As a non-American I was always under the impression that the Confederation never actually stood a chance.
But I might be completely wrong here.
But I might be completely wrong here.
The North's eventual win came at very high cost. In my opinion, we should memorialize Union soldiers more than we do. There was so much discussion of Confederate monuments the other year, but no one ever mentions the many Union monuments across the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monume... A lot of people paid the ultimate price, fighting for the promise that "history will remember you for helping to end slavery!", and yet we don't remember them that much. It actually makes me rather upset to be honest.
No idea where this idea comes from, the idea that the loosing side in a war had better Generals. For the Wehrmacht it's the same. People tend to forget thatbthise Generals lost their battles, and the war, at the end.
Lee had a habit of couching orders as if they were suggestions or requests. The South's most effective general may have been Jackson. For the first half of the war, the Union's top general in the east was McClellan, who was useless.
[Edit] McClellan didn't fight in the west. And I spelled his name wrong.
[Edit 2] Lee overruled Longstreet, who wanted to flank the Union's right. Lee insisted on a frontal assault. That decision led directly to Picket's disastrous charge.
I don't understand why some generals are so averse to flanking actions. Is it because they are somehow considered cowardly, or "just not cricket"? Flanking actions are often decisive, and sometimes even the threat of a flanking action can critically disrupt enemy operations.
Eventually the war gets truly hopeless. Without any feasible objectives to go for, the loser has incredible latitude to try and stay alive and inflict harm. Never any need to take a tactically disadvantageous battle for strategic reasons if there’s no strategic hope, after all!
Not at all. Longstreet, Jackson, Forrest, Stuart, Early (and that's just off the top of my head)...all of them routinely outperformed their Union counterparts in individual battles and smaller engagements for the first couple of years of the war. Until Grant came into his own and was able to properly empower others like Sherman and Sheridan, the Union didn't really have any competent generals (although Meade does deserve recognition for holding the line at Gettysburg).
The reason the Union still won was, first, logistics--as the saying goes, battles can be won by generalship but wars are won by logistics, and the Union had superior logistics (for example, running rail lines on the fly to support its armies). And second, the fact that the Confederacy failed to follow up key victories: for example, after the first battle of Bull Run, Washington, DC was pretty much there for the taking, but the Confederacy never tried. I suppose one could put that down to generalship, but I think it's more a matter of overall policy as regards the goal of the war: the Confederates weren't trying to conquer the Union, they were just trying to be independent from it.
(Similar remarks could be made about the Wehrmacht generals: no, they didn't lose all their battles, they actually won quite a lot of them, but because of the insane overall leadership they were under, and because once the war became protracted they were at a disadvantage in logistics, they ended up losing the war.)
Government, during war time, sets the priorities and policies, industry put those policies in place. This results in output, guns, uniforms, tanks, horses, ammunition, boots, food, planes, ships...
How said output is used on the battlefields, and more importantly how it gets to said battlefields, is the Generals thing (including theirs staff, the general staff, high command...).
Also, the civil war was one of the first semi-indistrial wars. And those cannot be won without a proper industrial base, which the South never had. And no single person can change that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Stevens
To your point about logistics and follow-up, they failed because Early had been pushing his troops too hard for too long. It’s hard for us to appreciate just how much effort travel was even in the early railroad era, where basic things like food decided battles. It also didn’t help that the troops decided to recuperate with some looted whiskey at the Blair mansion.
Just because something was done doesn't mean it was a great idea. There is an uncomfortable counterfactual to explore of whether it a better idea to let people split up and self govern. It is very much a history-written-by-winners moment to assume it is self evident that people have to be conquered for their own good.
A remarkable number of countries that weren't invaded by Union soldiers also gave up on slavery. It isn't economically feasible, anyone who tries to use it is going to get shredded by capitalists.
(Then there is the uncomfortable juxtaposition of the words "self govern" within a country that kept slaves. The slaves of course aren't counted as self governing.)
The traditional tool for ending slavery has been prosperity. That worked pretty much everywhere it was tried - including North America. Armies are not a tool of creating prosperity, so it seems a bit suspicious that this was the best path in the Southern US. Obviously the States gets to sort itself out with no involvement from anyone else, but it is a very open question whether holding itself together was the best choice.
Does the confederacy happily let slaves escape across the border to freedom?
You are also sort of writing off the intrinsic value of freeing 4 million people sooner than later.
No, why would they? In fact being free of any legal obligation to enforce the fugitive slave laws (and the provision in the Constitution that they were based on) was one of the main arguments made by abolitionists who advocated for the North seceding from the Union.
> Does the confederacy happily let slaves escape across the border to freedom?
Considering that even with the fugitive slave laws in place, a large number of slaves escaped and were never returned, it would certainly seem like many more of them could have escaped if the North and South were separate countries. Of course the Confederates, or at least the slaveowning ones, wouldn't have been happy about it, but what would they do about it? Declare war on the North?
> You are also sort of writing off the intrinsic value of freeing 4 million people sooner than later.
