(emphasis added)
How is “attacking Washington, D.C.” not a military strategy? For that matter, ruling out “seek outside intervention” seems like a rather cramped view of strategy as well.
The south should have sued for peace after the Battle of Bull Run. At that point they held the upper hand militarily. They had Washington D.C. by the throat and the “posibility” that they might take it would have been a very strong advantage. Remember, the emanacipation proclamation wasn’t even enacted until 1863 and states rights was more of an issue than salvery at the beginning of the war.
Some of you have asked why I ruled out “seek outside intervention” and “attacking Washington D.C.” as solutions to the military challenge: How could the South have won the Civil War?
Allow me to clarify.
I have never been satisfied with the idea that if you have attack, besiege or capture a country’s capital city, you have defeated it in war. This is one of the objectives in the game Risk, which allows you to lose every battle, concede almost every territory, lose almost your entire army – but if you capture the enemy’s capital, they surrender. This hardly seems likely, and history has borne this out:
The Nazis captured Warsaw, Paris and numerous other capitals, but lost WWII.
The British burned down the White House, but failed to win the War of 1812.
Rome was invaded and sacked long before Hannibal attacked with elephants, and the country went on to flourish for centuries.
Therefore, in this question, which is meant to be entertaining, challenging and thought-provoking, I am asking you to avoid the most obvious solution. If you can think of no other solution, feel free to stop posting.
Secondly, I agree that gaining recognition, assistance and military aid from Britain or France would have almost certainly guaranteed victory for the Confederacy. Such a solution would have come about through diplomacy, and not necessarily tied to victories on the battlefield. For example, our nation allied with a failing government in South Vietnam, and despite loss after loss, we continued our support of that country. The same with Taiwan, which in no way represents the 1 billion people of mainland Communist China, but we recognize it because we believe in the cause of freedom.
Therefore, since achievement of foreign recognition would be a * political * solution, I have asked you to remove it from our * military * discussion. If this displeases you, feel free to begin a thread titled “How could the South have achieved foreign recognition?”
To everyone else, past and future, who has considered this question from a military and strategic angle, I thank you for your comments.
To those who for some reason dislike this discussion, I thank you for your silence.
JasonGFirst, I wouldn’t have picked Richmond as a capital. It had advantages…Virginia was the biggest state and needed to be defended, but it also meant that the south was committed to the eastern theater, and pinned down troops in Virginia. I probably would have picked Atlanta…it’s centrally located, a railway hub, far enough south and inland that it can’t easily be captured, and is the northernmost point that the Appalachians can be crossed. Then, I would have attempted a static defense in the east, and attempted to advance in the west. With more troops and a better general than Braxton Bragg, the invasion of Kentucky had a good chance to succeed. This would have put pressure on the midwestern states, large portions of which, such as Southern Indiana, weren’t very supportive of the war anyway. It would also have allowed regular troops into Missouri to support the confederate raiders there. Jason, I know that you don’t seem to put much stock in the taking of cities, and you’re probably right about that, but if you take a city, you get its industrial capacity, or at least deny it to the enemy, and also raise morale on your side and lower it on the enemy. That being said, my goals would have been Paducah, because of the railroads there, Cairo, because of its importance in controlling the Mississippi, and St. Louis, because of the supplies stockpiled there, and also because taking it would have moved Missouri solidly into the confederate camp. If those three cities could be taken, the United States probably wouldn’t have sued for peace, but the dynamics of the war would have changed. The president and many of his advisors being midwesterners, there would have been stepped up pressure on them to defend the Ohio valley, and troops would have been shifted there. The demoralized and sympathetic counties of southern Indiana wouldn’t provide much resistance, and a strong push in the west would have protected the Mississippi. It also might have discouraged the landings the Union made in New Orleans and in other places on the coast. As it was, because the Confederacy did not pursue an aggressive strategy, the Union was able to free up troops for naval landings. With more pressure being put on the U.S., there would be fewer troops to move south.
How could the south have won?
Easy, force a settlement in the first 6 months, 12 months at the latest. Once the Union was in for the long haul it was all over. All of the figures are from Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
North South
Free Population 20M 6M
Army size at Peak 900,000 465,000
“Factories” in 1860 110,000 18,000
Miles of Rail Track 22,000 6,000
Kennedy makes several other comparisons such as the fact the Pennsylvania produced 18 times as much iron as the entire Confederacy, and that New York’s GDP was 4 times greater than VA, AL, LA, and MS combined. By '64 the Union had built 671 warships including 236 steam powered ships. This compares to a few dozen for the South (although they also impressed many ships from private merchants). What this means is although at the start of the war Navy power was roughly equal by the time of the '64 elections virtual nothing of size or consequence was moving in or out of the South. In addition the North had a strong banking system and access to the British and Dutch. This allowed them to borrow to pay for the war. In contrast the South had no overseas credit and no banking system of their own to speak of. So when they ran out of money the only way to raise money was to over-print paper money which led to a run away economy. In addition the south ruined its economy by pulling men from the fields in their largely agrarian economy. The Union was able to maintain an army roughly twice as large through most of the war and still grow their economy. In addition during the war 800,000 new immigrants arrived in the North Vs virtually none in the South.
