If the Confederate States had been supplied with real time intel from drones and satellite feeds, the North would have lost every battle they fought. Game over. It would just have been a matter of time as to when the North would finally realize that they simply could not win.
Most scouting was done by skirmishers and scouts. Lee depended heavily on cavalry officers like J.E.B. Stuart. Stuart rode out and about and returned with troop movements and concentrations. That could take days (or weeks) and, of course, Fereral troops didn’t stay where they were last seen.
Period maps were far from perfect. Certainly no match for satellite images. The North did make better use of the telgraph. Yawn. Field Commanders communicated thru runners, horseback, and flags. Runner. Stonewall Jackson’s brigade is somewhere to the West. FIND HIM. Tell to advance now. Tell him to concentrate on the enemies right flank. With drones and satcom, there would be no need to waste all that time sending a runner. The South would have known where to concentrate its own troops, when to advance, when to withdraw, where the stores were kept, how many troops were guarding what, and the best routes to encircle and trap opposing forces. Failed attacks like Pickett’s charge would never have taken place and Custer would never have become a General.
The North assumed that it could win battles if it could just come up with a better plan or better commanders but NO army expects to lose every battle. It would be like boxing someone while you’re the only one wearing a blind fold.
If the North had somehow held on until the 1864 election, President McClellan would have ended hostilities ASAP.
Let’s take this one step further. The Confederate army would have been unstoppable. I believe the United States would have been re-united, by force, under the “Confederate States of America” banner. President Davis and the CSA Congress would have been the ones dictating the terms of surrender.
In the beginning, slavery was not about hate. It was all about greed. In the short run, it does make economic sense, for certain agricultural products. Cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane are all more efficient on large plantations, where economies of scale can overwhelm the labor issues. Even after slavery ended, many Caribbean countries still developed vast gaps between the rich owners and the poor laborers, simply because the economies of scale squeezed out everybody in the middle.
In order to enslave someone, you do not need hatred; you simply need indifference. The Russian and Chinese emperors never hated their corvée laborers. They just didn’t care.
As for the thread topic: There was a non-trivial peace movement in the North. If the South could persuade Northern voters that the war was not worth the effort, it was theoretically possible that the North might have given up. A few more Southern victories might have won the propaganda war, and made the Northern economic power irrelevant. (Much like Viet Nam, or Afghanistan.)
Excellent point. If slavery wasn’t economically feasible in the South, it would have vanished long before 1860. No one spends a century losing money. Places like the South Carolina indigo fields (their major crop) had work conditions so brutal that you couldn’t hire people to work there, so slaves were the only way to go (indigo is the main reason why South Carolina was so committed to slavery – the crop was extremely lucrative).
I’m pretty shocked that there are quite a few people who are arguing that the Union still would have won the war even if the South had literally perfect intelligence on Union forces. That just doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.
With imagery intelligence, the Confederacy would have to be stupendously incompetent to ever be put in a position where it had to fight a battle under sub-optimal conditions. The intelligence would be strategically very useful, and tactically decisive. I just have a hard time seeing how an army that is at least competent, but has near-total awareness of the enemy, would fail to overwhelm a better enemy without such intelligence. It’s called a “force multiplier” for a reason.
From Publishers Weekly: Guns of the South, Harry Turtledove
The Confederates win the Civil War with aid from South African time travelers in this “what-if” tale. Using a time machine, Andrew Rhoodie and his cadre of white supremacists from A.D. 2014 :eek: join the rebels and supply them with AK-47 assault rifles. Rhoodie’s “America Will Break” brotherhood hopes to foster a haven for slavery and extreme racism that will last into succeeding centuries. Thus armed, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s troops are soon victorious, and Lincoln agrees to divide the nation…
Ah! I think that was done in the Twilight Zone: Season 3, Episode 11 Still Valley (24 Nov. 1961)
I can certainly envision a situation in which the south wins the war and then loses the peace. But everything I’ve read about battles in the days before radio indicates that imperfect knowledge and communication is ENORMOUSLY important and impactful, so I have to agree that with competent generalship (which the South clearly had) and perfect information, particularly if you give them a few weeks or months to practice and brainstorm how to really take advantage of it, the South would basically never lose a battle. And unless every person in the North is then infected with a “we will never ever ever ever settle or surrender or have a treaty or anything, nothing other than total victory is acceptable” bug, the North will eventually just give up due to the staggering cost and the psychological burden.
