Let’s put aside the question of whether the Confederacy * should * have won, and look at the question purely in terms of military strategy.
First, I want to take out the two most obvious solutions. If Britain or France had recognized the South as a nation, that would have brought about an end to the war. Since that relies on outside intervention, it doesn’t really satisfy the question.
Secondly, what Lee attempted – capturing Baltimore or Washington – would probably have sent Lincoln to the bargaining table. But I’ve never liked this Risk-game scenario, in which the South can lose every battle but one, lose half their territory, but if they encircle the capital and cause a panic, they win by default. After all, the British burning of the White House in 1812 didn’t prevent that war from ending in a tie.
So: how to win? An agressive, Lee-type offensive in Virginia? Invasion of Ohio? Breaking the blockade and holding New Orleans? Or something the generals never thought of?
And if you think the question is too easy, then try offering another answer – but this time starting in the fall of 1864.
I haven’t studied the Civil War for quite a while, but IMO the South did not have to win the war. They only had to not lose. I think that had Lee not tried to capture Baltimore and Washington, had not fought the Battle of Gettysburg, then the South might have been able to hold its borders. If it could do that, then the North would probably have grown tired of its losses and tried to negotiate a peace.
I’ll have to agree with Harry Turtledove and say that they could have won had they been supplied with AK-47s by white supremacists from 150 years in the future.
The one thing Karl Marx was right about in his farrago of poisonous rubbish, is that “All wars are fought for economic reasons”.
Slavery, for the goal of harvesting cotton, is that reason.
During the 1860s, a minor British Civil Servant in India, a telegrapher, took up the hobby of breeding plants. By the middle of the war, he had developed a strain of Indian cotton that produced the same high quality fiber that Southern cotton did.
This would have destroyed “King Cotton”, & the South’s economy with it.
If the South won, it still would have lost.
Within 25 years, I believe the South would have re-united with the Union. In physical & economic ruin.
The South probably couldn’t have won solely on the battlefield. Capturing Washington after a big defeat at Gettyburg wasn’t likely (there were plenty of troops there, with plenty of time to man the barricades), but even if Lee managed, it was unlikely the North would have sued for peace. Remember, at the same time as Gettysburg, Grant had captured Vicksburg, splitting the Confederacy.
The South was at a big disadvantage, with a agricultural economy and a smaller population (even including slaves) than the North. Recognition and help from England and France could have helped, but once the Emancipation Proclamation was announced, that was extremely unlikely. English textile workers were so opposed to slavery (Britain took the lead in trying to stamp out the slave trade) that they didn’t object to sitting idle while the war was fought. It was unlikely that Britain would have intervened militarily in any case, since the Northern army was the largest in the world at that time.
Had the South fought a purely defensive war. After all it was the North that invaded the South. They could have held out until the North couldn’t take it anymore. Look up the North’s casualty figures for the last year of the war. That is what Davis wanted to do.
Although taking Washington early in the war would have helped considerably.
No, a defensive war wouldn’t have done it. With Vicksburg and New Orleans gone the CSA was split in half.
Lee had the proper analysis that the only real means for victory was a decisive victory over the union army in the east. Had McClellan not gotten his hands on those plans and Lee and Jackson gotten to set the table for a battle on their terms I don’t think I’d be a citizen of the USA right now.
But, once the Army of Northern Virginia was plastered at Gettysburg it became a true, play for time losing battle.
New Orleans was lost early. All Vicksburg did was give the control of the Mississippi to the federals. While I agree that the South needed the Mississippi…it was more just the fact that they lost the battle that mattered more.
In Guns of the South Nazis with a time machine send 100,000 AK 47’s back in time to help the South win the Civil War so that a greatly weakened and constantly at war US would be unable to intervene in German plans to conquer Europe, and more than a little out of a sense of brotherhood.
Why bring race into it? We are talking the Civil War here. And, yes, I would think it a safe assumption that someone using a time machine to aid the South in the Civil War was a white supremecist.
[Harry Turtledove hijack]
Actually, they were white supremacist Afrikaners, not Nazis. (Well, maybe you could even call them Neo-Nazi Afrikaners, but they weren’t German.) And IIRC, the main motive wasn’t to weaken the U.S. so it would lose World War II or something; they wanted a new “White Man’s Paradise” homeland for themselves.
