Hypothetically, if time travelers had given General Lee and other major confederate generals intel on exactly what their opponents were doing, could the South have plausibly won the war? The time travelers are forbidden from granting any direct material support : no weapons, fire support, supplies, etc. They may only give Intel. Assume they are insubstantial ghosts that only the general can see.
I’m aware that there must have been past threads on this on this website. I’d appreciate a link if this has already been throughly hashed.
What I am really asking is if the defeat of the Confederacy was so certain that even perfect decisions made by the Southern generals could not overcome the material advantages of the Union, why did they even bother fighting?
Are you kidding? The vast majority of posters today on the Dope don’t understand this, with all the benefits of hindsight. It was certainly not obvious in 1861. And many Southerners - plus a smaller percentage of Northerners - never really believed that the Union would fight to the end for slaves.
For that matter, why are the protestors fighting in Egypt right as I type, even though they will be cut down with far greater assurance?
With perfect knowledge of how the war played out in our timeline, yeah, I’d say the South could have won.
Although the first time the South wins instead of losing that throws you into an alternate timeline. Do we get new, updated future history data?
Easier than winning the war would be to have not fought it, if the time travelers could go back a bit.
Gradual emancipation, subsidized by the federal government, with freed slaves moving West might just have been viable in a less hostile climate.
Information support would have made the war longer, but that doesn’t help the South: The longer the war went, the worse it was for them.
EDIT:
That would have been absolutely unacceptable to the South. The reason that they succeeded, and the reason why they attacked the North, was to preserve slavery against just such proposals.
Because it was uneconomical- they could have been bought out for the right price.
Maybe. With knowledge of how it actually played out for them in the end.
Can’t afford to send them all to Africa- but if we send them out to the western frontier, they’ll be far away and most will die quickly.
Yeah, some would say that. Most weren’t so hardcore, not until the last few years as tension grew.
Go back 20, 30 years, you could totally change the situation. Greed trumps hate every time.
Came in to post Shelby Foote’s quote from Ken Burns’ The Civil War, but in looking for it I found this argument made by Gary W. Gallagher, a professor of American history at Pennsylvania State University, that the South wasn’t doomed from the start, and that the North’s advantage in resources could have been overcome through enough tactical successes.
The South had some very good generals and with better communications could certainly made the war so costly to the North that many of them might have undermined the war effort to he point where some sort of “accommodation” might have been reached.
Foote is correct. Gallagher is dead wrong. Except about Northern resources and manpower overwhelming Lee - which is Foote’s entire point! The war was not about the military or tactics or bravery. Battles were, certainly. But the war was about economics and industry, neither or which Gallagher mentions on his page, partly because he’s examining why they fought not why they lost. The longer the war went, the less chance the South had. Everything depended on the North giving up as quickly as possible, not in prolonging the fighting. The North could lose only by surrendering. Which wasn’t an option under Lincoln.
Now if the time traveler has suggested an earlier assassination, who knows? But I hate silly counterfactuals. You can say anything you want that doesn’t contradict the laws of physics and there is no comeback, except another counterfactual.
Agreed. They could have. I think, in addition to perfect recon, if they also had 20/20 hindsight as to the overall strategic set-up – if they had a better grip on what it would take for the North to lose heart – they could more effectively fight the kind of war directly aimed at Northern morale.
The OP posits satellite or drone recon, as opposed to, say, taking a history book back in time. But either violation of history could be remarkably effective, if it is taken seriously by the right people. If, on the other hand, it is presented to the usual collection of dolts, hell, they’d probably just wave it off. “We don’t need this; we’ve got it well in hand, thank you!”
It’s hard to outwit, outmaneuver, and outfight the North when you don’t have bullets, sufficient rations, or transportation infrastructure.
If greed trumped hate, they’d never have developed the Peculiar Institution in the first place. Slavery just doesn’t make economic sense. At the very least, the alliance of hate and ignorance managed to trump greed.
I assume you mean the cotton harvester since the cotton gin was invented on the 1790s and was the main reason why slavery exploded in the first place. Before the gin, it was a pain in the ass to separate cotton fibers from the seeds so there wasn’t much incentive to plant it. After the gin, there were large plantations full of cotton that had to be picked by hand and taken to the gin for processing.