All this means that if the North decided that it was going to pursue the war to the bitter end the south would lose.
Kennedy like so many other historians believes without outside help such as the border states (Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri) or a foreign power such as Britain or France the South had no long term hope of winning the war once they were unable to force the issue in '61. Unfortunately the border states were marginally pro-union and were overrun and occupied before they could have accomplished anything in case. As for foreign intervention the British were the only nation that could have challenged the Union Navy and:
To sum up. The South’s only chances of winning were an early political settlement, possibly forced by early military victories, or by hoping the North would get tired and go home.
As we all should recognize, a staggering amount of both scholarship and of hot air has gone in to the question of what the South could have done to win its independence that it didn’t do. The consistent scholarly answer has been, not much.
There are two problems. The first is the South’s ability to successfully fight a prolonged war with an industrial state. The second is the North’s political will to fight a prolonged war to preserve the Union. Clearly, the South had the ability to fight a short war, for up to two years, that is through the summer of 1863. Likewise the North clearly had the political will to fight through the summer of 1863. The cheese became binding in the third year of the war with Grant’s Wilderness-Petersburg Campaign, Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign, and the Presidential election of 1864. The South was not able to mount a significant offensive action after the summer of 1863, with the notable exception of Hood’s Tennessee Campaign after the fall of Atlanta, and that was an unmitigated disaster. The 1864 election was a referendum on Lincoln’s prosecution of the war. The events of 1864 demonstrated the North’s will to fight the matter out to the bitter end and the South’s growing military and economic impotence. Once Lee was forced into his lines at Petersburg, Atlanta had fallen, and Hood’s Army of the Tennessee had been broken at Nashville, except for the killing the war was over.
In terms of a political solution, political contacts had been going on all through the war. These efforts were doomed, however, because the North would not accept and settlement that involved Southern independence, and after 1862, did not also emancipate the slaves, but the South would not accept any settlement that did not guarantee Southern independence.
It is pretty apparent that the South’s only hope of independence rested with European intervention, but the idea of France or Britain fielding an army to serve in North America is pretty far fetched. 40 years later Britain was hard pressed to field an army for the Boer War in South Africa. Napoleon III had his hands full with his adventure in Mexico and with a resurgent Prussia.
Mark Twain once said that the South died of an overdose of Sir Walter Scott. He may have been close to right. Southern independence was an ideal that could only be realized in there was a suspension of reality.
Captain Amazing, Bartman, Mr. Gelding:
Thank you for your thoughtful and scholarly replies.
Others?
JasonGNo matter what, the South would have required a near-miraculous series of fortunate events in order to even have a fighting chance. A few practical suggestions:
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Recognition of the Primacy of the Defence: Neither side in the Civil War fully appreciated exactly how vulnerable the line of bayoneted muskets had become in the face of advances such as the repeater and the Minie Ball. By the end of the war the CSA was adept at forcing Northern troops to attack prepared positions. Had the CSA committed themselves to protected defence from the beginning, they may have been able to prolong the fighting and reduce their own casualties long enough for the North to lose its resolve. This only would have been effective in combination with…
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Greater Influence on Mobile, Irregular Forces: Names like Mosby and Forrest still carry a lot of weight these days, and for good reason. A combination of army-in-being with irregular forces helped win the American Revolution, and helped Americans lose the war in Vietnam. It forces your enemy to be strong everywhere, while the irregulars can afford to be relatively weak. Politically, irregular forces carry far more weight per soldier than do regular armies.
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Vastly Increased Industrial Output: The South had but one modern steel mill, the Tredegar Iron Works. I don’t know if it could even have been done, but had Tredegar been converted into a factory which made other factory machinery, the industrial output of the South could have been better dispersed and greatly increased. As it was, the South faced steadily decreasing numbers of weapons, rolling stock, and railroad miles.
(Interesting aside: Professor James I. Robertson once claimed in a lecture that rifled musket production at Tredegar revolved around one man, a master craftsman whose personal efforts resulted in far better than expected output. Union brass had him assassinated, and rifle production plummeted. Anyone know anything more about this?)
- A Much More Powerful Navy: The Virginia proved for one day that ironclad raiders could play havoc with wooden-walled fleets. Greater numbers of such ships could have been used to temporarily open ports to external trade, and might have complicated the Anaconda Plan possibly beyond workability. It’s not as hopeless as it might seem. The capability to build and launch an ironclad from any port would have required the Union to guard all ports with ironclads of their own. Just as irregular forces could have augmented the land forces, ironclads could have proven to be a destabilizing influence on the balance of naval power during the war.
All of the above suggestions come courtesy of 20-20 hindsight. Only a few visionaries of the sort necessary to bring about such changes actually found themselves in positions where they could change things. Nearly all were part of the Union, not the CSA. That in itself may be indicative of why the South lost.