, it can't be the right answer.
Now, C gives a straight forward reason to chose it since it give advantages U's had although one has to make a minor assumption that larger population and more industrial manufacturing meant advantage for U's. However, if you know about American Civil War, you can easily pick C(I read about it and knowing that does not guarantee prize as in my case).

Answer is C.

IMO for this question you still need to know that U and C fought AGAINST each other, which is not mentioned in the passage -

Historian: The vast majority of scholars studying the American Civil War regard Confederate generals as superior to their Union counterparts. They also acknowledge that the Confederate soldier was, on average, more committed to the cause and, therefore, willing to fight harder than the Union soldier. However, most of these same scholars agree with my contention that when the Civil War began in 1861, it was already true that the Confederacy could not prevail without the intervention of a major foreign power such as Great Britain or France.

The passage only mentions - Confederate generals as superior to their Union counterparts

if we assume, they were fighting on the same side, against let us say Canada (however, improbable it may sound), then the answer choices does not make sense. Lets take C for example -

(C) The Union had four times the total population of the Confederacy and most of the industrial manufacturing in North America.

Contention of the author is - Confederacy could not prevail.

But they are on the same side, and if Unionist did the heavy lifting - so be it.

i actually found this one pretty easy. it's very easy to knock off everything but C and E.

E is OOS because it refers to the end of the civil war and refers to the rifles, not the troops.

Thus C is the correct answer

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