Sooner than what? If we are going to talk about counterfactuals, how about this one: abolitionists in 1831 have not yet dialed up their rhetoric, and the bill that was in the Virginia state legislature in that year to establish gradual emancipation of the slaves passes (in our actual world, the bill failed because copies of William Lloyd Garrison's famous pamphlet arrived, calling the Constitution "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell" and advocating for Northern violence to free the slaves, and once the Virginia legislators read it, all support for the bill evaporated). Other Southern states gradually follow Virginia's lead. Result: by 1865, all of the slaves are freed without costing a single life or requiring a single shot to be fired.
We could also consider another counterfactual: what if the US had done what Britain did, and freed the slaves by buying their freedom from the slaveowners? Britain did that in 1838.
I do wonder why anyone thinks the war somehow ends if the North isn't helping enforce slavery.
I'm actually not sure about this. Based on what I've read, many in the North had been saying for ages that slavery was going to go away on its own, and the war only happened when it became increasingly clear that that wasn't happening.
>Estimates of the number of enslaved people today range from around 38 million[1] to 49.6 million,[2][3][4] depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century
I think it's true that slavery was holding the South back economically, but their "shredded by the capitalists" moment came when they were crushed by the North's superior industrial economy during the war. I don't know how else it was supposed to happen.
I'm not from the US but I find it really ironic that even from the outside it appears the US culture views this phenomenon as normal: the losers (Confederates) highly priced the traditional values (just take a look at the personal position of general Lee), thus those values got denigrated because they got associated with racism, taking along the ability of the winners (Union) keep the memory and gratitude to those who gave their lives for. I actually live in a country torn by a civil war (disputed to this day!) and man, it is tragic. The wounds seem to never really heal, they just reopen along line where the scars used to be at the next big dilemma in society.
The North and the South had sort of different dispositions. The North grew out of New England and New York, the kernel is sort of Yankee values, and then expanded outwards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee
I’m not sure what the South’s traditional values are, I mostly associate them with a sort of slow-paced agrarian society, but I’m not sure to what extent that’s just a modern invention.
edit: and for the first few years, it looked like they might be able to do that.
But it would be a very silly thing for the Union to give up, having a hostile country so close would be a recipe for disaster. It doesn’t seem like a real stalemate would be possible, in the sense that the North’s economy was so much bigger. Stalemate today? Keep building factories, keep up the blockade, check again tomorrow.
This inadvertently makes a point I like to make when discussing the US Civil War with those unfamiliar with it. The US didn't really have a civil war. It split into two separate countries and then had a regular war, where one country conquered the other.
But I’m still going to call it the US civil war. It’s what it’s called, even if it might not the fit the traditional definition.
But the weaker party doesn't need to defeat the stronger one. They just need to make the cost of the war greater than the price the stronger side is willing to pay. That's how the USA won its independence from Britain, after all. Part of what made the price too high in that case was assistance from the French (it was the French navy, not Washington's army, that sealed the victory in Yorktown, for example).
The leadership of the Confederacy was well aware of this and had diplomats all across Europe seeking help for their cause. If they had succeeded, history might have taken a very different turn.
A good book about Union efforts to keep Britain and other European powers out of the war: Our Man in Charleston, by Christopher Dickey.
The British Empire had a whole planet to keep an eye on, losing in NA was of course not what they wanted, but it wasn’t existential or anything. America was a far away colony for them, long way to go to hold on to, basically, a resource extraction colony.
The US was a lot more motivated to take the South back. It is a big border, right near our population centers, far too risky to have a hostile country there.
If, like, Wales had tried the same strategy as America, I bet they wouldn’t have beat the English.
Win as in conquer the rest of the US? lol, no. That wasn't going to happen. The industrial base just wasn't there.
Win as in make it so costly to re-take the South that the rest of the US doesn't want to devote the resources? That was probably possible at certain points in the war.
In it, Lee manages a string of early victories, gets within striking distance of DC before Lincoln can flee, and takes it. The US capitulates. It's not a 1-in-a-billion thing, but it certainly does read like a 1-in-5,000 thing.
IIRC, there was a point at which everyone in DC was gloomy because they thought it would be captured.
The industrial base was in the Northeast mostly, IIRC. NYC alone appears to have had a population around 1/4 of the entire Confederacy’s non-enslaved population. Quite a few guns were made in Springfield, MA. Capturing DC would just be the start of things.
I don't know though. Maybe there was a plan to evacuate the capital which would've worked if push came to shove.
Or leadership could remain defiant, and they're little more than hostages. Disruptive to the war effort, but hardly the end of things.
So the leadership gets to decide whether to be war criminals, or to go prosecute those who refuse as ordinary (or extraordinary?) criminals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_(military)#False_sur...
The very notion of a "war crime" only arrived in the 20thC. More generally (as Wikipedia notes) the act amounts to perfidy, which isn't a crime anywhere I know about.
So that you can feel better, you're 100% absolutely right, and you won this argument with me and all future arguments because of your plainly superior intellect and bright, friendly personality. Game over. Goodbye.
Yes, twice, after the first and second battles of Bull Run.
There was also a cavalry raid by Early that crossed the Potomac upstream from DC and came down towards it from the northwest. Probably not a true threat to DC since Early didn't have enough troops, but it certainly threw a scare into the people there.
Maybe if Europe had gone all in on supporting them with trade, refused to recognize the blockade, that sort of thing? But that’s a pretty big “what if?”
It was a real possibility: Abraham Lincoln was worried sick about this. He knew the Union didn't stand a chance against a fully focused Royal Navy.