Why the South Lost the Civil War Ten Civil War historians provide some contrasting–and probably controversial–views on how and why the Confederate cause ultimately ended in defeat.
Interviews by Carl Zebrowski
"The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on."
Put that way, the business of fighting and winning wars sounds simple enough. And perhaps it was simple in the mind of the man who so concisely described the complex art: General Ulysses S. Grant. After assuming command of all Union armies in March 1864, Grant crushed the Confederacy in about one year.
But the American Civil War, like any war, was not simple. The North and South engaged each other for four long years. More than half a million people were killed. Families were torn apart, towns destroyed. And in the end, the South lost.
For the past 130 years Americans have argued over the reasons for the Confederacy's downfall. Diverse opinions have appeared in hundreds of books, but the numerous possibilities have never adequately been summarized and gathered together in one place. So we decided to ask ten of the country's most respected Civil War historians: "Why did the South lose the Civil War?" Here (edited for length) are their answers.
–Carl Zebrowski
WILLIAM C. DAVIS
Former editor of Civil War Times Illustrated and author of more than thirty books about the war, including the recent "A Government of Our Own": The Making of the Confederacy.
Why did the South lose? When the question is asked that way, it kind of presupposes that the South lost the war all by itself and that it really could have won it. One answer is that the North won it. The South lost because the North outmanned and outclassed it at almost every point, militarily.
Despite the long-held notion that the South had all of the better generals, it really had only one good army commander and that was Lee. The rest were second-raters, at best. The North, on the other hand, had the good fortune of bringing along and nurturing people like Grant, William T. Sherman, Philip Sheridan, George H. Thomas, and others.
The South was way outclassed industrially. There was probably never any chance of it winning without European recognition and military aid. And we can now see in retrospect what some, like Jefferson Davis, even saw at the time, which was that there was never any real hope of Europe intervening. It just never was in England or France's interests to get involved in a North American war that would inevitably have wound up doing great damage, especially to England's maritime trade.
Industrially the South couldn't keep up in output and in manpower. By the end of the war, the South had, more or less, plenty of weaponry still, but it just didn't have enough men to use the guns.
I don't agree with the theories that say the South lost because it lost its will to win. There's nothing more willful or stubborn than a groundhog, but whenever one of them runs into a Ford pickup on the highway, it's the groundhog that always loses, no matter how much willpower it has.
We can't fault the Southerners for thinking at the time that they could win when we can see in retrospect that there probably never was a time when they could have. The most important things they couldn't see was the determination of Abraham Lincoln to win, and the incredible staying power of the people of the North, who stuck by Lincoln and stuck by the war in spite of the first two years of almost unrelenting defeat. The only way the South could have won would have been for Lincoln to decide to lose. As long as Lincoln was determined to prosecute the war and as long as the North was behind him, inevitably superior manpower and resources just had to win out.
The miracle is that the South held out as long as it did. That's an incredible testament to the courage and self-sacrifice of the people of the South–both the men in the armies and the people at home who sustained them, with nothing but continuing and expanding destruction all around them.
The South lost the war because the North and Abraham Lincoln were determined to win it.
ROBERT KRICK
Historian and author of ten books about the war.
The South lost because it had inferior resources in every aspect of military personnel and equipment. That's an old-fashioned answer. Lots of people will be scornful of it. But a ratio of twenty-one million to seven million in population comes out the same any way you look at it.
The basic problem was numbers. Give Abraham Lincoln seven million men and give Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee twenty-one million, and cognitive dissonance doesn't matter, European recognition doesn't matter, the Emancipation Proclamation and its ripple effect don't matter. Twenty-one to seven is a very different thing than seven to twenty-one.
BRIAN POHANKA
Consultant for the weekly series "Civil War Journal" on the Arts and Entertainment network, on-set history advisor for the movie Gettysburg, a staff writer and researcher for Time-Life Books' The Civil War series, and a founder of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites.
The South certainly did not lose for any lack of idealism, or dedication to its cause or beliefs, or bravery and skill on the battlefield. In those virtues the Confederate soldier was unexcelled, and it's my belief that man-for-man there was no finer army in the history of America than the Army of Northern Virginia.
But of course the factors that enter into the South's ultimate defeat are those things that you hear time and time again, and with a great amount of validity: the North's industrial base; the North's manpower resources; the fact that foreign recognition was denied the Confederacy. In time these things would tell on the battlefield, certainly on the broader level. The North was able to bring its industry and its manpower to bear in such a way that eventually, through sheer numerical and material advantage, it gained and maintained the upper hand.
That's when you get into the whole truly tragic sense of the Lost Cause, because those men knew their cause was lost, they knew there was really no way they could possibly win, and yet they fought on with tremendous bravery and dedication. And that's, I think, one of the reasons why the Civil War was such a poignant and even heart-wrenching time. Whether or not you agree with the Confederacy or with the justness of its cause, there's no way that you can question the idealism and the courage, the bravery, the dedication, the devotion of its soldiers–that they believed what they were fighting for was right. Even while it was happening, men like Union officer Joshua Chamberlain–who did all that he could to defeat the Confederacy–could not help but admire the dedication of those soldiers.
NOAH ANDRE TRUDEAU
Author of three books about the war's final year, including the recent Out of the Storm: The End of the Civil War (April-June 1865).
One main reason why the South lost (and this may seem offbeat because it flies in the face of the common wisdom) is that the South lacked the moral center that the North had in this conflict. Robert Kirby in his book on Florida's Edward Kirby Smith and the Trans-Mississippi suggests that the South's morale began to disintegrate in the Trans-Mississippi in about 1862.
The North had a fairly simple message that was binding it together, and that message was that the Union, the idea of Union, was important, and probably after 1863 you could add the crusade against slavery to that.
Ask the question, "What was the South fighting for; what was the Southern way of life that they were trying to protect?" and you will find that Southerners in Arkansas had a very different answer from Southerners in Georgia or Southerners in Virginia. And what you increasingly find as the war continued is that the dialogue got more and more confused. And you actually had state governors such as Joe Brown in Georgia identifying the needs of Georgia as being paramount and starting to withhold resources from the Confederacy and just protecting the basic infrastructure of the Georgia state government over the Confederacy. In the North you certainly had dialogue and debate on the war aims, but losing the Union was never really a part of that discussion. Preserving the Union was always the constant.
So, one key reason the South lost is that as time went on and the war got serious, Southerners began losing faith in the cause because it really did not speak to them directly.
JAMES M. MCPHERSON
Professor of history at Princeton University and author of nine books about the Civil War, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom.
Historians have offered several explanations for the Confederate defeat in the Civil War. First, the North had a superiority in numbers and resources–but superiority did not bring victory to the British Empire in its war against the American colonies that were fighting for their independence in 1776, nor did it bring victory to the United States in its war against North Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s. While Northern superiority in numbers and resources was a necessary condition for Union victory, it is not a sufficient explanation for that victory. Neither are the internal divisions within the Confederacy sufficient explanation for its defeat, because the North also suffered sharp internal divisions between those who supported a war for the abolition of slavery and those who resisted it, between Republicans and Democrats, between Unionists and Copperheads. And, in fact, the North probably suffered from greater internal disunity than the Confederacy.
Superior leadership is a possible explanation for Union victory. Abraham Lincoln was probably a better war president than Jefferson Davis and certainly offered a better explanation to his own people of what they were fighting for than Davis was able to offer. By the latter half of the war, Northern military leadership had evolved a coherent strategy for victory which involved the destruction of Confederate armies but went beyond that to the destruction of Confederate resources to wage war, including the resource of slavery, the South's labor power. By the time Grant had become general-in-chief and Sherman his chief subordinate and Sheridan one of his hardest-hitting field commanders, the North had evolved a strategy that in the end completely destroyed the Confederacy's ability to wage war. And that combination of strategic leadership–both at the political level with Lincoln and the military level with Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan–is what in the end explains Northern victory.
GARY GALLAGHER
Professor of history at Pennsylvania State University and author, coauthor, or editor of eleven books about the war, including the recent Third Day at Gettysburg and Beyond and The Fredericksburg Campaign: Decision on the Rappahannock.
The principal cause of Confederate failure was the fact that the South's armies did not win enough victories in the field–especially enough victories in a row in the field–to both sustain Confederate morale behind the lines and depress Union morale behind the lines. In the end there was a waning of the will to resist on the part of Southern white people, but that was tied directly to the performance of the Confederate armies in the field; more than once they seemed to be on the brink of putting together enough successes to make Northern people behind the lines unwilling to pay the necessary price to subjugate the Confederacy.
The primary reason the Confederates did not have more success on the battlefield is that they developed only one really talented army commander, and that, of course, was Robert E. Lee. There never was a commander in the West who was fully competent to command an army–and I include Joseph E. Johnston and Albert Sidney Johnston and Braxton Bragg and the rest in that company. The almost unbroken string of failures in the West depressed Confederate morale. Lee's successes in the East were able to compensate for that for a good part of the war, but in the end there simply was too much bad news from the battlefield. And that bad news, together with Union advances into the South, the destruction of the Confederate infrastructure, and the problems of the Confederate economy that worked hardships on so many people, all came together to bring about Confederate defeat.
RICHARD MCMURRY
Historian and author of Two Great Rebel Armies, which examines the Confederacy's defeat.
If I had to pin the South's defeat down to one sentence, I would have to say it was due to very bad military commanders: Albert Sidney Johnston, P. G. T. Beauregard, Braxton Bragg, John C. Pemberton, Joseph E. Johnston, and John Bell Hood (and if you want to go down a notch or two in the command structure, Leonidas Polk, William J. Hardee, and Joseph Wheeler).
With people like Polk and Hardee you've got ranking generals in an army who deliberately sought to undermine their commanding general Braxton Bragg. With Wheeler you've got a subordinate general who on at least two occasions–in the fall of 1863 and the fall of 1864–went off joy-riding when he should have been obeying his orders from his army commander. With Beauregard and Johnston you had two generals who were unwilling to work with their government. With Hood and Bragg you had two generals who were basically incompetent as army commanders. And with Albert Sidney Johnston you had a general who underwent some kind of confidence crisis after Fort Donelson.
Let me point out that every one of those generals was in the West. Any explanation that does not account for the West is irrelevant to your question. The war was lost by the Confederates in the West and won by the Federals in the West. I don't see how you could even question that. In the crucial theater of the war, the Confederacy did not have a competent commanding general.
MARK GRIMSLEY
Professor of history at Ohio State University and author of the upcoming Hard Hand of War, his first book about the war.
There are really two interesting questions. One is: Why did the South fail to gain or maintain its independence? The other is: Why did the South not only lose its bid for independence but also its bid to influence the terms under which reunion would take place?
The answer to the second question seems to involve a combination of two things. First, the political culture in the South made it difficult for the many people (including those in leadership positions in the Confederacy) who wanted a negotiated settlement to make their will felt. Instead, Jefferson Davis, as president, was able to continue insisting on no peace short of independence. In a real two-party culture, Davis might have been pressured to compromise, or he might have been eased out, or the Congress might have been able to do something.
The other part of the answer is that while the key Confederate commanders–Beauregard, Lee, Joe Johnston–were trying to maximize their military position so as to influence any kind of peace negotiations and give the North an incentive to allow the South to reenter the Union on somewhat its own terms, military mistakes in the late winter and early spring of 1865 scuttled the Confederate military position in Virginia and the Carolinas. This precipitated a collapse sooner than might have happened, undermining any chance that the Confederate government might eventually pursue a negotiated settlement.
HERMAN HATTAWAY
Professor of history at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and coauthor of Why the South Lost the Civil War.
My collaborators and I, in our book Why the South Lost the Civil War, laid out our theory, which is that the South lost the Civil War because it didn't really want to win badly enough. Defeat was ultimately due to a loss of collective will. But in other discussions with various learned groups, I've been induced to admit that in order for the Southern people to have a sufficient degree of will to win the war, they would have had to be a different people than they were. And so, in that sense, victory for the South was ultimately an impossibility.
Now certainly the course of the war, the military events, had a lot to do with the loss of will. The Southerners hoped that they would win spectacular victories on Northern soil, and they didn't. They hoped that they would be able to exhaust the will of the Northern people, and they didn't. And I don't know that all of the Southern people put a great deal of stock in their hopes that Abraham Lincoln would not be reelected, but certainly the key Southern leaders did, and this was their great hope and great strategy toward the end.
With regard to military turning points, I'm not a fan of those, and I certainly don't think that Gettysburg and Vicksburg dictated the inevitable outcome of the war. We tend in Why the South Lost to imply that there was really still hope until March of 1865, but really I think the outcome of the war became inevitable in November 1864 with the reelection of Lincoln and that utter determination to see the thing through, and, of course, the finding of U.S. Grant by Lincoln and company. Grant was certainly the man to provide the leadership that the North needed.
EDWIN C. BEARSS
Former chief historian of the National Park Service and author of several books about the war.
The South lost the Civil War because of a number of factors. First, it was inherently weaker in the various essentials to win a military victory than the North. The North had a population of more than twenty-two million people to the South's nine-and-a-half million, of whom three-and-a-half million were slaves. While the slaves could be used to support the war effort through work on the plantations and in industries and as teamsters and pioneers with the army, they were not used as a combat arm in the war to any extent.
So if the South were to win, it had to win a short war by striking swiftly–in modern parlance, by an offensive blitzkrieg strategy. But the Confederates had established their military goals as fighting in defense of their homeland. In 1861, when enthusiasm was high in the South, it lacked the wherewithal and the resolution to follow up on its early victories, such as First Manassas in the East and at Wilson's Creek and Lexington in the West.
Despite the South's failure to capitalize on its successes in 1861, it came close to reversing the tide that ran against it beginning in February 1862. In the period between the fourth week of June 1862 and the last days of September and early days of October, the South did reverse the tide, sweeping forward on a broad front from the tidewater of Virginia to the Plains Indian territory. And abroad, the British were preparing to offer to mediate the conflict and, if the North refused, to recognize the Confederacy. But beginning at Antietam and ending at Perryville, all this unraveled, and the Confederates' true high water mark had passed.
In 1864, with the approach of the presidential election in the North, the Confederates had another opportunity to win the war. If the Confederate armies in Virginia, Georgia, and on the Gulf Coast could successfully resist the North and the war of attrition inaugurated by General Grant (with its particularly high casualties in Virginia), there was a good probability, as recognized by President Lincoln himself in the summer, that his administration would go down to defeat in November. But the success of Admiral David G. Farragut in Mobile Bay, the capture of Atlanta on the second of September by General Sherman, and the smashing success scored by General Sheridan at the expense of General Jubal A. Early at Cedar Creek, Virginia on October 19 shattered this hope, and Lincoln was reelected by a landslide in the electoral vote. With Lincoln's reelection, the road to Southern defeat grew shorter.
Judging from these responses, it seems clear that the South could have won the war . . . if. If it had more and better-equipped men, led by more capable generals and a wiser president. If it had a more unified purpose and was more aggressive. If it faced a different opponent.
The last condition should not be underestimated. By the end of the war, Lincoln and his powerful army were remarkably proficient at prosecuting war according to Grant's simple strategy. As historian William C. Davis has succinctly put it, "the North won it."
Carl Zebrowski is associate editor of Civil War Times Illustrated, another magazine published by PRIMEDIA.
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The south did not lose the civil war, America did!
Confederates states right to self detemination and freedom from the central government, makes imposible for a nation to wage a war. Lincoln was the president of a nation, Davis was the puppet of divisive forces among the south. Should the south won America will be a second class country as the south is today. The south lost at all levels: Millitary, Industrial, cultural, moral, and organization, A loose federation cannot work as a nation as soon as problems start, divided they go, a strong central government is a must to win a war
The south lost because it took a morally inferior position. States' rights, my butt! The war was all about slavery. At least South Carolina was honest in their secession, stating explicitly that it was because of slavery. There was no "noble cause", only the desire of one race to own members of another. The defeat of the Confederacy was one of, if not the, best things to ever occur in America.
Wrong. If anything, the South's "position", its ideology, was what kept it in the war so long in the face of the 3 to 1 population advantage of the industrialized North. A people fighting on its own soil for a cause are the most tenacious. See Vietnam.
That is an ignorant comment, the media and left wing nuts have made it about slavery over that last 150 years. The initial war was not a slavery issue. Several states in the Union had slavery and some of the territories who allied with the south did not have it.
Absolute right — although the "Lost Cause" fanatics continue to try an deny it.
Too bad the people who started the war weren't an anxious to cover their tracks as the South's modern apologists are. Just read the various Articles of Succession — they make it clear that they were leaving the union to protect the rights of slave-holders.
All the state's rights BS as propaganda for their own ignorant masses. The sale-owners who ran the Southern Legislatures couldn't get the poor, blue-collar whites to fight and die for their right to own slaves … so they sold a bill of goods to their own people.
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The real question of States Right was could the country continue with the rights of slave owning states taking presidence over the rights of free states. An African "freed" man in Pennsylvaina lived in fear of being identified as a escaped slave, arrested by authoritites and taken South into Slavery.
Visit the Abraham Brian home at the edge of the Gettysburg field near the old visitors center. He and his family fled the Confederate host because they Army of Northern Virginia were taking suspected slaves back to Virginia.
With a salute to you Civil War experts, I'm not an expert on the Civil War at all, but I love history, especially the tactics of warfare, and have been to Gettysburg and seen the options, and it seems clear to me that the North didn't win it so much as the South lost it, and stupidly, with bad generalship, both at Gettysburg and in many other places, both from the start and at various points over the next 4 years.
The numbers of combatants are irrelevant in wars. Small numbers have routed larger numbers regularly in history, usually by better generalship involving superior tactics. For the South, the superior tactical advantage was mobility, which is gold in warfare, and it was wasted on meaningless real estate.
If the South had correctly decided that a smaller force should concentrate all its resources in an early attack with superior speed (like the straw through the telephone pole in a tornado) and avoid any conflict other than capture of the flag, they almost certainly would have won. And as you gentlemen all know, circumstances even gave them that unsought opportunity at Bull Run – but bad generalship brought it to naught. Even at Gettysburg victory was very possible by bypassing the massing Union forces and firing the arrow of their entire force directly at Washington, D.C. A night maneuver around the southern flank, a dawn feint attack from the west by a small remaining force with a full artillery barrage (useless in a speed race) on the slow union army, and then a race to the capital with everything you've got, not even stopping for battle …
The war in the west should have been irrelevant. The South could have won at several points in the East just by using their superior mobility to avoid all combat except that which was necessary for the ONE THING – capture the head of state. And if it failed, same result with only a fraction of the total suffering.
Instead, they decided to defend and count on an eventual political victory. Gee, sounds a little like Vietnam, doesn't it?
"The numbers of combatants are irrelevant in wars. Small numbers have routed larger numbers regularly in history"
You're definitely right by saying that, but in many cases the smaller side in the war had outside help; namely, North Vietnam had help from China in the Vietnam War and the American Revolution against Britain was supported by France.
The South lost because it was defending an evil cause.
Wrong. Lots of so-called "evil" governments have won wars.
The South was outnumbered and did not have the industry of the North (industry that was thoroughly nationalized and mobilized by the dictator Lincoln).
But the Southern States made the decision to leave the Union over the issue of the protection of the rights to own slaves. That protect is written into the Confederate Constitution in several places. They then seized Federal Property and fired on memebers of the Federal Military, that is insurection. Refusal to obey the laws of the Federal Government, exactly what Washington put down in Western PA during the Whiskey Rebellion. The nation could not exist with temporary membership of the States. The US Constitution formed a "more perfect Union" from the "perpetual Union" formed under the Articles of Confederation.
The individual states are the building block of this nation. The US Consititution was radified after only nine of the 13 states had voted to radify it. That made it the law of the land over all 13. Each state after that voluntarily joined the Union.
