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Comment by avhon1 | Hacker News Reader

The Confederacy was never going to win outright, and they knew it. Their goal was to force a stalemate, allowing them to continue to exist as a separate country from the United States.

edit: and for the first few years, it looked like they might be able to do that.

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The US war of independence is considered won, and the US didn't conquer England. I'm sure I have all sorts of wrong headed bias, but I never thought the Confederacy had any larger goal than independence? Why would it be a stalemate and not a victory for them if they were allowed to exist as a separate country?

I think it would have to be a military stalemate, and then a negotiated victory.

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.

In some ways, I think it continues to exist as a separate country within the United States. Every demographic map you look at, political, health, education etc. you can see it. And whenever I have visited some of those states, it almost feels like another country. They even speak a different language, or at times sounds like it.

The outcomes are primarily due to race, not the contours of the Confederacy. Nearly all of these “red state demographic maps” are isomorphic to the percentage of African Americans within a given state/county/city.

Well, race and the Confederacy are linked though.

Right, and you know how when you visit another country, how the racial make up of that other country is often different. So, that sort of is the point I was making, it's like another country with in the U.S.

Black life being so different in the south is the contours of the confederacy.

>allowing them to continue to exist as a separate country from the United States.

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.

So, what is a true civil war then?

I assume one that doesn’t involve breaking up to create a new country. Plenty of wars like that, like the English civil wars between different political factions[0].

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.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War

I think the best example of a "true" civil war is probably the Chinese Civil War. I say that because it was fought across the entire geography, for a long time, where the belligerents were never sure who was friend and who was foe. The US civil war, relatively speaking, is pretty boring. When it started, everyone was already on "their" side of the line. So you didn't have kidnappings, murders, other horror show stuff that's common in civil wars throughout history.

I think maintaining their independence was "winning outright" for them.

They still seem to be winning the grand culture war.

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