[/Harry Turtledove hijack]
My bad. I somehow combined the plot of Guns of the South with another story in which Nazis do help the South win for just the reasons I stated. Can’t find the story right now (its in an anthology of stories of alternate history, and I don’t have the time or inclination to dig it out) or I’d give the name.
IIRC, the basic idea was that you the Nazis sent back advisors to help the commanders during the major battles. The ingenious thing was that, often, the South still lost, but the future Nazis would look at the new history, and send back the new information to the advisor. Repeat until the South wins the battle, or at least inflicts much greater losses on the North. It gives the South just enough of a bump to effectively secede and secure its borders, and gives the Nazis an ally in North America during the world wars, effectively keeping the US out of both world wars, and leaving Europe split between Germany and the USSR, with the UK still independant, but reduced to a third-world country.
Other interesting effects: With the US military focused on maintaining a hostile border with the CSA ala North/South Korea, the military support for the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom never materializes, and Hawaii never becomes a US territory, let alone a state and a staging area for the US Navy. The US never enters the Pacific war, giving all of the Pacific to the Japanese Empire without much real opposition, allowing Japan to focus much more of it’s might on the war in Asia, and givng much of Eastern Asia to the Japanese.
The basic idea is that if the US had been split into two hostile nations in the 1800’s, it could have had disasterous consequences for much more of the world than just the US, and for a long, long time afterwards.
As with any battle or war, much of the outcome is determined by the three B’s (beans, bullets, and bandages) and how effectively they’re managed. In most situations that are open to any kind of speculation, combat troops and equipment are more or less of comparable quality and quantity - and that holds true for this.
Given the South’s suitability to agriculture, the industries critical to maintaining an extended conflict simply did not exist. If there was to be any hope of “winning” (or, as someone mentioned above, not losing) the South could not afford to become involved in anything resembling a war of attrition. Once it became clear that the CSA was not going to win within the first year, the entire strategy of the South’s generals should have shifted to defense.
Offensive actions should have been mostly limited to short, well-planned attacks against strategically significant targets. Operations designed to affect the morale of friendly or enemy troops should only have been considered when it was clear there was little or no chance of failure. Identifying targets should have been no real problem. IMO, the South had the best scouts (e.g., Stuart’s cavalry) and it simply amazes me that they didn’t exploit this advantage to it’s fullest. Net result: By striking only when and where they had a distinct advantage, the CSA might have been able to extend the war long enough for the North to finally tire of the carnage and sue for peace.
And here’s an odd thought for you to ponder: Some of you might remember that President Lincoln was rarely happy with anything done by the Army of the Potomac. If the president had had his way and actually * found * a General of the Army of the Potomac who wasn’t content to pussyfoot around Washington, then General Lee might have had an opportunity to render it ineffective in a battle in Virginia - instead of stretching * his own * supply line into Pennsylvania and failing at Gettysburg.
Obviously there are too many “what if’s” to even * dream * of cramming them all into a SDMB post, but it all boils down to logistics.
No, thanks. I’m a Yankee, proud of it, and am quite satisfied that the Confederacy failed. However, if the material resources of the USA and CSA had been equal, I believe ‘Johnny Reb’ would have had better than even odds in a toe-to-toe slugfest.
Calm down. There are many reasons for speculating about “what ifs” and alternate histories. In addition to the sheer intellectual pleasure of playing armchair general (or armchair king or armchair president), it can also help to understand actual history. “How could the South have won?” can simply be another way of asking “Why did the South lose?” Military history is certainly a valuable and useful discipline in its own right.
There have actually been a couple of “What If?” threads about what the world would be like if the South had won–see What would the Confederate States of America be like today? and What if…–and the consensus seemed to be that the world would be a worse place, for a whole variety of reasons, some of which have already been alluded to by Number Six.
So, I asked how to win the Civil War and we mostly discuss slavery, cotton and time travel.
Perhaps I should rephrase the question.
You are commander-in-chief of the Confederate armies in March of 1861. What do you do, * strategically, *to bring about a successful conclusion to the conflict? Forget outside intervention or attacking Washington D.C.
Militarily, not economically or politically, how do you win?
JasonG
Did I stutter, or are you searching for a few ** tactical ** solutions to plug into my aforementioned defensive strategy? The critical point in all of this is that the South oculd ill afford an extended conflict and in order to win, they needed to realize this fact much sooner than they did. Desperation and bravery will only carry the day so many times.