And before we get too deep into a discussion of States Rights, I will say again that the rights of one state does not take presidence over the rights of another. The Fugitive Slave Law did in fact create that problem. A freed African Man in PA could identified by a slave owner from Virginia as a run away and the Sherriff in PA was bound by law to arrest the Freed man.
The eleven states left the Union after the election of Lincoln because they felt he would threaten the institution of slavery, not because of an Federal intrusion into personal life or of Federal involvement in State affairs.
The Federal Government did as a result become stronger after the Civil War, but that was a product of fighting a modern war not by a grand scheme of Lincoln to centralize power in Washington.
The United States was at a tipping point. At the beginning edge of the industrial revolution, it was the last modern society with the institution of Slavery, which itself directly contradicts our boast in the Declaration of Independance of "all men are created equal." The country had gone to great lengths to push of dealing with the issue of slavery in cold hard reality. Most Presidents up to that time had been Southerners and so had the Supreme Courts. The Senate remained deadlocked and only the House represented a clearer picture of America.
There were no more compromises to be made. More States were to join the Union and they would predominatly be Free States. Slavery would not be profitable and it was inevitable that the Federal Government would end slavery if it wanted to be concidered a major influence around the globe. To Europe we were backwards farmers with backwards ideas – like Slavery. We were not going to be taken seriously.
Confederate Leaders understood where the direction in the nation was headed and that Federally mandated emancipation would not be followed with compensation and they the rich land owners would be faced with financial ruin within a generation. Ultimately it was financial ruin at the hands of Northerners and Midwesterners they viewed as inferior to Southern Gentlemen or take matters into Southerners own hands and make a go of it as a nation on their own with a comodity that was percieved to have power to allow them to be successful – Cotton.
what nonesense the3w Northern Armys committed actions that would have got Sherman LIncoln and Sheridan hung at Nuremberg. Sheridan and Sherman then went on to do the same thing with great guston to the Plains Indians .
scv camp302
first the Confederacy was conceived to defend and support the institution of slavery so Michael's statement is completely accurate.
second much of Sherman's actions are in fact lore and fiction. Destroying war making materials is not unusual in war and fairly standard practice. Now if you study the census data in 1860 and 1870 you will find that one: the data helped Sherman pick his route of march because he understood that his army could not stop in any area for an extented period of time for fear on denuding the area of food and material. Second and more important to your concern, the area in which Sherman marched had an aggregate increase in production from 1860 to 1870. This is hardly possible if the accepted notion of devistation and destruction was in actuality what happened during his march.
The worst thing that happened on Sherman's march were the dozens if not hundreds of freed slaves that died crossing the Ebenezer Creek pontoon bridge. With Wheeler close on the end of General Davis' 14th Corps (US) and the former slaves that followed, Davis dismantled the bridge and the former slaves fearing for their lives with the approach of Wheeler jumped to their deaths in the fast moving current in that December evening.
A good portion of the value of goods destroyed along the route of Sherman's March was to govenrmental and infrastructure. Railroads were not easily replaceable, but food crops were replaced by the next growing season as documented by the Census data. The anticdotal stories of deviant actions are just that. The average soldier in the ranks did not carry off family treasures. Being a former Infantry Officer, I can tell you that you do not want to carry anything extra for two hundred miles. Sherman tightly controlled the number of wagons associated with the march. Again there are some valid accounts and evidence of illegal action, but compared to the War Crimes of the Thrid Reich, I recommend you go to Germany or visit the National Holocost Museum first.
I am in no way saying that it was fun to have two columns of 32,000 men march through the area, I am saying that there is not evidence to support your claim.
I have talked to family members that long claim to have had relatives in Sherman's path only to have them point out where that family member actually lived. I never questioned their story just showed them Sherman's route of march.
What an asinine and completely uneducated viewpoint.
Do you have anything to add other than an empty and base criticism Mr Tommy.
I have studied data from the US Census website. The entire 1860 document is downloaded on my desktop. I have taken college and post graduate level courses in History, Military Studies and Strategy, I have graduated from the US Army's Command and General Staff College, my personal library contains well over 150 books from authors such as Freeman, Foote, McPhearson, Sears, Coddington, Treudau etc. As an adult, I lived in Georgia for alomst seven years near Columbus Georgia and Augusta. Crisscrossed the state a number of times logging more than a month in hotels near Savannah alone. Toured Atlanta and Macon. Lived for four years in Virginia, right on the Petersburg Battlefield. Trained for 10K and 10 mile races by running the length of the Petersburg Seige driving tour – literally looked into the Crater hundreds of times.
You might think my challenge of the conventional wisdom flies in the face of your narrow minded view, but it comes with a breadth and width of background that would qualify as educated.
I would enjoy a discussion on the topic or others, the complete mismanagement of the war in the west by Jefferson Davis, a man by all accounts and experiences, should have been head, shoulders, arms, legs and feet above a country lawyer from the Midwest is almost unbelievable.
Sherman stood in Atlanta in September 1964 with 100,000 men and was opposed by a completely disfunticonal defeated army of perhaps 40,000 under the command of a man completely unsuited for command. The only functioning Confederate Force between the App Mountians and the Mississippi River could do nothing more that harass Sherman's supply lines. Nothing prevented Sherman from marching in any direction he wanted to without impunity. Even after leaving a force and a Commander, Thomas, capable of decimating Hood.
The failure of the Confederate government from protecting itself (infrastructure and war materials) or its citizens finally was manifested in Sherman's actions. The leaders finally accepted what had been confronting them since Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chatanooga, the war was lost. That same stubborn streak has not allowed you to open your eyes to a point of view that differs from your own narrow opinion.
All the South had to do is not lose. The North had to win. The South had interior lines. If Jefferson Davis did not inteverene with the locale commander resisiting Sherman's March to Atltanta maybe Sherman could have been delayed long enought for Lincoln to have lost the election. Instead, Davis fired the commander and replaced him with a liked mined individual he ordered frontal assaults into Sherman's line which merely made Atalanta easier to capture. With Cinco De Mayo coming up, I am surprised no one mentions how if the battle of Guadalupe had gone different, the French May have intervened. The already had a large army in Mexico. If Lee would have avoided battle at Getty's Burg or a at least stayed on defense and not order frontal assualts, the would have eneded up different and delayed the war even longer. Time was on the South's side.. not the North'ss. Remember, Lee was between Meade and Washington. Lee did not have to charge into Meade, Meade would have had pressure to charge into Lee. I never felt Lee was that great of a general. By that point of the war, he had enough experience to understand how technoligy had weekened offesee (tactically) reletive to defense. He had the best of both worlds, the strategic offence and the tacitcal defense and threw it away.
That's why we had 100,000 more kills than the north did, okay.
"That's why we had 100,000 more kills than the north did, okay."
And Germany had several million more kills than the allied forces. Be proud.
The north had 110,000 battlefield casualties. The south had 94,000.
The war is Over you lost. Whats the diifence how many died on each side that doesnt determine wins and losses.
who cares the south lost thats wat happened we all know it but w.e there isnt anyone who wont agree that southern women are fine az hell!!!
I have to say first off; i am a true confederate at heart. I love the south, as my grandfathers fought for it and loved it. At First the writer lost me with "the south only had one good leader…robert E lee" and "the north had a lot of great leaders…" i would like to point out "Stonewall" Jackson. If you look at his battles and life, anyone would surely say it was as great (if not greater) then robert E. lee. Anyone interested in this should read "Why the south lost the war" book. It states that Jackson had the right idea on how to win. Sadly hes life was lost in 1862. Also another good commander i have to comment about is Forest (in the west) but i do have to agree with the other commanders being dumbasses (sadly). I hate sharman ( and hes "march to the sea") i think it was wrong and evil…but war is evil. nothing is unfair, even i have to admit that. If only the south would have resulted to that kind of warfare… anyway good reading. :)
Jackson died in 1863, not 1862.
He was talking about army leaders, not subordinate commanders (granted Jackson led an army in his valley campaign and briefly at Cedar Mountain, but otherwise he served under Lee). There were some very talented subordinate commanders in the West (Clebourne, certainly Forrest) but they were wasted on bad commanders and their blunders ultimately crushed the Confederacy.
Note that Lee is described as the only competent ARMY commander.
Who was it who said there was a world of difference between commanding a corps and an army?
Jackson, for all his promise, never commanded an army, so we'll never know how he would have measured up. Albert Sydney Johnston died to early to take his measure as well. As for other Confederate ARMY commanders, Joe Johnson was competent, Bragg had some tactical skill but alienated his officer corps and John Bell Hood was a disaster. Hood's Franklin to Nashville campaign in a textbook example of how to do most everything WRONG.
In contrast, after the failures of McClellan, Pope and Burnside, the Union was able to bring forward the solid Meade, the relentless Sherman, Sheridan, the unflappable Grant and the innovative George Thomas.
The Union had poor commanders. Burnsides worst of all. Im a Yankee by birth, Crookston Mn. However Im Confederate by the Grace of God.
As for the Southern Leaders. Robert E. Lee was a much better Gen. than Grant.. HOWEVER, Lee depended on THOMAS Jackson as his right hand man. HE even stated "Jackson has lost his left arm and I have lost my right. Next when Jackson died due to the infection sickness that followed the wounds, LONGSTREET became Lees next best choice.
The Souths best Generals
Robert Lee
Thomas Jackson
Gen. Longstreet
Gen. Hood
Gen Braxton Bragg
Nathan Forrest not one of my choices.
In the Overland Campaign, at the critical point just after Cold Harbor, with Ten Thousand men layed across the field, Grant had the resolve to push his troops. He disengaged from Lee, jumped two "insurmountable rivers" and landed at Petersburg with Two Corps assaulting Petersburg for over 48 hours without Lee truly understanding where Grant was.
When his subordinated failed to push through and cut off all the rails and capture Petersburg in one pass,Grant had the fortitude to understand and execute a seige where he would take away Lee's only advantage, Mobility. Lee's troops moved quicker at every step from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor. Grant negated that. The superior Commander always takes away his opponent's greatest advantages.
All the while Grant was directing the operations of every other field army in the Union.
Not saying Lee did not do an amazing job, but Grant was better.
Hard to fathom Bragg and Hood as great generals.
Bragg got whipped soundly at Chattanooga, when the ground favoured him and Hood wasted the Army of Tennessee at Franklin and Nashville. After Nashville, the Confederate Army of Tennessee was never again an effective force – the only time that happened in the entire war. Perhaps most damning is Grant's assessment of Nashville: "Had I been Hood, I would have pinned Thomas down in Nashville and marched, virtually unopposed, on Chicago." I think that illustrates both the scope of Hood's failure and Grant's uncanny strategic vision.
Oh and one last think
Combat losses and other losses together were not 110,00 verses 94,000
The dead were UNION 360,000 combat and decease
The Dead SOUTHERN 258,000 combat and decease
THE SOUTH lost 110,000 LESS than the NORTH did.
The south were always outnumbered, and yet they always inflicted the same or a greater Kill ration.
Best of all the battle II Fredericksburg the North had the High Ground and still the south had fewer loses. I regret to say that Lee needed Jackson then most of all. LEE became delusional that his men were unbeatable. Jackson could had convinced him that it was not worth fighting. THE SOUTH ALWAYS faired better as a DEFENSIVE ARMY
True, the South lost fewer men. Unfortunately for the South, they also HAD fewer men, therefore they couldn't replace the ones they lost; the North could. The Germans had the same problem fighting the Russians, and the Japanese had it fighting the U.S. after Midway. The South could have won only by forcing the North to quit (for example, by taking Washington(, and they never managed to do this.
The difference is loss from disease, which you would expect to be much greater for the North, because over the course of the war it had many more men under arms (a certain number will die from disease just from being in military camps). The 110,000 to 94,000 represents battlefield deaths, which are roughly equal. Southern cavalry was better on average, at least in the first two years of the war. Southern infantryman may have been better shots (especially early on) because of a greater percentage of men from rural areas, through hampered by inferior weapons and ammunition. Union artillery was generally superior throughout the war. Southern armies being generally somewhat smaller than the Union armies opposing them may account for some discrepancy in casualties. If 1000 men get in a firefight with 750 men, the 1000 have a clear advantage, but might well suffer a few more casualties.
It is not surprising that the North had greater losses then the South. The North was on the offensive for most of the war. In particular the Grants Overland Campaign in Virginia resulted in a large number of Northern casualties. In that campaign they relentlessly attacked against a strong defensive general (Lee) with well entrenched positions. According to wikipedia the north lost 55K men and the south 32K.
wow dude! history books state that the south won more battles and killed more yanks but the war is over. now we are a nation what does it matter on who won the war. stop being prideful with the past read history be4 you say stuff and get over it!!!!!
Why in the world are all of the important words highlighted?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?………. ??
Kaitlyn, I suspect you found this article by doing a keyword search on our site. Whatever word you search for will be highlighted within the article, but no one else will see that highlighting.
The author is right on many counts but on military leadership he falls significantly short. Lee was a great battlefield commander but in my mind was not a great tactician. While he was very able, I believe his main talents were to inspire his army by his charisma. Lee was an engineer at heart and this was reflected in the many successful defensive networks he constructed.
I believe his best Generals on the attack were Jackson, his Shenandoah battles are legendary. He too was charismatic but in a different way than Lee. He was great on the offense but had the genius to avoid major losses;
Longstreet, he was well rounded and was able to be effective on both the offense and the defense. Had Lee listened to Jackson at Gettysburg I believe that the battle would have been a stalemate at worst, and a victory at best. Whether a victory would have allowed the South to eventually win is problematic at best. The variables are so enormous as to negate a clear outcome.
Stuart, he was arguably the best cavalry commander on either side. Again, he had the charisma to infect his troopers with the will to win in spite of the odds. His positive and negative trait was his flambouyancy. That he made the grave mistake of not being where Lee wanted him in the prelude leading up to Gettysburg will always be one of the big questionmarks regarding possible South victory at Gettysburg.
The south had numerous divisional commanders that were, in my opinion, superior to the North's. Unfortunately, great divisional commanders do not necessarily make good corps commanders. After the losses of Johnston, Jackson and many other broad thinking commanders, Lee had to rely on commanders who while they excelled on the line could not effectively command at the corps level.
To sum, in my mind the asolute best team of generals on either side of the civil war were the Lee, Longstreet and Jackson. While they were very different in personality and temprament, when united in battle they were virtually unbeatable.
No so with Grant. In my opinion, Grant won by superior numbers not in my mind by superior tactics or operational skills. He simply wore them down by attrition. Had the roles been reversed, by puttlin Lee in his place on the Union side, I believe Lee could have significantly shortened the war and the carnage that followed.
The Civil in my mind will remain one of our greatest enigmas.
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To some of your points (overall, I enjoyed your post though)…
Had Lee listened to Jackson at Gettysburg, it would have to have been through a seance. It was Longstreet who advised Lee to take the army around to the right and get between Meade and Washington. that would have forced Meade to attack on ground of Lee's choosing.
The Confederates started with the larger number of excellent battlefield commanders and developed even more during the war. However, the Union, despite its generally less experienced cadre of battlefield officers at the beginning, caught up and passed their southern counterparts by the end of the war.
Something similar happened in the early Southwest Pacific campaigns in 1942 and 1943 where the Japanese, who had been fighting since 1937, hammered the Allies in individual battles because the Allies were woefully inexperienced and had weapons systems that had not been fine-tuned to fight that war. However, the Americans learned quickly and for every Admiral Turner there was a Marc Mitschner and for every undersized carrier, there eventually came a fleet of Exxex class carriers.
By the way, mny commanders who were not good in a fight, like Kelly Turner and Frank Jack Fletcher, were able to take over other jobs and excell. It just took time to find the right niche for every officer. Kelly Turner, for instance, was instrumental in developing the "Fleet Train" a massive network of supply that enabled the US Navy to roam the Pacific.
Montgomery Meigs was another example, an officer who was not a battlefield officer, but was a genius at supply.
To your point about Grant; he was only briefly a battlefield commander but his strength, once it came to light, was that of a strategic commander in the mold of Eisenhower or Nimitz. His ability was to motivate his Corps commanders to operate in the same direction – his direction.
The Confederates, on the other hand, had the amazing Lee, but he was too much a gentleman to "crack the whip" as Grant had done. Lee was loyal and genteel and, as hindsight has shown, kept otherwise able commanders well beyond their effectiveness.
Most qualified military historians would disagree with your assessment of Grant. He had the clearest strategic vision, starting with his recognition that the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers were the gateways into the Southern interior, which led to his campaign against Forts Donelson and Henry, and continuing through his overall strategy for all Union armies in 1864 – 5. Grant's Vicksburg campaign, in which he bypassed the forts, landed below Vicksburg, cut loose from his lines of supply to live off the land, fought and won five battles, and then invested, besieged, and took Vicksburg itself, is universally regarded as a masterpiece of operational art. His relief of the Union armies in Chattanooga, in which he reopened the supply lines and routed the Confederates who had all the high ground, was brilliant. The Overland Campaign was not, as pro-Confederate writers still try to argue, mere butchery. He was facing a superb opponent in a limited space (between the Appalachians and the sea) crisscrossed with several east-west flowing rivers which constituted lines of defense. Even so, he totally outmaneuvered Lee by crossing the James, and had his subordinate commanders not hesitated, he would have taken Petersburg in the summer of 1864 and likely ended the war that year.
Also, Lee may have been a great battlefield commander, but he had to be the worst quartermaster in history. His armies were always starving in the midst of plenty. Grant, by contrast, was a great quartermaster, who always saw to it that his troops were well fed and well equipped.
Finally, although Grant's losses were greater in absolute numbers, Lee's losses as a percentage of his troops were always higher than Grant's. If the Grant of Cold Harbor was a butcher, he was no more a butcher than the Lee of Pickett's charge.
Did the Army of Northern Virginia have a strategy or were they just counter-punchers? Weren't most of their victories on the defensive when they parried a Union attach and then counter-attacked to victory? That was Longstreet's advice to Lee at Gettysburg: to assume the defensive and let Meade attack Lee. Lee's strategy was to defend Virginia, not to win the War. France was repeatedly proven that you can't win a war on the defensive.
Also, I believe you over estimate Stuart. The Confederates had the initial advantage in cavalry but after two years, the North had learned their lessons. Custer was certainly Stuart's equal in elan and leadership and Sheridan was a better strategic general and a good leader.
According to Andrew F. Smith, the south was starved into submission. Hunger defeated the Confederacy. See Smith, Andrew F. STARVING THE SOUTH: HOW THE NORTH WON THE CIVIL WAR. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2011.
Not starved, it was a distrbution issue to the Confederate Armies. Sherman the hated plotted his marches to feed his hungry host. A civil War field army would devistate an area it occupied if not fully supported by the logisitcal services.
The route Sherman traveresed saw an overall increase in productivty between 1860 and 1870 with agriculture output. Lincoln directed and Grant executed the starvation of the Confederate government and it's seat in Richmond. The South's largest city, New Orleans had no wide spread devistation because it was taken as an open city, much credit to Lowell for his concern of the population, likewise Savannah did not suffer nor did Nashville or Memphis. Vicksburg, Petersburg and Atlanta suffered due to Confederate Armies occupying the city and fighting from the urban center. The natural resources in the immediate area cannot sustain the local population and occupying force.
Much of Sheman's march is lore and anticdotal vs actual devistation.
I completely disagree with William C Davis. “The south only had one really good commander, General Robert E. Lee”. Without question the most beloved general of the civil war and a good strategist. But I don’t even have to put much thought into what other great generals the confederates had (Stonewall, Longstreet, Stuart, and list goes on). What major battles did Lee win without Jackson? None. Who advised Lee not to attack at Gettysburg on the second and third day? Almost everyone on his staff. Did the confederate army have a chance to win an offensive campaign against a much larger, better-equipped and well led union army when Lee decided to enter Maryland on the offence? No. So I have to disagree that Lee was such a great general that “The rest were second-raters, at best”. Although the south had some poor leaders, guess what, so did the north.
The truth is, the only reason the south lost the war was due to Lincoln’s resolve to win it at any cost. Both side had several great Generals, good equipment, Good brave dedicated soldiers, and a strong will to win. But without European support, the south never could withstand a TOTAL WAR against the north at the time. One main reason the war lasted 4 years was largely due to the fact that the south had so many great generals willing to fight compared to the north, who also had great generals (just not in the right position at the beginning of the war).
Why the south lost the Civil War?
Government and populace on both sides had similar will and determination to win, however,
1. The south never received European recognition.
2. Manpower in the north was far greater then in the south.
3. Industrial capacity was far greater in the north then in the south.
4. The north had control of most of the nations warships.
5. The north had the advantage to continue commerce and trade with minimal disruptions.
6. Much greater wealth in the north.
Although the south had cotton (cotton is king), they overestimated the need for this raw material in Europe during the beginning of the war. So Europe never helped to break the north’s blockade, preventing easy commerce and trade to take place. Thus devastating the economy in the south.
Why did the north win? Abraham Lincoln, period.
Well, the south had inferior weapons, no shoes, far less people, and was able to wipe out 100,000 more of the north by the war's end. That says a whole lot given the north had the best of everything and it was 4 to 1. They also failed to mention Stonewall, and Nathan Bedford which absolutely scared the softer northern troops (if you want to call them that) into something you would exopect a woman to feel..The south lost, because of one simple mistake at Gettysburg. It had nothing to do with what the south was fighting. That was the simple part. It was strategic mistakes. The south would engage 25 people, the north would meet it with 50,000 and still lost the majority of battles. The difference between now and then weapons are far much better. And, the north still his the softer side of "troops".
"The miracle is that the South held out as long as it did. That's an incredible testament to the courage and self-sacrifice of the people of the South–both the men in the armies and the people at home who sustained them, with nothing but continuing and expanding destruction all around them."
It was no miracle – it was self-destruction. From the time Lee re-crossed the Potomac after G-burg, there was absolutely no chance for victory; and within a week of the opening of Grant's 1864 offensive, it was obvious that the South would lose. Rather than end the carnage and destruction, diehards and stubborn old men kept the South in the war, increasing loss of life and property, and insuring that the post-war recriminations would be at their highest level possible.
I have no expertise with which to criticize the authorities but I wonder if one aspect of the North's numbers advantage has gotten proper emphasis. Not only was the North larger is population than the South but the flood of emigration to the North from Europe was supplying a ready source of young men desperate for employment. Sadly, I wonder if all of the Grant's huge casualties were born in the North if the North could have so blithely pursued their steamroller strategy without an outcry from grieving families.
Similarly, most of the civilian population in the North was almost unaffected by the War compared to the civilians in the South
Any analysis of why the South lost the Civil War misses the point if it does not mention the loss of Stonewall Jackson.
Jackson was the most aggressive commander on either side of the battlefield and early on had a plan for dismantling the north, having lived there and vacationed there during and after his West Point days.
Yet his ideas were anathema to Davis' "We just want to be left alone" strategy.
While Jackson reigned supreme in the Shenandoah Valley 1862, in combination with Lee he was unbeatable.
Many have said that if Jackson had been in command of his corps at Gettysburg instead of the reticent Ewell, the South would have won that battle as well.
With regard to the superiority of the North in terms of manpower and manufacturing base, the relatively short distances over which these resources could be brought to bear cannot be ignored.
Thus, it is not a valid argument to contend that the South could have defeated the North just as the American colonists defeated a much larger, better organized, and professional English fighting force when the latter had a command and control structure located an ocean away.
Neither could the Irish successfully revolt against the English for centuries, because of the close proximity of the English superpower.
Having a military superpower in its own back yard did NOT help the Southern cause.
I have to disagree with you on the point of Jackson. Jackson performed his most brilliant campaigns in the Valley, his own personal turf and when he got to dictate his own plans. During the Seven Days he was sloppy and late. He was very average at 2nd Bull Run, and the events leading up to it. (John Gibbon's Brigade earned the name "Iron Brigade" by defeating numerous poorly directed charges by Jackson). He was undistingishable at Fredricksburg, allowing to deepest penetration of forces against his front. I think he was very good, but he is far from the key to strategic turn of fortunes.
Taking Jackson's performances into account, he would have not moved quickly to disengage Harrisburg as Ewell had. Thus he would have linked up with Stuart sooner, but been delayed in getting to Gettysburg and Longstreet would have fought Meade alone.
Now all of this is truly conjecture, about how Jackson would have performed at Gettysburg. But a single Confederate Corps Commander can not possibly have held the fate of the United States. That is very dramatic and very much overstates his importance in a strategic discussion of a conflit that stretched far far beyond Northern Virginia.
Doing just a brief search of Corps and Division Commanders both North and South in the east, most were changed due to casualty: Longtreet, Hood, Jackson, Hill, Ewell, Stuart, Reynolds, Hancock, Sickles, Howard, Kearny, Sedgewick, Joe Johnson, the list goes on and is just as extensive in the West. Jackson was living on borrowed time to have survived as long as he did. His importance is magnified by the predominance of accounts of Eastern Operations. Again looking Strategically, his importance is greatly diminished.
Jackson surely did some idiotic things–the most egregious being the disposition of his troops at Port Republic, which nearly led to his early death.
Gettysburg is pure speculation with regard to Jackson's performance there.
However, I mention it because I believe only Jackson and Lee had a vision of how to defeat the North. One without the other was much less effective.
Stepan,
They did not have a strategic vision to win the war. Lee and Jackson were myopic to Virginia. Lee politely refused or deferred(whatever description you like) to go west and personally fix things out there.
Early in the war, he went where Davis asked him, the Carolina Coast, but his heart belonged to Virginia. Once Lee assumed Command near Richmond, it was his to command until victory or defeat. The War was won out West or lost out West.
They did have a plan to defeat the North by taking the war up North not out west.
To win such a war of separation required a sense of unity. Unity was the antithesis of a war of secession. Georgia's Govenor Brown demonstrated that when he threatened to seceed from the Confederacy over the issue of a military draft.
Only Noah Trudeau got it right:
"The North had a fairly simple message that was binding it together, and that message was that the Union, the idea of Union, was important, and probably after 1863 you could add the crusade against slavery to that.
Ask the question, "What was the South fighting for; what was the Southern way of life that they were trying to protect?" and you will find that Southerners in Arkansas had a very different answer from Southerners in Georgia or Southerners in Virginia. And what you increasingly find as the war continued is that the dialogue got more and more confused. And you actually had state governors such as Joe Brown in Georgia identifying the needs of Georgia as being paramount and starting to withhold resources from the Confederacy and just protecting the basic infrastructure of the Georgia state government over the Confederacy."
That's why the North would prevail despite such massive losses.
The book "A Patriot's History of the United States" says that part of the reason the South lost is that it insisted in fighting the Northern armies head on. Even when the South won a battle, they lost a larger percentage of their total army than the North did. In the end, these kinds of victories could only lead to their defeat. They would have had a much better chance of winning if they had simply avoided head on battles unless they were certain to have an advantage. This was essentially the same strategy that Washington used against the British. If the South had simply tried to outlast the North rather than win the war, the North might have eventually just given up.
The decisions that cost the South the Civil War were actually made before the first shot was fired- General Winfield Scott set in motion the Anaconda Strategy to crush and dismember and ultimately starve the South, and Jefferson Davis laid down a policy of defending the South at every point, thereby diluting the already outmatched Southern resources. These ideas were pervasive, they affected every decision that came after in subtle ways to the point where their big picture implications weren't really thought through.
Had either the North not seized Southern ports and worked down the Mississippi (a plan not universally agreed with as interrupting Southern commerce made Europe unhappy), or if the South had made better use of interior lines and coordinated its forces more efficiently, the South stood an excellent chance of forcing a peace.
This debate has worth. But the wrong question has been raised. That war should never have been fought. The Union could have won with both hands tied behind their back; the South never had a chance. The industrial revolution was making the north into a giant, while the South was still agrarian. (Full disclosure: my fore bearers lost lives, fortunes, and limbs fighting in gray. Everything.)
Within a generation, the industrial North was wrestling with unionization of industry, the beginnings of migration from farm to factory. Had R. Lee taken command of the Union army, the war may have been ( a fantasy ) over in three weeks, with far less harm to his native region. Then the social conflict of slavery would have evaporated due to competitive costs issues, one tractor could do the work of a company of slaves, at far less cost. The harm that still hurts our nation is the destruction of states rights vs national government authority. This is the issue locking up the resolution of Yucca Mountain nuclear spent fuel.
The Union army won by imposing its overwhelming weight against a weak opponent, no genius was needed. R. Lee took long chances, in desperation; some worked. To me. the big strategic decision maker was Longstreet. He knew when to hold them (Fredericksburg VA) and when to fold them (Appomattox). Lee overruled him at Gettysburg and was wrong.
A personal note: My father grew up in abject poverty among former slaves. The plantation system had destroyed the financial order, with no viable replacement. He was raised by former slaves, all struggling to eat. One, Uncle Sydney, was his mentor. Dad cried recounting the death of his silver haired hero, who taught him to fish, ride a horse, go hunting. Dad, as a boy, asked the old man his age, and was told, "Massah, I never learned to count, but was a young buck n… when we fought the Yankees at Vicksburg.".
From war, we must learn to love.
Good points about Longstreet. My view is that he is very unfairly demonized by Southern apologists, this and previous generations.
God bless your father, and Uncle Sydney. That personal note really touched me. As a boy growing up outside of Houston, TX, I knew people like Uncle Sydney. It is on their shoulders, that their descendents, and we, stand.
Uncle Sydney had a wife, Aunt Sarah, the terror of little boys in short pants. Her management policy, when dealing with boyhood mischief was to order the young miscreant to fetch a switch, from the switch bush. Choosing a switch which was too weak, meant a broken stick and hence redoing the corporal punishment. Choosing a switch too stout meant broken skin, and welts. Making hard decisions in front of the switch bush could reduce a little man to tears.
We would be a better nation if the US government was run by Aunt Sarah.
Our great country would be a very different place had the South won. Regardless of all of the revisionism thqt has occurred, the Civil War was a war of ideas and the democratic idea won. The war was lost in the Confederate West because the non-slave owning farmers there were being asked to fight a war for the slave-owning plantation owners in the East. These farmers could not afford to buy their sons out of the army like the plantation owners could (and did). Resentment led to the loss of morale. Lee's overconfidence at Gettysburg didn't help either.
The answer is Abe Lincoln. No man in the History of the Country was better sutied for the position at the exact time he was needed. From arguing (successfully) against the Supremen Court in the Marberry (sic) case to learning to and ultimately directing the strategic aspect of the war, no one has ever been his equal in the White Hosue.
In the most critical time of the war, 75 days from May1st til July 14th 1863, Lincoln was directing his three major subordinate armies in a coordinated offensive. Hooker in Virginia, Grant at Vicksburg and Rosecrans at Tulahoma. Over the next 75 days the Confederacy suffered 100,000 casualties, the loss of the Mississippi River and full connectivity with the Western states of Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. Much of Mississippi lay in ruin and the rail in the part of the country was damaged severely.
Lee had been repulsed in Penn. and Lincoln wanted a killer blow. Grant requested a move to Mobile at this time, Mid July and Lincoln refused. He wanted Grant to refit and move east. Mobile was not required to finish off the Confederacy, Atlanta was the more critical point. The Chattanooga campaign held Lincoln up from directing that move.
In the East, Lincoln's frustration was never more evident that the episode in the White House where his son form him despondent over the news that Lee had escaped into Virginia.
Could Meade have beaten Lee, it is very doubtful, but from Lincoln's strategic level vision as the true Commander in Chief, he was putting well equipt Armies in the field andgiving good guidance. It was only Grant's continued success, with only what Lincoln provided, and without complaint finally convinced Lincoln that Grant would do what he asked without question and hesitation. Grant would finish the war for Lincoln.
Other factors are important, slavery was critical, Emancipation had a part, Industry palyed a role, so did the capability to produce a navy, population helped, preserving the Union as a single message over 11 losely Confederated States was important, the ability to replace fallen leaders, the availability of qualitiy leaders, a developed infrastructure (rails and canals, a more refined rail system.
The resolve of a single man, a relatively unknown product of rural America to singlehandedly at some points, bring this nation through it's toughest trial is why the North won and the South lost. Every other arguement pales in comparision.
As a youngster, I read a DoD book put out covering WWII, a red-covered book with really thin pages like a dictionary. I wore that book out then armed with what I assumed was all the knowledge in the world, I proceeded to teach my Dad everything one needed to know about WWII.
My Dad, who had I cared to ask, had fought with Patton's 4th army, was less than impressed but listened patiently.
When I had finished, he gave me the two pieces of knowledge that I have kept to heart since then:
1. If you can help it, war is not like a football game. You can win a football game 24-21. You want to win a war 100-0! It means fewer dead on your side – and possibly on their side as well.
2. For all the talk of strategy, the American victory was due to the fact that if we needed 100 of something, we sent 10,000, and had the officers and troops who knew how to use them.
The argument by Mr. Krick ignores the fact that without the fall of Atlanta in September 1864 the horrendous losses of Grant's summer campaign of that same year in Virginia probably cost Lincoln the election. Does the North win the war with 21 million vs 7 million under McClellan?
Why can't people admit that Abraham Lincoln defeated Jefferson Davis, and the only things that kept the war going on for four years were the South's generals, interior lines of communication, and the power of defensive weaponry in the 1860's. Lincoln is a towering figure in American military history and doesn't get his due. Jefferson Davis is one of the great failures as an American war executive rivaling LBJ.
What I would expect from a bunch of Yankee liberal professors. First, to claim that the South had inferior military leaders is contrary not only to conventional wisdom, but also what is taught at war colleges around the world. That aside, there was no more set of incompetents in history than the Northern generals. They blundered their way to victory, jockeying for position to replace Lincoln along the way. They were divided, arrogant and lazy. Sherman was a terrorist. To elevate him to the title of great general is shameful – even for a Yankee – but especially for a liberal. U.S. Grant became one of the most incompetent Presidents in our history.
The South lost for four reasons, in this order: (1) they were outnumbered 3 to 1 on the ground; (2) they had no industrial base with which to manufacture the implements of war while the North had the greatest industrial base in the world at the time; (3) bad luck and impatience at the battle of Gettysburg – which was caused largely because Lee realized his mistake after – (4) Lee's failure to press ahead after Bull Run.
Now, Northern generals made many more mistakes than Lee, but they could afford to given their superiority in number and equipment. The Civil War was not a lost cause either. The South could have won and nearly did. As it was, it took the entire industrialized North years to defeat us. In the end, the North's victory was only temporary. A century and a half later it's entire industrial base has fled cold and what's left has moved to places like North Charleston, South Carolina. If only U.S. Grant had lived to see it….
Yee Ha!
Sir,
I commend your admiration, but question your reasons
4. Lee was not at Bull Run, it was Pierre Beau. and Joe Johnston, Lee assumed Command over 12 month later.
3. Gettysburg was an important battle, but when Lee met with Davis in early June and convicined the Confederate President the best way to relieve Vickburg was a surgical strike and some yet undetermined point North of Washington DC in the Pennsylvania App. Mountians in early to mid July 1863, the fate of the Confederacy was sealed. Only one Army in the war was ever destroyed in its entirety, (The Army of Tennessee against the gates of Nashville) Lee could not bring the equipment and supplies required to destroy the Army of the Potomac. That needed to occur in Virginia during an attack such as Chancellorsville, where Lee could have blunted a Union advance and countered by attacking and mauling several Union Corps. The Army of the Potomac, for all its poor fortune in Army Commanders , was a solid organization staffed with phenominal men such as Warren, the Engineer, Hunt, the Artilleryman and Engalls the Quartermaster.
1 & 2. Rich Southern men for a generation decided not to develop industry or shipping. They put their stock in the agriculture and industry of cotton and slavery. These same men and their son's made the poor decision, as prominent political men in their respective states, to not allow Lincoln's name to appear on any ballot in any of the 11 Confederate states. They had no idea how little support the idea of leaving the Union really had.
a. The western Counties of Virginia left and became the Union State of West Virginia, taking with it 30% of the population and men willing to fight.
b. Tennessee provided over 33,000 men to fight in Union Blue.
c. Western North Carolina was greatly under-represented in the Confederate Army.
d. an Alabama Cavalry Regiment formed most of Sherman's escort force during the march to the Sea.
e. of the potentially 1.1 million men 18-45 years old living in Southern states in 1860, over 100,000 men wore blue and bled for the Union. That number dwarfs any nuber even estimated for men going South.
Not that anything I present will sway you from your objective view of the greats tragedy in our nation's history.
"Only one Army in the war was ever destroyed in its entirety, (The Army of Tennessee against the gates of Nashville)"
Not quite true. Thomas also destroyed a Confederate army at Mills Creek, the first major Union victory of the war.
See http://www.aotc.net
Don,
A unique, reasoned analysis!
Well done sir.
Your point is well taken. Objectivity indeed!
Unless I am referencing the Wrong Mills Creek, Thomas defeated an Army of about 6,000. While important to the strategic development of the Union victory, Hood had 40,000 men or so moving into Tennessee in the fall of 1864.
I use that refernece to point out how Lee planned the destruction of the AoP or Hooker planned the destruction of the ANV. Thoes were both empty fanciful ideas without merit.
Lee thinking, in the spring of 1863, that he could move north of the Mason Dixon line and fall upon the Union Army and destroy it, is not a realistic plan. Armies just do not disintegrate. No large force in the Civil War just melted away, except Hood. Even the illfated 11th Corps rebounded from a poor showing in both Chancellorsville and Gettysburg to provide faithful service at Chattanooga, Atlanta and beyond. There are far greater instances of European "professional" armies of the 19th century melting away during a defeat than an American Civil War Army breaking apart.
All this just goes back to my point that Lee's plan to relieve the pressure of Vicksburg by conducting an offensive in PA was so strategically wrong that it hastened the Confederate defeat in the war not just the battle. Having a myopic view of the war from a Virginia perspective, Davis and Lee were outclassed by a backwoods lawyer and a store clerk with no tolorance for the drink.
The South most certainly sealed their fate of losing the war for their independence when they foolishly decided to fight a war (attack the North) after seceding. They may very well have lost their independence to true Northern aggression later, but that war would have been different for sure, and I think only by prolonging the start of hostilities with the North, letting them strike first, would there have been any hope for a more tolerable outcome for them. There are no guarantees, but time could have helped them to gel as a nation, prepare for the likely war with the North, and court foreign trade and recognition. Also being the victim of true aggression rather than the aggressor could have helped win sympathy among some Northerners especially in the border states and abroad, or at least soften Northern resolve, and it could have helped to cement the bond of the new confederate union.
Deo Vindice.
What do you expect God to vindicate
The South lost because, having little access to copper, it could not produce the metallic cartridge used in the Henry and, above all, the Spencer repeater which was decisive in the Tullahoma campaign and the battle of Chickamauga.
http://www.aotc.net/Spencer.htm
If the Spencer repeater was "decisive" in the battle of Chckamauga, how do you account for that battle being a notable Confederate victory?
The South was a weak dictatorship, so weak that for four years it could not even dictate the completion of a 50 mile stretch of railroad between Montgomery and Selma, Ala.
[...] think the South lost the Civil War. Not a long read, but pretty interesting explanations IMO. Why the South Lost the Civil War – Cover Page: February '99 American History Feature I was surprised that Stonewll Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest were not mentioned as competent [...]
Since every war is prosecuted for political objectives, it is impossible to separate any explanation of why the South lost the Civil War from the political context in which it was fought. And in this instance the general objectives–yes, there were exceptions–on each side varied greatly. Southerners wanted political independence to end their confrontation with northerners on slavery. Northerners wanted the Union preserved at all costs, though their individual motivations for that preservation may have differed from one to another and probably changed over time as the course of the war moved many in the North to use the conflict to end slavery and seek a reformed Union as a consequence. The Civil War was a test of these two competing wills and though the military history of the conflict is of course vital to explaining why the South lost, it must be related to the shaping of the will on each side as the war progressed if it is to be presented properly.
So the question arises: "When, where, and how did the South have an opportunity to break the will of northerners to preserve the Union, if at all?" Since I do not accept the principle of historical inevitability, I will dismiss the impossibility of southern victory. No; in spite of the long odds against it, I believe it was feasible for the South to win its independence. But because I am convinced that Abraham Lincoln was committed to preserving the Union, I think this implies that the necessary precondition for southern victory was to undermine Lincoln's prospects for mobilizing northern political will as he continued to wage the Civil War. And, even if we set aside northern fatigue as the election of 1864 approached, it appears clear that, for the most part, Lincoln became stronger as the war progressed, largely because of Union gains writ large, which were primarily bolstered in the fighting in the West.
Though I cannot present the argument that winning the Civil War for the South was merely a question of understanding the military necessity of attending to the defense of the western Confederacy, I do argue that southern victory was impossible if the Mississippi Valley was left largely unattended, which is what in fact happened. And in this observation I believe the central flaw in the South's strategy–I am tempted to argue that Jefferson Davis bears the greatest responsibility here–becomes clear; the South could not win with the quick and decisive early victory it sought, because that plan required it to concentrate the mobilization of its material and manpower resources too heavily in the east. Davis and the South effectively conceded geographical advantage to the North from the outset of the conflict, which all but guaranteed a hardening of the northern will to fight as a result of their successes in the West.
There are obviously other considerations that would have followed from a more continental strategy for the South, which I will not go into in great length. An increased rate of mobilization of southern resources, especially manpower, would have been required to fulfill the demands of deploying military assets across a broad expanse of territory. With a reduced concentration of manpower in the eastern theater, military strategy would necessarily have been more defensive in nature. And a much-improved command and control structure within the Confederate army would have been needed, one that thought out and implemented wartime strategy in a coordinated fashion, unlike the wide latitude for individual initiative given to local commanders in the war we know. But these problems were not insurmountable and, especially with respect to the need for a defensive strategy designed to raise northern casualties (as Longstreet argued for in vain), they were at least discussed for the most part.
In sum, only a strategy that slowed northern progress across the broad expanse of the geography of the eastern half of North America that emphasized a defensive posture designed to raise northern casualties was the only prospect for the South's success. The odds would still have been long in the event they had chosen such a course, but the prospects for southern independence would have been raised.
"the South could not win with the quick and decisive early victory it sought, because that plan required it to concentrate the mobilization of its material and manpower resources too heavily in the east."
Everything I have read says they could have walked into an undefended Washington D.C. after Bull Run and captured the entire federal government, President Lincoln included. Endgame. No more forces needed.
And after walking the hills around Gettysburg, I still don't see why they charged the main federal lines when they could have moved around them to the south, outraced them to D.C., and taken on much weaker opposition. The Union army failed to sufficiently reinforce Little Round Top even after that key skirmish, so it was wide open for movement down there that very evening and the next day. Could have left the main Union army behind. Advantage, mobility.
Leads me to think the Confederate leadership never really wanted to wage war. I think they simply hoped for a political solution. What a waste.
"Everything I have read says they could have walked into an undefended Washington D.C. after Bull Run and captured the entire federal government, President Lincoln included. Endgame. No more forces needed."
Yes; they could have taken Washington, D. C., though I tend to think that Lincoln would have escaped. I don't think that would have settled matters by any means, as the increased Union resolve that followed Bull Run demonstrated. I think the really interesting corollary to a hypothetical capture of Washington D. C. after Bull Run is really "what would have happened to secessionist sympathizers in Maryland if the Confederates held Washington?"
With respect to the possible "southerly flanking maneuver" that Lee chose not to implement at Gettysburg, I do think it could have created a much different battle, since the Union army would have been forced to attack in that scenario. But I also believe that, by July, 1863, Union military assets in the general vicinity of Washington were strong enough that Lee could not have taken the capital with an army that would have been significantly weakened from its engagement with the Union army.
But your Bull Run scenario is still interesting.
Has anyone considered the battle for hearts and minds, especially the battle for the Northern home front? If the South had made it clear in the beginning that it was seeking only its own independence and not expansion into any further territory beyond the boundaries of its member states and that the issue was not the preservation pf slavery maybe Northerners would have been less interested in battling to the death against secession.
The United States soon after its founding attached itself to the firm anchor of a single geopolitical scheme, which became known as "Manifest Destiny". What this meant in practice was that the nation was intended to encompass the land from the eastern seaboard all the way west to the Pacific coast, The Confederacy deviated from this scheme not only in the particular of separating a portion of this land from the entirety, but also in the generality of contemplating the expansion of its boundaries into the Caribbean and Latin America.
This possibility presented the North with the question not only of whether it should accept the presence of a brother nation which had chosen to separate because of differences in its culture and its economic basis, but also the question of tolerating the presence of a possibly hostile expansionist power furthermore involved in entanglements with the European great powers.
Then there was the failure of the South to read the world tea leaves on the issue of slavery. The South could have announced at the beginning that it "foresaw the end of slavery" and taken the first firm, even if small, steps in that direction. That, and foreswearing expansion outside of the existing boundaries of the states that formed it membership, would have done a lot to weaken Northern political resistance to Southern independence. Lincoln treated secession more than anything else as an affront to the Manifest Destiny concept and as an affront the idea that the Union had a special role to play in the process of the moral development of world civilization.
The South could have taken these issues off the table. But the South didn't. Maybe that had something to do with why the issue ended up settled on the battlefield.
Mike,
It is an interesting premise, but the Confederate Constitution specifically defended the right of slavery, so the idea of the new nation ending slavery is not plausible, just because we can look with 21st century eyes on a 19th century issue.
The South wanted to expand. With the Missouri Compromise hemming slave states in 1820, and the explosion of Cotton as a crop with the new mechanical "gin" land for the labor intensive crop was at a premium. Eastern Texas was an early target as was Southern California. Cotton requires a certain temperature band and plenty of fresh water. The reason that Missouri did not automatically join the Confederacy despite a pro-Southern governemnt was slavery was profitable only along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. The middle of the state was populated by small pro-Unionist farmers. The border wars in Kansas was fueled by some Missourians but they were used up by the start of the Civil War. There were not enough pro-slavery men to counter the pro-Unionists. That is why Missouri went neutral then ultimately to the Union, with a Confederate style shadow government is exile in Arkansas.
The Civil War had to happen, thankfully it happened when Abe Lincoln was on the watch.
Exactly! Had the South not had the desire to expand the bounds of slave holding states, the war would not have happened, and slavery would have died a slow lingering death.
Even through 19th Century eyes, some thought slavery was doomed with or without expansion. I can only imagine that many in the South saw the institution as clearly doomed without expansion. Lincoln thought so as far as I know and opposed the expansion of slavery exactly for that reason. He saw slavery as an impediment to America's proper destiny.
If the Civil War had been an election we would have said that it was the North's to lose. The North had too many resources to lose the war militarily but it could have lost it politically (in the same sense that the U.S. lost the Vietnam war), due to a loss of support at home. This did not happen because of Lincoln's superb political leadership. He commanded a level of unity in support of the war effort that I do not think any president other than Washington could have achieved.
But the numbers are only part of the story. You have to look at why the North had such a material advantage. The tally of manpower and resources on the Union side included the slave states of Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland and the seceded portion of Virginia. If those states had fallen into the Confederate column the ratio of population would have been much closer to even (60/40) and Confederate forces based in Kentucky would have been poised to split the Union in two. Instead it being a Southern war of defense played out in Northern Virginia, it might have become a Northern war of defense played out in Ohio.
So to return to the election analogy, the North achieved its overwhelming advantage because it had the better ground game and carried the swing states – again largely due to Lincoln's decisive leadership in pouring resources into those states early on.
If the Confederates had been as proactive in mobilizing and moving their regulars into those states things might well have turned out differently for them. But they were slow off the mark because they were not mentally prepared to fight an offensive war. And that I think was the crux of the problem for the South.
The Confederate General Polk invaded Kentucky and pushed that state into the Union Column.
Lincoln moved troops into only one State, Maryland. Delaware was completely in withthe Union.
Missouri was not a pro-Southern as many thought, I posted earlier about that.
The Virginians east of the Shenandoah completely discounted what the minority of their state believed. That was common in many Southern States. A mantra that they used in the reverse as a supporting reason for leaving the Union.
The Confederate interests in Kentucky were first that it would secede and add its forces to the Southern cause and failing that to remain neutral and serve as a buffer against Northern invasion.
When Polk invaded Kentucky in late 1861 the battle for either objective had already been lost. The June election had returned a unionist super majority to the state legislature and the Union Army was openly forming military units in the state.
The secessionist cause in Kentucky had not died a natural death. I believe that the turning point was the formation in May 1861 of the Unionist Kentucky Home Guard which was armed by the Federal government in opposition to the secessionist State Guard. This likely contributed to the collapse in the secessionist vote in the June election by way of "voter suppression" (the election turnout was about half that of previous years).
I'm not suggesting that Polk should have invaded sooner – at least not openly. I'm suggesting that the Confederacy should have covertly provided manpower by means of out of uniform regulars to the State Guard in order to limit the formation and operation of the Home Guard units. Then the election might have turned out differently and there would have been no need for Polk to invade. As it was, Lincoln played the game more aggressively than they and as a result won the state.
Some in the South may have thought Salvery was doomed; however, the institution became so entangled in the economic life of the South, it was not going to be phased out.
The slaves were seen as an economic asset to be pulled from the Plantation owners only by force.
I think it likely that the boll weevil would have finished off slavery if nothing else did.
Sorry posted last one wrong,
The Southern States claimed that their voice was being silenced, yet in the two border states (Missouri and Kentucky) they had pro Southern elected governments but a majority of citizens that were pro Union. Niether had an overwehlming majority, but enough of a majority to oust the government in Missouri.
That the Union Home Guard in Kentucky was a reaction to the Confederate guard is exactly why the attempts of Confederates to move first doomed any hope of keeping Kentucky neutral or get them to side with the South.
I will not argue that Lincoln played a better political game that Davis. He did it throughout the war.
I believe that long term neutrality was not an option in Kentucky. Even without outside intervention, the logic of events would eventually have tilted it one way or another, probably to the Union side because they were the stronger party and Kentucky would have occupied an exposed salient as a Confederate state.
So the Confederate mistake was not that they intervened in Kentucky, but that they did not intervene effectively enough. The State Guard did not have the pro-secession effect it might have had within the state because it suffered a steady hemorrhage of men who went south to enlist. The flow of resources was headed the wrong way.
With regard to Union support within Kentucky, it is deceptively easy to gauge the level of support for a certain cause in retrospect. As it was the General Assembly declined a convention on secession in December 1860 precisely because they feared at that time that the Confederate cause would prevail in a popular vote.
Somewhere between December, 1860 and June 1861 the political winds shifted, and as I have suggested, the most likely cause was that the Union side was more effectively supported with direct federal intervention.
It's a cliche to say so, but the reason that history is so interesting is because it so often repeats itself. I pay a lot of attention to the news, read a lot of comments in news articles and in the last several years I have come to a conclusion that I firmly believe: The United States will not exist in its current form in 100 years.
The same issues that ultimately ripped the country apart in the mid nineteenth century are resurfacing, i.e. the overbearing assertion of federal power on the states and a rising sense of resentment of this interference at the state and local level. I don't see how to reconcile the fact that the red and blue states have very different expectations regarding the role of government as well as towards social norms, economics, race relations, etc. From a logistical standpoint, it was always unlikely to have a unified democratic government in a country as large as ours given the vast diversity between regions. From a moral standpoint, it's unethical for either the red or blue factions to obstruct the other's right to determine the way they want to order and govern their society.
I hope that this future split is amicable and does not devolve into bloodshed but there is no doubt in my mind that the United States will eventually be broken up into at least two, but more likely 3 or more separate countries.
Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and those that do are doomed to repeat it anyway.
100 years? That's an awfully long time in our fast moving world and way too generous of a time frame. The US is too big and diverse to be run so centrally from DC, where the Federal government now micromanages everything down to the local school board. The fissures are beginning to show.
The reality is that a U.S. president could not recreate today what Lincoln did in the 1860s. In fact, any president today responsible for the death of 3 percent of the population of the U.S. (about 10 million today) would be labeled genocidal and tried for crimes against humanity. No marble temple to sit like Athena in the Parthenon for such a guy.
So never mind millions or even thousands of casualties, just a few hundred killed before the cameras will suffice for the U.S. to negotiate the secession of any state who so chooses. It may go something like this: "OK, but you pay us amortized over the next 30 years the value of federal installations within the state."
The article begins with the incorrect term "civil war," when in fact it was no such thing.
A civil war is a conflict between two factions within a nation for control of the government. The Confederate States of America didn't want control of the United States of America any more than the USA wanted control of England. In both cases it was in fact a war of independence.
However, victory is written by the victors so no surprise that for propaganda purposes it had to be called a civil war –a squabble between the same peoples– and not a war between two different nations where one invaded and subjugated the other.
A Civil War is generally understood to mean a war between two different factions of the same nation divided by regional, dynastic, political, religious or cultural loyalties. North and South were the same nation prior to secession, which makes the conflict a civil war by most reckonings. The U.S. Army's official history of the conflict does call it "The War of Secession".
Nonsense.
The North and South were both rule by Washington. That doesn't make them the same nation. Once the South declared their independence and elected a new President and raised it's own army, they were a separate nation.
Under your definition we would have to tell the Latvians, Estonians Ukrainians, Russians that they were the same nation because they were under the rule of Moscow and collectively known as the Soviet Union.
Also under your definitions we would have to call the American war for independence from the British a civil war. After all weren't the founding fathers the same as the British. They shared the same ethnicity, same lineage, same language, same forefathers, same religion, same appetite for conquest.
Finally, I'm not referring to what the U.S. Army may or may not call the conflict. I clearly say in the opening sentence I'm referring to the term "civil war" used in the headline and the body of the article we are reading. If the article said "War of Secession" or "Confederate War of Independence" clearly there would be no need for my comment.
Actually the American war of independence was a civil war in many respects. English speaking Canada was founded by those Americans on the losing side who voted with their feet and went north after the war.
As of 1812 most of the population of Upper Canada had been born in the 13 colonies, and so a case could be made that the land portion of the war of 1812 was round 2 of the same civil war.
In actuality, the War could more correctly called a failed rebellion or insurrection.
Rebellion:
1. Open, armed, and organized resistance to a constituted government.
2. An act or a show of defiance toward an authority or established convention (American Heritage Dictionary @2000 copyright)
Insurrection:
Government, Politics & Diplomacy) the act or an instance of rebelling against a government in power or the civil authorities; insurgency
[from Late Latin insurrecti?, from insurgere to rise up] (Collins Englidh Dictionary – c. 2003 Harper Collins)
I think the term Civil War was and is much more appealling to a healing process that either of the two words above or such names as War of Northern Agression.
I reference the Founding Legal Documents of our Country the Artitcles of Confederation and the US Constitution that specifically allows admittance into the Union, voluntarily ( US ConArticle IV section 3) and Article XI which states
Canada acceding to this confederation, and adjoining in the measures of the United States, shall be admitted into, and entitled to all the advantages of this Union; but no other colony shall be admitted into the same, unless such admission be agreed to by nine States.
The Union originally designated in the Articles of Confederation Preamble as a perpetual Union, was further refined in the Preamble of the Constitution as a more perfect Union.
The final words of the Art of Con are reenforcing: "And that the Articles thereof shall be inviolably observed by the States we respectively represent, and that the Union shall be perpetual."
Obviously the Articles were not complete in their ability to support the fledgling country so a better document was needed to more perfectly found the Union.
In other words, and state or states cannot break the Union because of an outcome of an Election, Presidental decsion, Congressional Law or Judicial Ruling because their are perpetually invested in this Union. That the Southern States did not like the fact that Lincoln was their future President was not cause to fire on a supply ship sent by President Buchanan (Star of the West Jan 9th 1861) ordered by future Confederate General Floyd.
I can see where you don't believe in the term Civil War but more correctly this was insurrection. However, as a Historian with a view to National Military Strategy I like the term Civil War because of how that term better encompasses the sectional nature of the rise of the conflict from the beginings of the Nation with the battle over the idea of slavery in a Nation that valued freedom. Through decades of political compromises and deals to push the ultimate decision of the exisitance of slavery to future generations.
I would be happy to continue to discuss this with you especially in light of the phrase "and not a war between two nations where one invaded and subjugated the other" The word subjugation is facinating.
Donald G Herko
LTC (R) US Army
MA Military Studies
I wonder what would've happened if the south DID NOT fire on Ft Sumter? You have then just 9 succeeding states. It would have forced the North to become the aggressor (invade Virginia) and in the court of world opinion may have had England's intervention with the South much sooner. You also need to remember is that it took the North 4 years to finally subdue the South. With European intervention, the South would have forced independance in late 1862.
European intervention has always been another source of "monday morning quarterbacking" for some who believed in the ability of the South to win its independence.
First the South delcares independance and then takes Federal Property. It is a moot point about the actual shooting at Sumpter, because they already fired on the US Supply ship.
There were three huge issues with European intervention with substansial equipment and men:
1. Neither the French or English Governments would be successful in providing overt support to the South that, at its core, was a potential nation build on the predication of the ownership of slaves. France abolished slavery originally in 1794 and England with several laws principally 1807 and 1833. Mexico abolished slavery in 1830 which makes the immigration of slave owning, English speaking Protestants into Eastern Texas a facinating discussion for another day.
2. Many European Countries were still smarting over the Crimean War. England had 22,000 fatalities and France almost 100,000 in what is accepted as, along with the American Civil War, the first modern wars. Despite European criticism of the American Conflict as fought by ametuers, the Crieman War was full of poor decision making, disasters such as the Charge of the Light Brigade, bad logisitcs, poor health care (nursing saw its modern birth in the war as the army medical departments were overwehlmed) and opposition back home.
England had been burned twice for fighting a war on North America in the past. They did not have the stomach for another. England was dependent on US Crops, but not cotton, it was the food crops of Wheat and Corn that supported the English People. The loss of Southern Cotton was made good by imports from India and Eygpt. Lincoln's Statue is prominant in the old cotton town of Manchester England as a hero of workers rights over slavery.
The Trent affair was a major concern that occured in late 1861, but Lincoln skillfully difused it. Again, slavery and crop shortages across Europe led England to the Pragmatic conclusion that was cemented by the Southern loss at Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation all in the fall of 1862.
3. Expansion of Germany as a world power. England was very concerned about emerging powers in Europe. The Crimean War consumed nearly 500,000 dead among the nations that fought and in the aftermath, Prussia rose to assume the leadership of a new Germany in direct opposition to France for territory around the Globe. The Franco Prussian War in 1870 was inevitable as was German intervention into colonialism up to World War I.
What seems like an almost certain involvement by the British was never really that close. Even the most overt act by the English, sending of 11,000 troops to Canada in late 1861 and early 1862 was more sabre rattling than actual preparation for combat. Once Union began to string together victories starting with Forts Henry and Donalson, the English could see the SOuth being strangled. Antietam was viewed more as a "Hail Mary" play and the loss cemented the European view that the South was doomed.
A very interesting read and some very insightful comments as well.
I'd like to bring up a couple of issues that I did not see raised before:
1) the initial Southern strategy of fighting a purely defensive war- or, at least, defending its home turf rather than attempting to expand its borders- was actually a very good idea. At no point did the South ever have the resources necessary to conquer the North. It might well have caused the North to suffer a politically unsustainable level of casualties (it nearly did, in fact) by forcing the North to conquer them, the potential result being a peace based on sepratation after a McClellan presidential victory in 1864.
2) the decision by the North to establish and maintain a blockade of Southern ports was a stroke of genius. While the South was outweighed, to varying degrees, by the North in just about any type of resources you want to name, the South's deficit in shipbuilding and sailors was perhaps the greatest deficit of them all. The lack of an adequate industrial base meant that the South had to import a sizable percentage of their war material and the blockade reduced that to a trickle by mid-1863. the South turned to ironclads very early on but, again, was hamstrung by it's lack of iron rolling mills to produce the armored plate and by armories to produce the cannon and ammunition…and the option to import these on the scale necessary just did not exist.
One point with which I take some exception: that the South lost because its effort was based on an immoral cause (Slavery). While slavery was- and is- indeed immoral, there is no evidence that Lincoln siezed upon that immorality as a causus belli. To the contrary, his initial justification for going to war was the preservation of the Union. There is a quote attributed to Grant in which he says that he would not have put on the uniform had the reason been abolition. Had the North truly been a hotbed of abolition, it seems to me that it would have been foremost mentioned among the justifications for war.
The South lost because its cause was evil. It is as simple as that. God and history were on the side of the North.
If the South had won, would they still have slavery?
The short reply is, Yes, slavery, to some degree, would have endured, at least temporarily.
But that is a wholly unsatisfactory reply to a very complex question.
If the war had ended quickly- say, after First Bull Run- then slavery would have lasted longer because the South would not have suffered the privations of a long war. If they had won later- say, in 1864 or 1865- then its end would have come much sooner, as there were plans to arm slaves by that time because the South was so short of white manpower. In most of these plans, in return for their service, slaves would be manumitted and, in a few, given the right to vote and own property (though not testify in court against whites and other such secondary rights).
But slavery, in either case, was doomed. The South could not have remained an aristocratic planter's society indefinitely. Assuming that the rate of American innovation had remained constant, the South's industrial base would have expanded, and the workers necessary to run the new industries could not have remained totally or even largely uneducated.. Laws against the education of blacks went largely unenforced, and it would have been increasingly difficult to keep an educated race entirely subjugated.
I side with those who believe that slavery was withering on the vine, and we need not have fought a war that cost the lives of a half million men and women in order to kill it sooner.
You are right, Lincoln could not have abolished slavery without the Civil War. he could have gone down in history as another ineffectual President on the mid 19th century and have his name obscurely placed on several public school across the nation.
But the fact that the Southern States believed he could effect slavery, caused them to leave him off the ballot in Maryland, Viginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. (South Carolina did not have a popular vote at the time). Their arrogance in never willing to accept the outcome of an election, forced the inevitable war in 1861.
That the 11 states voted to leave the Union and seize federal property (arsonals) left the brand new President two options:
1. fight to preserve the Union or 2. allow any remaining state at any time leave the Union for whatever reason they would like. Option two in effect means the county would disolve.
This war had to be fought to preserve the Union and only Lincoln truly understood that. He was able to use the war to right an injustice that few other believed in to include most of his predominent Commanders Grant Sherman.
If only one face was on Mount Rushmore it should be Lincoln's
If the South's defeat can be attributed to any single thing, I would say that it was by firing on Fort Sumter and giving Lincoln a clear casus belli. Prior to that the preponderance of public opinion in the North even among abolitionists was to "let the erring sisters go". Immediately afterward the North was filled with war fever.
Davis & Co. had good strategic reasons to begin hostilities. They were concerned that some of the states which had seceded would either stray back into the Union or go it alone. Creating a clean break would solidify their commitment to the Confederacy and Davis hoped would bring the other hesitating Southern states into the fold. In this he was right, but it was a fatal error nonetheless. Without that slap in the face, as the people of North saw it, I don't think that Lincoln could have mustered the political will and popular support to invade the South.
I believe that the basic errors in Confederate strategic thinking were:
1) Failure to recognize that time was on the side of the Confederacy. The longer it remained seceded, the more secession would be recognized as a fait accompli in the North and become the new status quo, leading to de facto and eventually formal recognition internationally.
War between the Confederacy and the Union would likely have come sooner or later, over boundary issues if nothing else, but if by then the CSA had achieved recognition as a sovereign state, such a war would have been like any European war, two nations fighting to gain concessions from each other. However, by forcing the pace of events and moving to immediate hostilties, the CSA gave away that advantage and plunged into a fight for its existence.
2) Failure to recognize that the CSA's political battle had to be won in the North as well in the South. By attacking Fort Sumter, the CSA galvanized Northern opposition to secession and silenced its sympathizers there.
The Firing at Fort Sumpter was the most public example of Confederate States taking federal property.
The problem you state about Davis holding the coalition together is in part a result of the fact that many in theSouth did not want to leave the Union. Western Virginia, Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Central Missouri, a good portion of Kentucky were all vast regions that were unrepresented in the election of 1860 (except Missouri). We still do not know what the portion of Southern men would have voted for Lincoln, which would have given us a more accurate picture of support for Lincoln and remaining in the Union. We can only extrapolate data to defend .
The war and the defense of the Confederacy did push some support from preserving the Union to defend the home state. Again over 100,000 from the 11 Confederate States went to fight for the Union, Deleware (a slave state) had one of the highest per capita representation in the Union Army, Missouri provided over 100,000 men to the Union Army of approx 225,000 men of eligible age ( I have been studying the 1860 census) Kentucky provided over 75,000 men of 180,000 eligible, again Tennessee 33,000, West Virginia alone 32,000 of Virginia's 1860 population of 196,000.
Davis was galvenizing support, I think he did understand that the support for leaving the Union was not overwelhming and he needed to controi the message and paint Lincoln as an invader. The relief ships with supplies were prevented by force from getting to Sumpter.
In reality, we say Davis, but this issue did not happen at Fort Monroe, nor in Florida with the Union Fort Pickens just in South Carolina, where the seperation fever was the greatest and had been for more than a generation. They had threatened during Jackson's time and pushed again against Lincoln. South Carolina was the only state that did not even have a popular election, instead votes for electors. So the least deomcratic state in the Union, with a deep history in threatening to leave the Union, and some of the wealthiest slave owners in the Country (Wade hampton and his extended family) was the site of the spark of the war. Did Davis control this? Did he benefit ultimately in garnering support?
I have doubts that Davis was truly a controling strategic thinker as an opposite to Lincoln. He always seemed more comfortable acting and working in the details best left to the Secretary of War or one of his deputies.
There is a very interesting perspective on Davis in the book, 1858. He spent the summer at the home of New England senator. He had to be in New England because his periodic onsets of herpes ( contracted in Cuba at the age of 20 to 22) required him to stay cool. Back home, the local folks got uneasy at the all the time and attention that he got from his 'northern friends.' When he returned home, he increased his advocacy for secession, perhaps to reassure his base supporters. The block asserts that secession was, in part , expedient for Davis' political reputation.
I don't recall if the book indicated whether his severe herpes was publicly known. In some cases, he went blind for at least a week.
You raise a good question as to whether the Davis cabinet was really in control of events in Charleston. The evidence is mixed. John Minor Botts wrote that,
"On Wednesday night, the 10th of April, Mr. Roger A.
Pryor, who was supposed to have been deputed by his co-
adjutors in Richmond, as otherwise he would scarcely have
ventured to take such a responsibility upon himself, made a
speech in Charleston, in which he gave the most solemn as-
surance and sacred pledges that if they would begin the war
by firing upon Fort Sumter, the Virginia Convention would
immediately pass an ordinance of secession, notwithstanding
the vote that had just been taken, which stood 46 for secession and 95 against it. But upon this assurance from Mr.
Pryor the state determined to act ….." (The Great Rebellion p. 203)
It's not clear to me whether Botts is referring to the state of South Carolina here or the Confederate state. However, we do know that the Davis cabinet met that same day and voted to demand the surrender of Fort Sumter. Once the ultimatum was issued, an attack was inevitable. Even if the immediate decision to attack was made in Charleston, it only hastened things a day or two.
What I found interesting is the statement that CSA Secretary of State Robert Toombs made in opposition to the motion:
""Mr. President, at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal."
Toombs had been passed over in favour of Davis for the office of CSA president. That raises an interesting question: if Toombs had become president instead of Davis, would the Confederacy be around today?
[...] Why did the South lose the Civil War? [...]
[...] are many, varied, and depend on the particular Southerner. Some of the most obvious are that the South lost the Civil War and — both literally and figuratively — has never been able to recover. Another is that [...]
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I will make no attempt to conceal my sympathies lie with the Confederacy in most respects. That is in large part due to the fact that it had a devastating effect on my family. The question of whether secession was constitutional or not is a matter of legal interpretation, though it's also presented on both sides of the issue as Prima Facie yes or no. It is obvious from the very beginnings that most of the states felt they had the right to secede when conditions warrant.
There is in fact prima facie evidence of that, since even the New England states convened to discuss secession. The ultimate question to me seems to me what warrants such action. It that the Declaration of Independence is not only a eight-man other rights of the oppressed but also a blueprint for revolution when the time demands.
It is hard to argue that the deep South did not succeed over the issue of slavery when they made it abundantly clear that they did. On the other hand any examination of the order of secession shows that states such as Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Kentucky drew up secession documents based upon Lincoln's decision to use force to maintain the Union.
Likewise it is impossible for a logical person to ignore that Lincoln sole purpose was the preservation of the Union and not the ending of slavery. It is obvious that he did not like slavery and would prefer its prohibition. It is also obvious that this feeling was generated not out of sympathy with enslaved Negroes as much as his firm belief that man should be rewarded for his labors. He also made abundantly clear that he would like to send all Negroes back to Africa because they are morally and intellectually. Inferior to white people. The evidence for that is indisputable.
The restriction between the New England states and southern states goes all the way back to the very founding of the colonies. The New England states were founded by Puritans and Virginia and the other southern coastal states were founded by royalists many of which were descendents of peers and their indentured servants who were primarily from northern Britain and Scotland. That cultural and religious divide was never bridged. As more immigrants emerged in the South a very high population of Ulster men and women merged with the descendents of the indentured servants. Though they are commonly referred to as Ulster Scots most of them in fact were from the border regions of Scotland and England and had been displaced from that area to Ulster only a generation or two before.
A quick look at the surnames shows a dearth of Celtic origins and a large number of common Border names like Johnson, Jackson, Armstrong, Maxwell,Nixon Graham etc.Lincoln had once been a strong proponent of secession, and as a first-term congressman from Illinois, he spoke in a session of the House of Representatives in 1848 and argued that:
"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable and most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world." Lincoln recognized the right of West Virginia to secede but refused to recognize the right of the South to secede. However in the US Constitution Article IV, Section. 3, Clause 1 of the United States Constitutions reads: New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
And, of course, the Northern view is wrong. The Constitution of 1789 — a document of delegated powers — does not prohibit secession, and the 9th and 10th Amendments must be interpreted to allow for a constitutional right of secession — to say nothing of the natural right of secession so eloquently described in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence
President Lincoln, in his Inaugural Address before the war, gave his support to the first 13th amendment pending at that time which would have explicitly protected slavery where it already existed.
ARTICLE THIRTEEN
No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
Two days later, in his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln promised to support the amendment even though he believed that the Constitution already prohibited the federal government from interfering with Southern slavery. As he stated:
I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution . . . Has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose, not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable (emphasis added).
.Abolitionist Lysander Spooner saw that despite all of the "anti-slavery" rhetoric by Lincoln, Seward, their actions proved to Spooner that these men were all quite" diabolical liars, connivers, and political manipulators." He excoriated them for believing that they could "ride into power on the two horses of Liberty and Slavery." In his letter he literally called Seward and all the rest of the Republican cabal "double-faced demagogues."
Shortly before the war, the Chicago Daily Times was only one of many newspapers predicting a calamity for federal revenue and business in the North if the South was allowed to secede with its ten percent limit on import taxes which would attract trade, especially from abroad, to the South rather than the North. In an editorial it stated:
"In one single blow our [Northern] foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade will pass into other hands . . . We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits. Our manufactories will be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue (ten percent or less), and these results would likely follow."
In order to eliminate all political ties, the Northeasterners tried in vain to break the bonds of Union, and the movement lasted until the failed Secessionist Convention in 1814, again. Secessionist Convention convened over the Louisiana purchase and Texas annexation by the United states.The New England secession movement was led by U.S. Senator Timothy Pickering, who was the adjutant general of the Revolutionary Army and served as President George Washington's secretary of war and secretary of state, the latter position being held under the administration of President John Adams as well. Pickering announced that secession was "the" principle of the American Revolution. "I will rather anticipate a new confederacy," he declared, "exempt from the corrupt and corrupting influence of the aristocratic Democrats of the South" (Adams, p. 338).
The State of Connecticut is a FREE SOVEREIGN and INDEPENDENT State; that the United States are a confederacy of States; that we are a confederated and not a consolidated Republic. The Governor of this State is under a high and solemn obligation, "to maintain the lawful rights and privileges thereof, as a sovereign, free and independent State," as he is "to support the Constitution of the United States," and the obligation to support the latter imposes an additional obligation to support the former. The building cannot stand, if the pillars upon which it rests, are impaired or destroyed."
As the author points out, during the entire New England ordeal, there is virtually no literature to be found that supports the view that the inherent right to secession was non-existent. It was, in fact, really never questioned.Abraham Lincoln famously declared that "the Union is older than the states." This is, of course, hogwash. The colony of Pennsylvania, for example, was created on March 4, 1681 when King Charles II gave a charter to William Penn. Earlier, a large part of the colony was included in the Virginia colony, chartered in 1606. Lincoln's argument that the union preceded the states is nonsense.
On February 5, 1809, both houses of the Massachusetts legislature nullified the embargo act by denouncing it as "unjust, oppressive, unconstitutional. While this State maintains its sovereignty and independence, all the citizens can find protection against outrage and injustice in the strong arm of State government" (James J. Kilpatrick, The Sovereign States, p. 130)A lexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, "The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disapprove its right of doing so . . . ." The New England states debated the idea of secession during the Hartford Convention of 1814–1815.
.The New York Tribune wrote on February 5, 1861, that "Nine out of ten people of the North" were opposed to forcing South Carolina to remain in the Union. "The great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration" is "that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed." Therefore, if the Southern states want to secede, "they have a clear right to do so." The New York Times concurred on March 21, 1861 by writing, "There is a growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go" (emphasis in original). The Hartford Daily Courant wrote on April 12, 1861, that "Public opinion in the North seems to be gradually settling down in favor of recognition of the New Confederacy by the Federal Government."
His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz. New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, to be free, sovereign and independent States; and he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the Government, proprietory and territorial rights of the same, and every part thereof. ("Treaty with Great Britain," in Charles Eliot, Ed., The Harvard Classics, vol. 43, American Historical Documents, p. 175).
During the debates of the federal constitution delegates of the states made it plain that secession was their right.Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, authors of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 that enunciated the doctrine of nullification. St. George Tucker, a respected jurist in the early republic era, wrote in 1803:
And since the seceding states, by establishing a new constitution and form of federal government among themselves, without the consent of the rest, have shown that they consider the right to do so whenever the occasion may, in their opinion require it, we may infer that the right has not been diminished by any new compact which they may since have entered into, since none could be more solemn or explicit than the first, nor more binding upon the contracting parties
We, the delegates of the people of Virginia . . . Do, in the name and behalf of the people of Virginia, declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression, and that every power not granted thereby remains with them at their will . . .
: "We, the delegates of the people of New York . . . Do declare and make known that the powers of government may be reassumed by the people whenever it shall become necessary to their happiness . . ."
N: "We, the delegates of the people of Rhode Island and Plantations, duly elected . . . Do declare and make known . . . That the powers of government may be resumed by the people whenever it shall become necessary to their happiness . . ."
Hamilton in Federalist Papers 6 predicted that disunion would lead to war, as occurred constantly in continental Europe.
A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.
President Andrew Jackson, in his Proclamation to the People of South Carolina, made the case for the perpetuity of the Union while also contrasting the differences between “revolution” and “secession”:[32]
But each State having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute jointly with the other States a single nation, cannot from that period possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of a nation, and any injury to that unity is not only a breach which would result from the contravention of a compact, but it is an offense against the whole Union. To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union, is to say that the United States are not a nation because it would be a solecism to contend that any part of a nation might dissolve its connection with the other parts, to their injury or ruin, without committing any offense. Secession, like any other revolutionary act, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right, is confounding the meaning of terms, and can only be done through gross error, or to deceive those who are willing to assert a right, but would pause before they made a revolution, or incur the penalties consequent upon a failure.[33
The argument about the whiskey rebellion is entirely disingenuous because the whiskey rebellion it not involve the assembly of duly elected representatives of the state that under the Constitution of that state to decide on succession.
Any defense of the actions of Gen. Sherman or Gen. Sheridan as merely necessary war measures DO not hold up to rational scrutiny. First all medicine and food sent to the South was considered contraband and therefore Southern civilians as well as Confederate soldiers were denied such essentials as quinine and morphine not to mention the effects of starvation and lack of shelter brought on by the scorched-earth policy of both generals.
50,000 Southern civilians died in the war given the southern population at the time that would be equivalent to 2 million people in our population. That civilians were targeted for reprisals of Confederate activity is well documented. Sherman himself ordered his subordinates on several occasions to round up civilians and shoot a few in retaliation for Confederate snipers. The letters of federal soldiers themselves reveal a brutal campaign against Southern civilians.
Shermans order to General Louis D. Watkins: "Send over about Fairmount and Adairsville [Georgia], burn ten or twelve houses of known secessionists, kill a few at random, and let it be known that it will be repeated every time a train is fired upon …."
In 1862 Sherman was having difficulty subduing Confederate sharpshooters who were harassing federal gunboats on the Mississippi River near Memphis. He then adopted the theory of "collective responsibility" to "justify" attacking innocent civilians in retaliation for such attacks
. He burned the entire town of Randolph, Tennessee, to the ground. He also began taking civilian hostages and either trading them for federal prisoners of war or executing them.
Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi, were also burned to the ground by Sherman's troops even though there was no Confederate army there to oppose them. After the burnings his soldiers sacked the town, stealing anything of value and destroying the rest. As Sherman biographer John Marzalek writes, his soldiers "entered residences, appropriating whatever appeared to be of value . . . those articles which they could not carry they broke."As Mark Grimsley In His Sherman and Total War describes it,
"With the utter disregard for blacks that was the norm among Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever they liked." A routine procedure would be to hang a slave by his neck until he told federal soldiers where the plantation owners' valuables were hidden.
General Philip Sheridan is another likewise attacked defenseless civilians. After the Confederate army had finally evacuated the Shenandoah Valley in the autumn of 1864 Sheridan's 35,000 infantry troops essentially burned the entire valley to the ground. As Sheridan described it in a letter to General Grant, in the first few days he "destroyed over 2200 barns . . . over 70 mills . . . have driven in front of the army over 4000 head of stock, and have killed . . . not less than 3000 sheep. . . . Tomorrow I will continue the destruction."
letters home Sheridan's troops described themselves as "barn burners" and "destroyers of homes."
One soldier wrote home that he had personally set 60 private homes on fire and opined that "it was a hard looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year." A Sergeant William T. Patterson wrote that "the whole country around is wrapped in flames, the heavens are aglow with the light thereof . . . such mourning, such lamentations, such crying and pleading for mercy [by defenseless women]… I never saw or want to see again."
Better example what Sherman's orders to burn three Confederate Holmes because Confederates "had murdered Sedgwick, Commander Union VI Corps. In fact the general was killed by a sniper when he stepped into open range admonishing the cowardice of federal soldiers were keeping low and avoiding Confederate fire ""Why they couldn't hit an elephant at this distance!"– He told them immediately prior to his death due to confederate riflefire, Spotsylvania, VA, 5/9/1864.All of the above mentioned actions would be be considered war crimes,according to the Geneva Convention.
Sherman openly boasted of the distruction of southern cities and literally reveled in civilian suffering. Sheridan likewise left a civilian population in desperate situation lacking food and shelter. Beside the same individuals that practiced the genocide of the Plains Indians showing the same lack of human feeling or remorse.1880s, what Sherman sometimes referred to as "the final solution of the Indian problem," which he defined as killing hostile Indians and segregating their pauperized survivors in remote places . . . .Whihc as he wrote to Grant was "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children." Writing two days later to Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman .
Sherman issued the following order to his troops at the beginning of the Indian Wars: "During an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age. As long as resistance is made, death must be meted out "
if this were not enough Sheridan served as an advisor to the Prussians during the Franco Prussian War, his friend Sherman advised Bismarck to apply the same scorched-earth policy to France as he did to Atlanta and the South.
I do not find any moral superiority or either cause my sympathies entirely lie with the thousands of American soldiers on both sides died and civilians in the South as well both black and white. Freeing the slaves and enslaving free, states rights and human rights and only be seen as hypocrisy meeting hypocrisy.
There was not rampent starvation throughout the South, the problem was distribution. As a retired Army Logistician, I have studied it. Richmond had become one of the larger cities in the South. It did not however surpass New Orleans (the largest city in the pre war southern 11 states) which did not suffer from starvation due to the bockade. New Orleans was captured sooner, but the surrounding region produced more food than the surrounding region of Richmond with the additional luxury of having the Mississippi river bring food stuffs for trade both domestically and internationally. Richmond was the supply center that supported the Army of Northern Virginia. The over-taxed rail system between Virginia and the rest of the South just could not compete with the demands of the citizen of the city, the new Confederate Central govenrment with the 1000's of workers and families, the 60,000 men of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Army that occupied Richmond itself and the Union Prisoners held in Richmond area prisons. Now add to the dilemma rampent inflation caused by a government that authorized each state to print its own money. It was a reciepe for disaster that culminated in the food shortages and extreme prices for food stuffs.
Sherman's march itself is an excellent example of logistics. He planned it along routes where the most abundant food crops were. He knew he needed to move quickly and not stop for any length of time as his Army would quickly consume all resources in an area. He also understood near the Georiga Coast, the crops became less abundant and unable to support his Army for any length of time at all. No look at the Richmond area, it was not possible for this region to fully support it's population plus twice again that number in soldiers, government workers and prisoners with a rail system that did not even have a single gauge running between the states.
I think you are mixing up references and not sure if you have many of them correct. Sherman did not punish anyone after the death of Sedgewick
"Better example what Sherman's orders to burn three Confederate Holmes because Confederates "had murdered Sedgwick, Commander Union VI Corps. In fact the general was killed by a sniper when he stepped…"
This example is a very poor mangling of historical facts. Makes me question some of your other undocumented quotes and references as well as the context of those you do site. Meade was Sedgewick's superior Officer and Grant was Meade's. Grant was near tears as the body came by. Likewise, Sherman wept when McPhearson's (sic) body was brought to him near Atlanta and no reprisals were ever attributed to the McPheason incident. The US Army Fort in Atlanta does break with tradition and bear the name of a falled Northern General deep where Forts were named almost exclusively for Confederate Heroes: Lee, Pickett, Hill, Bragg, Benning, Sam Houston, Hood, AP Hill, Polk.
Sherman did not order wholesale destruction of private propety, and having done my fair share of marching I will tell you that carrying extra dead weight in a sack for 10-20 miles a day is not a common practice. Sherman's men marched from Atlanta Georgia, to Savannah to Columbia to Washington DC. Marched, the regiment had a wagon baggage was sent home from Atlanta, and the postal system did not work between the opposing forces. His Army received no mail until four days after arriving in Savannah.
Incidents did happen, but not widespread rampent crimes as you infer.
Sherman did not boast of burning multiple cities, Only two cities burned during his 64 and 65 campaigns and he went to his grave agruing that Hampton started the fires in Columbia SC to keep bridges and supplies from falling into Enemy (Union) hands. Sherman is most probably cuplable for not reacting vigorously enough to stop the fires once started. He graciously accepted Savannah's surrender and did nothing to the beautiful city. I recommend a visit, the old part of town near the waterfront is an excellent example of colonial period architecture – amazing city. Sherman also did not aim his forces towards Charleston SC to punish it for starting the war. Charleston also is a beautiful city with its old charm – and its reminders of slavery. Some of the old slave market building survived to now support some of the downtown restaurant district. Sherman was on the most direct path to Grant to cut off Lee's escape route into Western Virgina and beyond.
I can't agree with you premise that both sides were equally cupable. I can say war does horrible things to men and in any war the enemy is dehumanized to a point that shooting another man is an acceptable form of behavior. I never shot anoyone in Iraq, but I did dehumanize thaose that shot at me. The American Civil War was the first war where accounts of all the participants have survived and not just that of a King or a General. The value of that cannot be measured. Raw emotion of men ordered to kill fellow men. The glorification of war in 1861 tarnished by the reality of five years of conflict and death. Even today we only see the physical scars of soldiers returning from the Middle East. Look at photos of returning vets from the Civil War. The missing limbs, the vacant stares, the susbstance abuse. Lee did not turn grey from the fun he had, the war aged him – ravished his body. America ignored the problem of slavery for 80 years, pushing the issue down the road to its posterity. One man had the courage to solve the problem for us all and he was shot in the head for it.
Someone must remember the bragging words of Thomas Ward Osborn, a Union Officer who served with Sherman and stated that “The city is built entirely of wood and is in the most excellent condition to burn. The space on fire by midnight had housed thirty-five thousand people. The flames rolled and heaved like waves of the ocean. The scene is splendid, magnificently grand; the scene of pillaging, the suffering and terror of the citizens and of our frantic and drunken soldiers.”
Erman, in Milledgeville, Georgia, issued Special Order no. 127, "In caseof…destruction (of bridges) by the enemy,…the commanding officer…on the spot will deal harshly with the inhabitants nearby….Should the enemy burn forage and corn on our route, houses, barns, and cotton-gins must also be burned to keep them company."
General Howard reported to Sherman, "We have found the country full of provisions and forage….Quite a number of private dwellings…have been destroyed by fire…; also, many instances of the most inexcusable and wanton acts, such as the breaking open of trunks, taking of silver pate, etc."
Sherman reported to Grant, "The whole United States…would rejoice to have this army turned loose on South Carolina to devastate that State, in the manner we have done inGeorgia."
On December 22 in Savannah, Georgia, Sherman advised Grant, "We are in possession of Savannah and all its forts….I could go on and smash South Carolina all to pieces." On December 24 Sherman wrote Halleck, "The truth is the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina."
Rigadier General Edward M. McCook, First Cavalry Division of Cavalry Corps, atCalhoun, Georgia, on October 30, 1864, reported to Sherman, "My men killed some of those fellows two or three days since, and I had their houses burned….I will carry out your instructions thoroughly and leave the country east of the road uninhabitable."
General Sherman also wrote to U.S. Brigadier General Louis Douglass Watkins at Calhoun, Georgia, on Oct. 29, 1864: "Can you not send over to Fairmount and Adairsville, burn 10 or 12 houses of known secessionists, kill a few at random and let them know it will be repeated every time a train is fired upon from Resaca to Kingston."
sHERMAN After willfully destroying Columbia, Sherman then tried to deflect responsibility onto the Confederates, claiming they set bales of cotton afire, destroying their own capital city at the orders of Confederate Lt. General Wade Hampton III. Yet the last Confederate troops to leave the city insisted that they were given strict orders from Hampton that no cotton was to be fired.
Sherman later recanted this allegation. In his Memoirs, Volume 11, page 287, he writes, “In my official report of this conflagration I distinctly charged it to General Wade Hampton, and confess I did so pointedly to shake the faith of his people in him, for he was in my opinion a braggart and professed to be the special champion of South Carolina.”
Two years later commander of the US 15th Corps, General Howard, also admitted to this heinous act. He openly admitted that, “It is useless to deny that our troops burnt Columbia, for I saw them in the act.”
Eneral Sherman also issued the following military order at Big Shanty, Georgia (presently Kennesaw) on June 23, 1864: "If torpedoes (mines) are found in thepossession of an enemy to our rear, you may cause them to be put on the ground and tested by a wagon load of prisoners, or if need be a citizen implicated in their use. In like manner, if a torpedo is suspected on any part of the road, order the point to be tested by a carload of prisoners, or by citizens implicated, drawn by a long rope."
"If you entertain a bare suspicion against any family, send it to the North. Any loafer or suspicious person seen at any time should be imprisoned and sent off. If guerrillas trouble the road or wires they should be shot without mercy."
Erman, in Milledgeville, Georgia, issued Special Order no. 127, "In caseof…destruction (of bridges) by the enemy,…the commanding officer…on the spot will deal harshly with the inhabitants nearby….Should the enemy burn forage and corn on our route, houses, barns, and cotton-gins must also be burned to keep them company."
Sherman reported to Grant, "The whole United States…would rejoice to have this army turned loose on South Carolina to devastate that State, in the manner we have done inGeorgia."
as FOR STARVATION
commissary at Fort Gibson reports about 20,000 people, mostly refugees and Indians, on the verge of starvation. It cannot be expected that the army will supply these people. Please call the attention of the Department of the Interior to this matter. The case demands immediate attention while the Arkansas is navigable.
“It is a common, an e very-day sight in Randolph County, to see women and children, most of whom were formerly in good circumstances, begging for bread from door to door. They must have immediate help, or perish. Fifteen hundred families, embracing five thousand persons, are in need of immediate aid.”
“This was in January, 1866. The destitution here described was not confined to a portion of the country, nor was it a new thing. In 1863, the shortness of the crops, the depreciation of the currency, and the consequent high prices of provisions, produced a famine among the poorer classes. The families of soldiers, fighting the battles of a confederacy which paid them in worthless paper, were left to suffer the extremes of want, . In Mobile there were insurrections of women, driven by starvation to acts of public violence.”
Ficial Records (War of the Rebellion)–SERIES I–VOLUME XXXIX/2 [S# 79] UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING TO OPERATIONS IN KENTUCKY, SOUTHWEST VIRGINIA, TENNESSEE, MISSISSIPPI, ALABAMA, AND NORTH GEORGIA (THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN EXCEPTED), FROM OCTOBER 1, 1864, TO NOVEMBER 13, 1864.–#21
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)–SERIES I–VOLUME XXXIX/2 [S# 79] UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING TO OPERATIONS IN KENTUCKY, SOUTHWEST VIRGINIA, TENNESSEE, MISSISSIPPI, ALABAMA, AND NORTH GEORGIA (THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN EXCEPTED), FROM OCTOBER 1, 1864, TO NOVEMBER 13, 1864.–#30
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)–SERIES I–VOLUME XLIII/1 [S# 91] UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING SPECIALLY TO OPERATIONS IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA, WEST VIRGINIA, MARYLAND, AND PENNSYLVANIA, SEPTEMBER 1, 1864, TO DECEMBER 31, 1864.–#23
"The Savannah (Georgia) Campaign. No. 4.–Reports of Capt. Orlando M. Poe", Official Records (War of the Rebellion)–SERIES I–VOLUME XLIV [S# 92] NOVEMBER 15-DECEMBER 21, 1864
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)–SERIES I–VOLUME XLIV [S# 92]. UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING TO OPERATIONS IN SOUTH CAROLINA, GEORGIA, AND FLORIDA, FROM NOVEMBER 14 TO DECEMBER 31, 1864.–#4SPECIAL FIELD ORDERS No. 127
"The Savannah (Georgia) Campaign. No. 7.–Report of Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard", Official Records (War of the Rebellion)–SERIES I–VOLUME XLIV [S# 92] NOVEMBER 15-DECEMBER 21, 1864
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)–SERIES I–VOLUME XLIV [S# 92] UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING TO OPERATIONS IN SOUTH CAROLINA, GEORGIA, AND FLORIDA, FROM NOVEMBER 14 TO DECEMBER 31, 1864.–#12
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)–SERIES I–VOLUME XLIV [S# 92] UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING TO OPERATIONS IN SOUTH CAROLINA, GEORGIA, AND FLORIDA, FROM NOVEMBER 14 TO DECEMBER 31, 1864.–#11
"The Savannah (Georgia) Campaign. No. 1.–Reports of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman", Official Records (War of the Rebellion)–SERIES I–VOLUME XLIV [S# 92] NOVEMBER 15-DECEMBER 21, 1864
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)– SERIES I–VOLUME XV [S# 21] Union Correspondence, Orders, And Returns Relating To Operations In West Florida, Southern Alabama, Southern Mississippi, And Louisiana From May 12, 1862, To May 14, 1863: And In Texas, New Mexico, And Arizona From September 20, 1862, To May 14, 1863.–#2
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)–SERIES I–VOLUME XLIV [S# 92] UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING TO OPERATIONS IN SOUTH CAROLINA, GEORGIA, AND FLORIDA, FROM NOVEMBER 14 TO DECEMBER 31, 1864.–#14
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)– SERIES I–VOLUME XXXVIII/4 [S# 75] UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING TO OPERATIONS IN THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN, FROM MAY 1, 1864, TO JUNE 30, 1864.–#24
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)– SERIES I–VOLUME XXXVIII/5 [S# 76] UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING TO OPERATIONS IN THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN, FROM JULY 1, 1864, TO SEPTEMBER 8, 1864.–#6
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)–SERIES I–VOLUME XXXIX/2 [S# 79] UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING TO OPERATIONS IN KENTUCKY, SOUTHWEST VIRGINIA, TENNESSEE, MISSISSIPPI
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)–SERIES I–VOLUME XXXIX/2 [S# 79] UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING TO OPERATIONS IN KENTUCKY, SOUTHWEST VIRGINIA, TENNESSEE, MISSISSIPPI, ALABAMA, AND NORTH GEORGIA (THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN EXCEPTED), FROM OCTOBER 1, 1864, TO NOVEMBER 13, 1864.–#20
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)–SERIES I–VOLUME XXXIX/2 [S# 79] UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING TO OPERATIONS IN KENTUCKY, SOUTHWEST VIRGINIA, TENNESSEE, MISSISSIPPI, ALABAMA, AND NORTH GEORGIA (THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN EXCEPTED), FROM OCTOBER 1, 1864, TO NOVEMBER 13, 1864.–#15
Confederate Military History, Vol. 5 CHAPTER XXI
Confederate Military History, Vol. 6 CHAPTER XVII
"History Of The Army Of The Cumberland", Southern Historical Society Papers Vol. I. Richmond, Virginia, June, 1876. No. 6
"Editorial Paragraphs", Southern Historical Society Papers. Vol. II. Richmond, Virginia, July, 1876. No. 1.
"Diary Of Captain Robert E. Park, Twelfth Alabama Regiment", Southern Historical Society Papers. Vol. III. Richmond, Virginia, February, 1877. No. 2.
"The Burning of Columbia, South Carolina — Report of the Committee of Citizens Appointed to Collect Testimony", Southern Historical Society Papers Vol. VIII Richmond, Va., May, 1880. No. 5
"Sherman's March To The Sea, As Seen By A Northern Soldier", Southern Historical Society Papers Vol. X. Richmond, Va., August and Sept, 1882. Nos. 8-9
"General Sherman's March from Atlanta to the Coast — Address Before the Survivors' Association of Augusta, Ga", Southern Historical Society Papers. Volume XII. July-August-September. Nos. 7, 8, 9, April 20th, 1884
“How would you like it, what do you think, to have troops passing your house constantly … Ransacking and plundering and carrying off everything that could be of any use to them? There is considerable excitement in foraging, but it is [a] disagreeable business in some respects to go into people's houses and take their provisions and have the women begging and entreating you to leave a little when you are necessitated to take all. But I feel some degree of consolation in the knowledge I have that I never went beyond my duty to pillage.”
My Dear Wife:
"I have no time for particulars. We have had a glorious time in this State, Unrestricted license to burn and plunder was the order of the day. The chivalry have been stripped of most of their valuables. Gold watches, silver pitchers, cups, spoons, forks, &c., &c., are as common in camp as blackberries. The terms of plunder are as follows: The valuables procured are estimated by companies. Each company is required to exhibit the result of its operations at any given place. One-fifth and first choice falls to the commander-in-chief and staff, one-fifth to corps commander and staff, one-fifth to field officers, two-fifths to the company. Officers are not allowed to join in these expeditions, unless disguised as privates. One of our corps commanders borrowed a rough suit of clothes from one of my men, and was successful in his place. He got a large quantity of silver (among other things an old milk pitcher), and a very fine gold watch from a Mr. DeSaussure, of this place (Columbia). DeSaussure is one of the F. F. V.'s of South Carolina, and was made to fork out liberally.
Officers over the rank of captain are not made to put their plunder in the estimate for general distribution. This is very unfair, and for that reason, in order to protect themselves, the subordinate officers and privates keep everything back that they can carry about their persons, such as rings, earrings, breastpins, &c., &c., of which, if I live to get home, I have a quart. I am not joking. I have at least a quart of jewelry for you and all the girls, and some No. 1 diamond pins and rings among them. General Sherman has gold and silver enough to start a bank. His share in gold watches and chains alone at Columbia was two hundred and seventy-five.
"But I said I could not go into particulars. All the general officers, and many besides, have valuables of every description, down to ladies' pocket handkerchiefs. I have my share of them, too.
"We took gold and silver enough from the damned rebels to have redeemed their infernal currency twice over. * * * I wish all the jewelry this army has could be carried to the Old Bay State. It would deck her out in glorious style; but, alas! It will be scattered all over the North and Middle States.
"The damned (n'ERS), as a general thing, preferred to stay at home, particularly after they found out that we wanted only the able-bodied men, and, to tell the truth, the youngest and best-looking women. Sometimes we took them off by way of repaying influential secessionists. But a part of these we soon managed to lose, sometimes in crossing rivers, sometimes in other ways. I shall write you again from Wilmington, Goldsboro, or some other place in North Carolina. The order to march has arrived, and I must close hurriedly.
"Love to grandmother and Aunt Charlotte. Take care of yourself and the children. Don't show this letter out of the family.
"Your affectionate husband, "THOMAS J. MYERS,"Lieutenant, &c.
N the 18th December, 1864, General H. W. Halleck, major-general and chief-of-staff of the armies of the United States, wrote Sherman as follows:
"Should you capture Charleston, I hope that by some accident the place may be destroyed, and if a little salt should be thrown upon its site, it may prevent the future growth of nullification and secession."
To this suggestion from this high source to commit murder, arson and robbery, and pretend it was by accident, Sherman replied on December 24, 1664, as follows:
"I will bear in mind your hint as to Charleston, and do not think that 'salt' will be necessary. When I move the Fifteenth corps will be on the right of the right wing, and their position will naturally bring them into Charleston first, and if you have watched the history of that corps, you will have remarked that they generally do their work pretty well; the truth is, the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble for her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her. I look upon Columbia as quite as bad as Charleston, and I doubt if we shall spare the public buildings there, as we did at Milledgeville." (See 2 Sherman's Memoirs, pages 223, 227-8.)
MAJ Osborn served in the Army of the Potomac with the 11th Corps until his unit's transfer to Chatanooga in the fall of 1863. I assume the quote may be about Atlanta but the population was 9,554 in 1860 and 21,789 in 1870. Columbia SC had a population of 3,300 in 1860. As a matter of fact (http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab09.txt) lists only 4 cities that large in Confederate States (New Orleans 6th, Charleston 22nd, Richmond 25th and Mobile 27th) (three border state cities: St Louis, Lousiville and Baltimore) The quote was a rememberance clouded by time.
The next two citations speak of war, Confederate forces destroying items of need for the Union Forces Union forces dealing with irregular warfare. According the the Geneva Convention today, un-uniformed non regular forces are not accorded the same treatment as regular combat forces.
South Carolina did infact start the movement for leaving the Union, during Jackson's Presidency, and he sent troops to deal with them harshly. Decades later, and over 100,000 casualties, it was just human nature to want to punish those that started the war. Look at internment camps in California.
Sherman and Hampton argued until death over who was to blame for the fires in Columbia. Sherman did little to stop the fires, Hampton's actions like Wheeler before him was to stop Sherman by destroying infrastructure. It is quite possible these actions started the fires in Columbia. To pin them categorically to one side is short sided.
As for the land torpedos or land mines. Sherman was not going to risk the lives of his men against a tactic that has been universally deplored. Having been in a convoy that was targeted by an IED on a busy highway in downtown Baghdad, those items kill indescriminately, so why should the killing be limited to Union Soldiers.
You spend most of your post jumping from fact to fact that range from Charlston SC to Arkansas and from 1862 to 1866 and beyond. We can spend eternity debating the merits of the quotes of an individual soldier or leader from their perspective clouded by time. Howard and several of his men truly belived in supporting the freedom of African Americans – He grew to resent those rich plantation owners of South Carolina from preventing his efforts in the Freeman's department. Each man's quotes are efforts to bloster, edit, refine, defend or glorify his own efforts. The job of historians is to piece these together to better understand what actually happened.
Lincoln was prosecuting a war to ensure the survival of the Union. If the South wins, North America would mirror Europe with literally dozens of small nation states, some completely land-locked by the begining of the 20th century with no power to help stem the tide of global war in 1916.
Sherman's actions while brutal by some, anticdotally horrible by a few hastened the end of a war that was over by 1864. Sometimes only a dose of reality is needed for the obvious to become visable. Davis refused to acknowledge the obvious. As do many in the South.
You sound like the Japanese complaining about Hiroshima or the Germans complaining about Dresden. You sound like a moral relativist.
Face facts — the South was very, very evil and it had to lose. It had to be crushed. Sherman and Sheridan did what they should have done. Who are you to second guess the military?
Collateral damage is unfortunate but normal.
collateral damage is unfortunate but normal."
Thank you Lt Calley..
What absolute and ridiculous nonsense. Very, very, evil that is beyond stupid.You say nothing defend no position just toss out ad hominems and thing that is an argument. By your logic the extermination of the Lakota was justified. After all they were very very evil. Are you an expert on the ontology of evil,or are you perhaps a bit presumptuous d Do not forget Lincolns execution of the Mankato Sioux.
. Who are you to second guess the military? I dont know maybe a judge ate Hague someone who was a soldier that had to follow the uniform code of military Justice..
Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions collective punishments are a war crime. By collective punishment, the drafters of the Geneva Conventions had in mind the reprisal killings of World Wars I and World War II. In the First World War, Germans executed Belgian villagers in mass retribution for resistance activity. In World War II, Nazis carried out a form of collective punishment to suppress resistance. Entire villages or towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there. Additional concern also addressed the United States' atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which, in turn, caused death and disease to millions[citation needed] of Japanese civilians as well as their decedents[sic][citation needed]. The conventions, to counter this, reiterated the principle of individual responsibility. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary to the conventions states that parties to a conflict often would resort to "intimidatory measures to terrorize the population" in hopes of preventing hostile acts, but such practices "strike at guilty and innocent alike. They are opposed to all principles based on humanity and justice."
combatants who are hors de combat (out of the fight) due to wounds, detention, or any other cause shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, with the following prohibitions: (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) taking of hostages; (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment (d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
Every soldier Marine Airman and Sailor is taught this. It is his or her personal responsibility to adherecompliance with the LOAC.
Distinction. Distinction means discriminating between lawful combatant targets and noncombatant targets such as civilians, civilian property, POWs, and wounded personnel who are out of combat. The central idea of distinction is to only engage valid military targets. An indiscriminate attack is one that strikes military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction. Distinction requires defenders to separate military objects from civilian objects to the maximum extent feasible. Therefore, it would be inappropriate to locate a hospital or POW camp next to an ammunition factory.
.
Slavery was "very, very evil." The secession ordinances of virtually every state that seceded state the defense of slavery above "states' rights" as the their reasons for acting.
Lincoln was prosecuting a war to ensure the survival of the Union. If the South wins, North America would mirror Europe with literally dozens of small nation states, some completely land-locked by the begining of the 20th century with no power to help stem the tide of global war in 1916
Then we would not be an emprie and stride the globe like a behemoth with a huge standing army.IfWE would actually be a jeffersonian democracy instead of a Corporate Plutocracy If Lincoln was right in protecting the Union then so was George the IVth. Tibet by your logic hould be Shermaznized as should Checny and taiwan. We should have stayed out WWI. the War to end wars. I do not think th eCivil war should have been fought because it could not be won conventionally. I would have waged a camaign of terror and arson with select Units until the Union had enough. kInd of like we did against the Indians and Phillipine insurrection.Only Boston and Philadephia burn them like Atlanta.
As a benevolent Super Power, unlike any other in the history of the world, for 100 years we have been involved in wars and only asked for enough land to bury our dead.
That is another legacy of Lincoln, on the deck of that ship with Grant, Lincoln and Porter, he directed his senior Commanders to welcome the Southern States back into the Union. He walked the streets of Richmond and welcomed former slaves to the Union as equals, begging them not to bow to him. That is not a legacy of a King ordained by God. That is leadership, we expect from every President.
You second paragraph is so distorted I cannot make any sense of it good luck to you sir.
Davis was a horses ass of course and Sherman was a war criminal and would been if he had not been in the Civil war.Col's always love war can not get enough I got more than my share as a mighty lance cpl.I was in a War we could not win but it sure was good for the military industrial complex., Dow made a mint of off napalm.
I spent most of my life being thankful that the Union won the war, since it held the states together and allowed for the the growth of the most free and prosperous nation on earth. However, with the over-reaching, over taxing, inefficient, corrupt imperial federal government we now have to live under, I find myself wondering if it would not have been better the other way.
My sympathies are with the North (although my ancestors fought for the South, mostly), but the reason the South lost the war has nothing to do with right, wrong, virtue, states rights, confederations vs. nations, or any of that. The South lost the war when it failed to use its early military advantage (the South had a military tradition and many military schools to support it) and invade the North. The capture of Washington, assumption of Maryland and other border states into the Confederacy, and martial success would have given the North pause. That pause may have led to an accommodation between the USA and CSA. Many virtuous men have fallen with bullets through their skulls. War is the true realpolitik.
They had absolutly no infrastructure to execute the war. Having a strong militia tradition in Virginia does not compensate for little to no militia tradition in Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida etc. The Military tradition and Military prep schools idea is myopic to Virginia, which unfortunatly dominates popular views of the time.
The most famous current Southern Military schools, Citadel (founded 1842), VMI (1839), VA Tech (1872), Texas A&M (1866 or 1871), North Georgia (1873) There is references to a school in Mississippi and a school in Louisiana first led by William T Sherman just before the war broke out. The graduates from VMI and the Citadel made an impact on the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at the lower level giving units from Virginia and the Carolinas a cadre of trained and drill junior leaders.
No Officer on active duty besides Winfield Scott and Albert Johnston led a force larger than a regiment so the practicality of an Southern Officer mustering a force large enough to move on DC before 1862 is out of the question.
The thought that a government that began it's existance in the Spring of 1861 could support a field army operating in Northern Virginia was completely out of the question. The Union General Staff during the Civil War never gets it due credit. Two men in particular deserve great credit: Herman Haupt the chief of the Union Rail system and Montgomery Meigs the Quartermaster General. Meigs is credited with personally managing the entire supply system for the Union cause estimated at 1.5 billion dollars and is also credited with tracking every cent.
The Confederacy had no such men running their strategic war efforts.
They needed no military infrastructure, as you say, in the earliest weeks of the war. There were no Federal troops to oppose them and pro-Southern riots and activity in Maryland and sympathy in the other three slave-owning border states. A bold move by Confederate militia (which is as good as it gets when there is no one opposing you) to take Washington and influence those states would have shifted hundreds of thousands of soldiers from north to south, brought their industry and wealth into the Confederacy, and made long-term war a much more costly venture for the USA.
As for the military acumen of the south, it was part of the culture of the cavaliers. In the north, no.
The beginning weeks of the war were chaotic, but there were Federal Troops available, but not Confederate Militia.
Montgomery Alabama was the first Confederate Capital, Jan 1861. The Confederates fired on Sumpter on April 11th. Richmond was not selected until May and Davis Arrived on the 29th of May. There was not an organization to carry out such a plan. There were rioters in Baltimore, but Union troops put that down with troops arriving in Baltimore April 19th. This was two days after Virginia voted to leave the Union. By the end of April many regiments had arrived in DC. Bolstered by the US War Department that remained intact, it made for an adventurous time but no real practical danger. Virginia did not have weapons, uniforms, artillery, horses, wagons, ammunition, medical supplies, a commander or money to attempt such an excursion. Even in the 1860s, there is a machinery for a government, any government to appropriate and execute a budget for military operations.
Of the four border states, Deleware sent more men per capita than any other state. The other three sent more men to Union Armies than Sourthern Armies. Missouri kicked out its pro-Southern Government. Missouri founded as a slave state did not have the climate and river system to support large plantations and functioned as a slave state in name only. Aside from a few plantations near the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, the state was a small family farm state and many of the pro-slavery fire eaters went to Kansas and diluted that potential pool duing the 1850s.
Kentucky wanted to remain Neutral and was forced into the Northern Camp by an invasion of a Southern Army led by General Polk. That invasion back-fired. The Continental and later US Federal Government had fled a physical capital several times, but not once did it end hostilities.
Virginia had problems with keeping all its counties in line. Almost 1/3 of the counties and population left Virginia to form the Union State of West Virginia. They began meeting in May of 1861 to discuss rejoining the Union after less than four weeks after the state of Virginia left the Union.
Even after the victory at Bull Run, the Confederate Army, trained for months under decent leaders was in no shape to execute an offensive operation. McDowell's Army did not do well in its first offenisve operation either. Again the movement of massed formations was not taught. The US did not have a senior tactics school like most European Powers did.
For all the natural abilities of men like Hampton and Forrest, with no formal training, they both required some time to develop leadership skills of moving large forces. Forrest never commanded more than 12,000 which was the same size as the invasion force under Scott. He did not have that many until near the end of the war or three years of combat.
Finally, more than 2/3 of current and former West Point cadets remained in the Union, providing the back bone of the Federal Army.
The South lost the war because the Southern people eventually figured out the huge disconnect between their formidable propaganda machine and the dismal reality of their war machine. Brave soldiers can't compensate for incompetent secretaries of war, mediocre generals, unrealistic objectives and overall poor logistics
My, Don Herko, you are heavily engaged here, as they say. Opinions are shooting past you left and right.
I will stand with my previous statement that the war could have been won by the Confederacy in the early days of the conflict. Lincoln needed to galvanize his nation and that took time. ("Where are they? Are they coming?") There were few Federal troops in the vicinity of Washington D.C., the capitol was (is) situated in the middle of the South, and opportunities presented themselves thereby. I agree, the CSA may have driven the border states northward by overt action, but they went north anyway, some after coercive action by either side. Jefferson Davis's decision to fight a defensive war also cost the CSA much of its offensive punch. The key was Washington, at least before the build-up of the Federal army. Imagine a CSA with its capitol in the then domeless capitol building.
You keep dodging those opinions, Don, and keep your head down, d'ya hear? I enjoy your commentary.
Richard,
I am dodging opinions and staying with facts, facts as they stood in the Spring of 1861. The opinions you aspouse are fun to think about if you are so inclined, but they have no basis in reality.
There was no Confederate militia capable of moving on Washington DC in the Spring of 1861. There were more that 10,000 men in DC before the Confederate Capital moved to Richmond. Were they top notch, no, but no better or worse than what the Confederates could muster. Winfield Scott was still the General in Chief and would have been more than capable of designing a defense to protect the capital. The intital 75K troops were streaming into DC by train moving infinately fasted than troops that could be moved by the non-existant Confederate rail system.
Finally, the idea that a city, any city was the key to victory has been folly for Generals for eons. The Crusaders wanted to capture the Holy city of Jerusalem, not defeating the Muslims just capturing a city. Napoleon and Hitler both viewed Moscow as the key to those wars. Hilter thought the capture of Paris would end French resistance. On to Richmond was the battle cry for several failed Union Commanders.
It was not the capture of Vicksburg, but the capture of the Army that turned the tide in the West. Pemberton's 30K man force just melted away after that battle most never returned after parole. It was not just a defeat but a removal of a strategic force that Davis could not replace. Grant without an opposing force could move in any direction Lincoln desired. That he moved to Chatanooga and turned the tide on that battle sealed the fate of the Confederacy.
Mr Richard you continue to dream of a force that did not exist to execute a plan that could not have occured, not hard to dodge when you are shooting blanks.
Apart from the small number of (untrained) men available, Virginia's arsenals were also lacking in the spring of 1861, as were most other states' arsenals. This is from "An Omen at Philippi, the First Battle of the Civil War," America's Civil War magazine: "The arsenal at Richmond had just 9,363 firearms, 6,700 of which were obsolete flintlock muskets and pistols." Reports sent to Robert E. Lee about the arsenals can be found in the Official Record of the Rebellion.
Discussing anything with a true believer is a waste of time.
Vicksburg, by the way, was a strategic victory depriving the CSA of supplies and succor from Texas and Arkansas. As long as the Union controlled that river, the CSA was split in half. Some of the soldiers paroled there by Grant were captured again later by the Union, thus contributing to the decision not to parole prisoners of war.
Blanks indeed! Such arrogance. Somewhat like that of the Confederacy itself.
I do believe in facts.
Once Grant captured Vicksburg and the Army holding that city, the river was opened for Union travel. No Confederate stronghold controled the river. Union commerce could flow without major impediment. It was not that the South could not have pushed supplies across the river, the Union controled the natural crossing points and those on the West just felt abandoned by Richmond.
It was the psychological effect of the capture on that army that most felt abandoned by the Confederate Government. Some did recover to fight again, but most went to their homes never to return. A long recovery was required from near starvation and for those that lived away from major fighting did not return to the ranks. Louisian, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas vets generally had enough. Not all but most, why fight for a government that did nothing to keep Vicksburg from falling.
There was not another instance like Vicksburg to compare to support your comment about the Union not paroling prisoners. They did not exchange prisoners once Grant assumed control of all the Armies, but that was not a single issue either. Prisoner exchange did mean that the Union would fight the same men again just like the Confederates would fight Union men again. It was in fact the reluctance of the Confederate Government to exchange African American Soldiers. The Confederate government did not capture too many African American Soldiers, those they did capture were immediately impressed into slavery. The most extreme example of that treatment was the Fort Pillow massacre.
I don't believe I am arrogant in my views, I acknowledge many such as Gerald, who have specific and greater insight on topics than I do. I have learned that there are hundreds if not thousands of very knowledgeable men and women that have have specific knowledge beyond me.
I just do not accept fantastic comments that have no basis in fact. If it is a discussion about what Lee could have done within the context of the Gettysburg campaign, opinions abound. But to pontificate about what Jackson could have done in the campaign tends to be fruitless because most true believers cannot accept critical reviews of Jackson's campaigns, tactics or the man himself.
Your original thesis that the South could have won the war with a quick strike utilizing an advantage that did not exist just does not hold water.
I wrote a paper comparing and contrasting the Virginia and Tennessee military traditions and how those two states were the foundation of the two major Confederate Armies. Examining why the ANV was so successful and the Army of Tennessee was so star- crossed – even more so than the Army of the Potomac.
I also have discussed at length that Davis was the most capable man in North America to become President and he completely failed. Lincoln however, was completely ill-suited to have accomplished what he did , but he did infact do it.
Throughout the war, the Confederacy never showed the apptiude to support a strategic offensive. Their major cities served as supply depots. Unlike the Union and the very capable Montgomery Meigs who developed a system of main depots and forward temporary depots that operated to support the foward moment of armies on the offense.
The greatest example was the coordination between Meigs and Ingals ( AoP QM chief) when Grant decided to leave Cold Harbor and attack Petersburg. Meigs and Ingals turned off the forward depot in Northern Virginia and redirected the supplies to City Point , once Ingals had his supply train jump the two rivers. City Point became the busiest port in the world until it was shut off at the end of the war.
Your proposal does not count on the fact that nothing existed in Richmond to support any operation until well into the summer. By the time Davis relocates the Richmond and in begins to build as an deopt to support operations, tens of thousands of Union Soldiers were actively drilling in and around the city. There was a high level of anxiety throughout Washington DC at the begining of the war. Southern sympathies existed that completed surrounded the city. Men from the DC milita event went to the Confederate flag, but the hype was never matched with actual on the ground Confederate capability. The professional soldiers Scott and Meigs rallied the forces and went about building the infrastructure to wage war.
Lee does not resign from the US Army until April 20th, West Virginia secedes from Virginia April 27th, The Confederacy declares war on May 6th, North Carolina does not secede until May 20th not until June 24th does Tennessee secede. The physical timetable does not support any capability for an offensive operation.
As for beliefs, I had no relative, to my knowledge, that fought in the war. My father's parents both immigrated from Eastern Europe. Mother's family from Ireland in the 1800s – to New York and Northern PA. I do not have a personal dog in the fight. With that said, I think Lincoln single handedly saved the Union and paid with his own life. He should be the only carving on Mount Rushmore. He walked the streets of Richmond and would not allow freed slaves to bow to him because he rightly believed everyone was created equal. Lincoln so mastered the concept of total war, he became our first true Commander in Chief a true war chieftan.
Don,
Your history documentation on the war is very impressive. Help me understand the eye witness accounts of Sherman's soldiers. Are you saying that the letters written to the soldier's families are lies or are not real? I do not claim to know. Only asking because you seem to know.
Thanks for the history. Glad to know its behind us all and settled so we can all live in peace and harmony as one nation. Thanks Again
Have you considered the possibility that the letters were cherry-picked out of tens of thousands available by someone who wishes to prove a point?
Walt,
Thank you for the kind words. I do not know specifically what letters but I would like to recommend a movie done a few years ago called "Vantage Point" The movie is done from numerous points of view to paint the picture of an attempt on the US President's life. The eye witness accounts of an individual during such a momentous event is only a very small piece of what actually happened. You can take any major event in world history and see the event unfolding is confusing and very dire. History, or better time and reflection allows us to come to grips with what actually happened.
Did the US need to arrest thousands of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. The attack was not the opening stage of an assault on the west coast, but at the time contemporary accounts gives the feeling of the world coming to an end.
Now lets look at how the post American Civil War literature developed. The Northern accounts dominated early writings. Vet groups like the Grand Army of the Republic build monuments to their units and kept Confederate memorials from national parks. As those vets began to die out, the families of Southern vets took up the pen to capture accounts of their dying relatives. Union relatives moved on, they won the war, harbored no need revisist the past. Douglass Southall Freeman also penned two magnificant works to which he dedicated to his father, a soldier in Jackson's Valley Army and all Confederate soldiers form the ANV. Lee's stock rose and Grant's fell – aided by a truly aweful presidency. Longstreet's defection to the Republican Party in the post war south (and his critical view of Lee's actions at Gettysburg) also cemented his downward fall from grace. Accounts were generally "Virginia-centric" that helped to elevate those Confederates that fell during the war (Jackson, Stuart and AP Hill)
Against that rise of "pro-Southern" writings, is the total war that Sherman fought against both the South and the Native Americans. He becomes an easy target of opportunity as a beast with absolutely no talent as a General Officer in tactical, operational or strategic arts.
Sherman was ruthless to show the South that the Confederate Government was powerless to stop his Army from moving at will throughout the deep South. Some private property was destroyed, some wealth was stolen off. As a former Infantryman, I can say those men that traveled hundreds of miles through Georgia and the Carolinas did not carry off the wealth of the region. Sherman meticulously (sic) managed the size of the force and the number of wagons. Tired or worn horses were swapped with local horses and often the old horses were shot. damaged wagons were burned, wounded soldiers were often taken along. The army could not stop, a stationary army in enemy land would stavre and de-nude the area of material in short time. Sherman did not stay long anywhere to do such damage to civilian property. That the land increased in value and Agricultural output from 1860 to 1870 shows a land that was NOT decimated by war, unlike Virginia.
I would not argue for a second that damage and crimes did not occur. As an Iraq war vet, I know despite orders, contraband was sent home and property of the Iraq people did leave the country. Packages were x-rayed for contents but stuff did get through. Bottom line Union Soldiers did see some homes burned, food was stolen, but Shreman's Army did not create the damage that was all attributed to it nor was the damage as extensive as have been claimed.
I have just finieshed John Keegan's book, and was at the part last night talking about the last months of the Confederacy. The South had a huge problem with desertion. It did not even pursue deserters towards the end of the war. They banded together to form lawless groups to keep from being brought to justice and these bands roamed the countryside living above the law. I am not about to begin and blame these ex-Confederates for a tremendous amount of damages and crimes either, but the sum of all parts, Sherman, his Army, stragglers, ex-slaves, deserters, common criminals, hatred for Sherman and poor or faded memory have all contributed to the legend of making Georgia Howl.
To be honest, I think the soldiers were probably tougher on South Carolina than Georgia. They seem to admit it in journals and writing. South Carolina did start the war, but the legend persisted about the "March though Georgia".
Thanks again Walt, I do enjoy talking about this stuff.
Don,
Thanks for your educated and researched response. I am as die hard as any Southern man that ever lived in the South. However, I do believe in the three sides of the story theory, "My side, their side, and what really happened". I view your comments as the closest I have read about the "what really happened". I enjoy these discussions myself and if you do not mind I will have further questions that challenge both of our views. If you visit the South please let me know and I'll buy you a cup of coffee . Thanks Again!!
I am by no means a historian or college grad, anything like that, however I have always loved history. The American Civil War has always been interesting to me, and of course I was southern born. I lived in Arkansas and Tennessee for most of my childhood and teenage years. They will always feel like home to me and be a piece of my heart, so naturally I wonder what it would have been like to be a Southern Belle in those times. What it would have been like to live in the cotton kingdom. I still hold that southern pride and as I have said before, wonder what it would have been like if the south had won the war. I guess I was just born a century and a half too late. Reading all of the comments and the facts on this site is very interesting, thanks for all of the knowledge.
I know people here believe in facts but here is a fact for you war is written by those who won. Fact is the north was just as bad and evil as some would but it as the south. All is fair in war got over it people yes the north did horrible things in the south if u don't believe that then your naive. Here is a fact not found in a book the civil war was all about government control and money that's it.
Most people think we freed the slaves back then but they didn't your a slave to our beloved government now if you know or not. Why do we even have states or state government when the federal government runs and controls everything the state government means nothing. My point is this the south lost cause of money no money no war.
There is no facts or winner's in war and unless you have been in that war then you know nothing about it. I get tried of people saying how bad the south was and how the civil war was all over slavery please grow up people it was all money games. But it what you want to think or believe. Its the same now as back then just money game just there are no men left with balls to fight for what is right.
I've often wondered if Lincoln had done just two things different if the War would have been much shorter.
1) Ordered Lee detained until he had made his decision whether he would command the Union Army.
2) Appointed nearly anyone but McClellan as commander.
Or what if Lee had accepted?
Lee had a good run, from Second Bull Run (maybe even from the Seven Days) through Chancellorsville, but Pickett's Charge showed he was not the general an insurgency needed.
The prime imperative of an insurgent army is to remain an army, and Lee threw that away on July 3, 1863.
The South lost because, instead of George Washington, she had Robert E. Lee.
The article is very good. I would add the following:
1. The South was politically unable to get all slave states into the Confederacy (Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, Missouri).
2. The North had the Navy (both salt water and riverine) and was able to blockade the South. This Anaconda plan took the South by surprise. They failed to account for this possibility in their planning. The Southern Navy was ineffective for the most part.
3. The Southern artillery was ineffective and the Northern was very effective. The South could have done much better had they been able to purchase artillery abroad. They didn't have the capacity too make it themselves.
Two-thirds of Civil War deaths were from disease, this being the era before antibiotics and adequate attention to sanitation. First, for many on both sides, war marked the first time they were in contact with multitudes of others Anyone from a town that had not suffered a epidemic of a particular disease was highly susceptible. Oh, and then there were charming places like Andersonville, a still overlooked blot on the Confederacy, whose commandment was the only individual on either side executed for what amounted to war crimes.
[...] Why Did The South Lose The Civil War? [...]
How many times did we stress that the South had bad commanders? Somebody wants to change a pretty defined opinion. Unfortunately, none of you are a Shelby Foote. So grind away at your opinion wheels and good luck to you. Even small souls have an impact.
The South was never going to get all four border states into the Confederacy. They each represent problems of the States that did try to leave.
Missouri was a slave state in name only. Slavery was not profitable except along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers where there was enough water to support the large cotton plantations. Elsewhere, small family farms were prominent. Only the occasional family slave existed normally inherited from a relative.
Deleware firecely independent and a government that does not intrude on personal lives, it has almost no farming, but has become home to some famous and large corperations despite its size (Dupot Chemical and several large banks)
Maryland was sharply devided on the issue, in the east along the coast, slave owners used waterways to support their plantations and slave culture. In Western maryland, much like Western Virginia (30+ counties and over 30% or the eligable military aged men) that voted to leave Virginia and stay in the Union.
Kentucky did not want to be involved in the war. A frontier spirit of independence it hoped to avoid picking a side, because like Missouri, Virigina, Tennessee and North Carolina it had a large segment of the population that was pro-Union even though the government was pro-slave. Polk's invasion hastened the inevitable move by Kentucky to the Union cuase.
Every rebelling state had Federal volunteer regiments even South Carolina which did supply freed men to form Colored Regiment. Tennesse and Viriginia provided about 30% of those that served to Union Regiments. North Carolina, not quite that many. The 1st Al (Union) Cavalry escorted Sherman through Georgia and the Carolinas.
2. It was the North's ability to build a navy under Wells and Fox that was the difference. No Southern state hade a seafaring tradition like the New England states.
3. The South lacked the industry to support an artillery branch. This is the first instance of industiralism having a profound impact on the war. Additionally, while the South received most of the prominent Cavalry Officers Lee, Johnston, Johnson, Hardee, Stuart Rooney Lee, Hood and others. The South also had the advantage of thousands of natural riders. The North kept most of the talented Artillerists; Henry Hunt chief among them. Southern West Point grads gravitated towards the Cavalry while Northern graduates seemed to have taken to artillery. Hunt was so disapointed in his former pupils, that at Appomattox, he found them in gray and chastized them for performances at Gettysburg and other battles. Henry Hunt's mentorship and handling of the Army of Potomac Artillery branch was one of the most underrated, yet possibly most crucial aspects of that Army's survival of the dark days Summer of 1862 until summer of 1863.
The North was on the offensive throughout pretty much the entire war, so of course the North took more casualties. It's a lot safer, generally speaking, to stand in a trench and shoot at the men charging across no man's land than vice versa.
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as to the main question, somebody once said that if one looks at the civil war as a revolution, the south had the best chance of success of any in history, but if one looks at it as a war between nations, the south's loss was a foregone conclusion. too many resources in the north in every possible way.
as to a lesser issue, mr. davis's comment that the south had only one good army commander and a bunch of second rate generals is not correct. general longstreet is well remembered as having early perceived the changed nature of fighting and being the leader in the concept of (at least then through about now) of \modern\ war and the power of modern weapons in defensive positions. longstreet saw the outcome of \pickett's charge\ years before he found himself in a position to protest it.
as an aside, longstreet's views reflect on the main question as well. a couple of southern professors posited i think in the 60s (the 19s, not the 18s) that the southern ethos of \attack and die\ (the name of their book) led to the defeat, and the casualty statistics from the war showed that its constant attack in battle strategy eventually bled the south to death.
there were other brilliant southern generals, such as alexander (short wicks or whatever other cause of imprecise firing at gettysburg aside) was a very young but very capable artilleryman. while surely the \fact\ that the south had all the good generals is a myth, so is mr. davis's opposite comment.
let's just be glad the south did lose, as that same general alexander wrote in the forward to his book on the war years, so that we could have one greater nation with no slavery instead of two lesser ones, and that the south accepted its loss in a way making that possible without guerrilla war (which acknowledgement is not intended to lessen the impact of the kkk etc.).
keevan d. morgan, esq., chicago
Longstreet was a great subordinate, but blundered horribly in front of Burnside at Knoxville. It was a dismal display.
Alexander was promoted to lead the Artillery due to Pendleton's unbelieveable incompetence. Alexander performance was so bad at Gettysburg, that Hunt sought him out and chastised him. While Alexander was overmatched on the field – incapable of managing the fight Hunt was supervising his batteries, assessing battlefield effects, arguing with Corps Commanders, replacing used batteries, all the while being disappointed at the dispaly of his former students from the other side. At one point he critizied a battery commander for wasteful spending of government funds by not shooting his guns in a more competent manner.
Nope, Once AS Johnston died, the south lost the best chance in the west to conduct the war and develop junior leaders. Bragg poisoned and ruinned that army.
I agree with what you say. It's possible that the South was counting on getting all the slave states, though, which was a miscalculation. There was a star on their flag for each of the slave states. They tried to get them into the Confederacy. I visited Paducah and Fort Donnelson a few years ago and learned a lot about the war in that area. Kentucky certainly wanted to be neutral. It was a very delicate political situation. Grant's leadership and coordination with the Navy were instrumental in the capture of Fort Donnelson, which was where the confederacy started to unravel in the West. My wife is from Missouri. There was a lot of fighting there early. Col Lyons and the Germans helped to keep them in the Union. The Confederates had to evacuate most of the state because the riverine fleet, the brown water navy, could cut them off.
I've often wondered whether, assuming the South actually ever did have any hope of winning the war, their final chance for victory was Early's raid into Maryland in 1864. For a few days in early July, there was a real possibility of General Early storming into Washington, D.C., virtually unopposed. Imagine what a position of strength the Confederacy would have been in, had President Lincoln and a large part of congress been captured and held hostage, with an immediate truce being the condition for their release.
So perhaps the Battle of Monocacy, on July 9th 1864 (which delayed Early long enough for the Union to prepare a defense of the capital) was the true \decisive battle\ of the Civil War.
Oh, and then there were charming places like Andersonville, a still overlooked blot on the Confederacy, whose commandment was the only individual on either side executed for what amounted to war crimes.
There ewer Union prisons with higher death rates and they were not blockaded from food and medicine, The Andersonville trail was a total kangaroo court. The main witness claimed he was in the army and he was not . Contingents of soldiers went to Washington from the prison asking for Prisoner exchange and were rebuked. The commandant was not allowed to present a defense. etc,
Rebel prisoners in our hands are to be subjected to a treatment finding its parallels only in the conduct of savage tribes and resulting in the death of multitudes by the slow but designed process of starvation and by mortal diseases occasioned by insufficient and unhealthy food and wanton exposure of their persons to the inclemency of the weather….Congressional Globe, 38th Congress, 2nd session, 1/24/1865, pg. 381
Signed by Abe Lincoln
Lincoln was then told by General Dan Siegel that this would not work as the Confederates were starving from the blockade and distruction of farms. and in fact giving the union prisoners the same rations.
the North had no moral high ground it raped and pillaged its way through the south .Also the Border states did ot secede over slavery but over Lincolns draft to attack the Confederacy. Look at the order f secession for Virginia,,North Carolina,,Arkansas for instance.
The whiskey rebellion was a rebellion the south by orderly means under the constitution of their states met and choose to leave the Union. That secession was considered by many constitutional is attested to the Hartford convention were New England met to consider secession.
Two states Massachusetts and Virginia had in their state
constitution the prerogative to leave the Union. The Communist Chinese have in fact brought up Abraham Lincoln as an example of why they should be allowed to take over Taiwan and Tibet..
the fact remains that Lincoln was the cause of the war as he decided that states did not have the right to secede and thus invaded them. Whether he was constitutionally right is a moot point.
Also the deep south did secede over the economic issue of slavery, This is not true of the border states.. Sherman targeted Civilians, executed some. The north was as virulently racist as the south with a few exceptions Certainly Lincoln was just read the Douglas debates.Lincoln had thousands arrested without writ, he has opposing newspapers burned downed .n the blistering summer of 1861, President Lincoln began pressuring and ordering the physical shutdown of any Northern newspaper that voiced opposition to the war. These attacks were sometimes carried out by soldiers, sometimes by angry mobs under cover of darkness. Either way, the effect was a complete dismantling of the free press.
The bottom line is wars are made by the powerful and fought by the powerless. America is now a corporate plutocracy in no small part due to Lincoln.those who criticize Lee are in odds with almost every major military historian in the Western World,including Winston Churchill.
Lee faced the same problems Rommel did in Africa – an enemy able to field overwhelming numbers of men and nearly unlimited supplies. Once the war of attrition began, the South was doomed. I would argue that, in the strategic sense, Lee lost every battle he fought. Each cost him men and materials his side could not easily replace. Grant understood that; thus his methodical \grind 'em down\ (my phrase, not his) approach. I also believe that Lee was very lucky at Gettysburg in that Meade chose to stand and fight a defensive battle, rather than moving to cut off Lee's retreat and suspect supply lines. How long would Lee's formidable army have remained formidable had they been forced to live off the land, subject to constant harassment? Indeed, how long would their ammunition have lasted?
Someone, perhaps it was \Stonewall\ Jackson, is said to have wanted to march on DC immediately after First Bull Run. Hannibal's generals also wanted him to attack Rome immediately after Cannae. In both cases, the commanders chose, I think wisely, not to attack a defended city in enemy territory with a battered, tired army.
The South needed a swift, smashing \knock out punch\ in the first months to win. But I really don't think they had the wherewithal to land it, although Gen. Grant did throw out a tantalizing idea. In 1864, when Hood had Thomas bottled up in Nashville, Grant is supposed to have growled that, had he been in Hood's position, he would have left a covering force to confine Thomas and bypassed Nashville, heading for Chicago. Instead Hood forced a fight with Thomas and had his army virtually obliterated. But a race for Chicago, late in the war, with all eyes on Virginia, could have been a real game changer.
The Lee Grant myth is a tough one to crack.
Grant was a brilliant strategist, but a very capable tactical master in his own right. He consistantly out moved his opponents, every one of them in the West both tactically and strategically. Grant was very capable of out manuevering Lee as well, but the Generals of the East were under Lee's spell.
The story of Grant during the Overland Campaign whittling while the battle raged and chastizing an Officer that was in his presence worrying about Lee attacking in the rear of the Army. Grant told the Officer to focus on what the Union forces were going to do to Lee and not what Lee might do to the Union Forces.
The McClellanites (officers promoted and beholden to McClellan) were prominent members of the Army of the Potomac and Grant realized he need to do somwthing drastic to get the Army to best Lee. After Upton's assault, Grant tried to break Lees lines at the Mule Shoe on an grand Corps level. when his officer could not press their advantage, Grant tried to out move Lee locally, Grant could not get the Army to move at a speed he was accustomed to so he made his only real mistake of the campaign,Cold Harbor – a place that has forever tainted his reputation as a great commander.
No one remembers that Grant disengaged from Lee, jumped two rivers at three points to arrive at Petersburg with two full Corps facing less than 10,000 Confederate reservists, and Smith and Hancock let him down again. Lee refused to acknowledge Grant was even there for more than 24 hours.
Grant then took all of Lee's mobility away from him. Grant pins Lee to Petersburg and Richmond and just starves him out. As the seige progresses, Grant is able to replace McClellanites with Corps Commanders of his choosing, so by the end of the campaign, Meade, Sheridan and Ord as Army Commanders
Humphries, Griffin, Wright, Parke, Gibbon, Wetzel and Merritt for the Cavalry as Corps Commanders
This group was agile enough to break the seige and Five Forks and the Breakthough at whatis now Pamplin Park, mop up Petersburg and Richmond and still move quickly enough to block Lee at every turn right up to Appomattox Courthouse.
The Star Crossed Army of Tennessee (CSA) was a fine gorup of men, but even more cursed than the Army of the Potomac. It could never have accomplished that mission, and for all of Hood's abilities as a fighter, he could never have pulled off such an undertaking.
What Sherman did in Georgia and the Carolinas has never been duplicated and should stand along with Ceasar's crossing of the Rhine as a remarkable Military Operation unique in the History of Warfare.
I'm always bemused by those who argue that the Civil War was unnecessary because slavery would have died out naturally. Even if that were true, just how many years of enslaving four million and more people would they be willing to tolerate? From the inception of the nation, we have always held slavery to be worse than death. And yet Southern apologists are willing to see this hideous institution survive for decades longer, rather than see it ended by war.
Moreover, it is by no means clear that slavery would have died out naturally. Slaves worked in some Southern factories, like the Tredegar Works. Want to bet that trainloads of slaves couldn't have been headed North to work in factories there, or West to work in mines? After Dred Scott, the Federal Government had no power to prevent slaveowners from taking slaves to the territories. And there was a case working its way through the federal courts toward Roger Taney's Supreme Court which stood for the proposition that even free states could not forbid slaveowners from taking slaves into those states and working them there.
Lincoln had it right:
Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said \the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.\
I believe the South had one chance to win the war and it was to win it early, delivering a staggering blow before the North could gear up its war machine. I don't think Jackson's plan of invading the North and taking Philadelphia or New York would have had the effect many seem to think it would have — it might have had the opposite effect, making the Northerners really angry and involving the entire country in the war rather than the rural people, lower classes and immigrants who provided much of the blood and muscle of the Union Army. But if it had happened early, while Lincoln paced and asked, \Where are they? Where are they?\ as he waited for the state troops to arrive, it might have forced an agreement.
As for Grant (whose autobiography is the best I've ever read), he was a fine tactician but a brilliant strategist, while Lee was the opposite, at best. Lee certainly had the Army of the Potomac dazzled, but I can't help but to think it was Little Mac's incompetence reflected as glory that mesmerized them more than anything Lee did, a hypnotic trance Grant later had great difficulty snapping them out of.
I find most of the comments here excellent and thoughtful, by the way — they've ignited reconsiderations, always entertaining.
Here are two things I recently learned about Lincoln that help explain why there was a war:
1. To make more efficient use of his campaign money in 1860 he didn't campaign at all in the South. Perhaps had he campaigned there Southerners might have disliked him less. But then again perhaps he wouldn't have won the election.
2. Lincoln believed that no Southern states would secede from the Union if he was elected in 1860. Whoops! That was a big miscalculation. But Southern states had been talking about secession for decades, so what was different this time?
Lincoln did not campaign at all during the general election, he allowed surrogates to do speeches for him and he was not on the ballot at all in most Southern states.
And lets not forget, at this time, South Carolina which threatened secession under their home grown Andrew Jackson, did not have an election, a committee made the determination of the electors for President.
Why was there a war, the was unstoppable movement to the abolishment of the institution of slavery
The South won.
War is politics using other methods, and the obverse is true: What were he goals of the South? States rights, black economic and political subservience, a heirarchian agricultural society, and a "Southern culture" that tried to perpetuate that of England in the 1700s. Once Reconstruction ended, the South accomplishd all of those until the Seond Civil War was finally won, with the passage of the Federal – "the Union" – Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1964 and the Voting Rights Act. Thousands died in the 90 years after Reconstruction, and the Battles of Mongomery and Birmingham were every bit as critical as Gettysburg and Peterburg. For nearly a century, the South achieved its primary goals, and even now "states rights" and "affirmative action" and the Federal Government are powerful political issues.
The South won, and has not been fully defeated even today. Those who believe in James Earl Ray know I'm right; we honor Martin Luther King as a warrior, and we hope – we HOPE – that he won.