I’m not sure that any one or two battles going the other way, even Gettysburg, would change the outcome of the war. But ALL the battles? Definitely.
[QUOTE=Pine Fresh Scent, quoting Professor Gallagher]
…As long as Lee’s army continued to outwit, outmaneuver and outfight the Federals, rebel losses elsewhere could be absorbed.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not sure if the good Professor is being quoted out of context here, but on the face of it this statement makes absolutely no sense. In fact, what happened is precisely that Lee continued winning tactical victories, but the “country” he was fighting for was being destroyed everywhere Lee wasn’t. While Lee was mostly winning in 1862 and 1863, Grant was out West consuming the Confederacy in a string of gigantic strategic victories. By the time Grant and Lee were face to face Lee was basically just defending Virginia; his doom had been sealed on fronts he never fought on.
That said, the idea that this was entirely the product of weight of numbers is not true. In the West, the Confederates were badly, and in some cases comically, out-generaled by Grant and his finer subordinates like Sherman, Thomas, et al. Without Grant, it is not clear the war in the Western theatre goes the way it does, especially not Vicksburg, which was a work of stupendous genius and beyond the comprehension of most military thinkers of the time. There was no Lee in the west after Johnston died at Shiloh.
Actually, it was the cotton gin that made slavery profitable - before the gin, turning a cotton ball into strands was done with two paddles covered with wire bristles - one slave could do maybe a pound a day - hardly worth the price of a slave - the gin could process an entire day’s worth of picking - now you can put slaves to good use raising enough cotton to feed the gins. Slavery boomed.
The “perfect advice” would have been either:
Best:
Never fire the first shot. Firing on Ft Sumter doomed the CSA
Go for it and hope:
The first battle was an absolute rout for the south, on the outskirts of DC - had they kept going, they could have possibly captured Washington then sue for peace from a position of strength - at least Atlanta and, especially, Charleston, would have been MUCH better off.
Yeah, you’re the second person in the thread to point out that I was wrong about the cotton gin.
But you lose points because you didn’t give me the correct answer (the cotton harvester) like **USCDiver **did.
Having perfect intelligence is important in battle-planning, yes. But its importance is directly related to how much you can react to it and how much the other side gives a damn.
By 1864 Grant was really at the point where his grand strategy was 'Fuck ‘em, I’m heading straight at Lee and I don’t care if he knows it. I’m burying that rebel bastard in bodies until one of us runs out and it won’t be me.’
Paraphrased, of course. But Lee knowing exactly where Grant was going to be at all times wouldn’t do him any good if that’s exactly what Grant wanted. Lee had a choice of defending Richmond or saving his army. Good luck with that.
Early in the game it might well have been very useful. Trying to force a quick victory and bringing the US to the bargaining table would be the only way for the CSA to gain its independence. But after that didn’t happen in the first six months it wasn’t ever going to. I suppose a complete rout of Meade at Gettysburg that would allow Lee to move on Baltimore or Philadelphia - and perhaps occupy either - would have made suing for peace a higher priority. But even that is a maybe.
Maybe they are anti-Nazi.
South avoids war, nation remains whole, becomes international power earlier.
US defeats Spain and becomes a major player, gets ahead of Germany and stays there.
WWI peters out into the nothing it always should have been, and WWII never happens.
Hitler is a famous, but troubled artist.
What do you mean, “give a damn?” Does Grant have to care that his supply lines are destroyed, or that he is never able to execute a flanking maneuver without a perfectly timed and delivered counterattack? Because that’s what great intelligence would give Grant’s opponent, and “caring” about it doesn’t even seem to enter into it.
Given the code of honor that 19th Century Professional Military Officers subscribed to…would Lee have accepted the advice?
The “Marble Model Of The Confederacy”?
Would he have seen it as dishonorable?
Don’t laugh: the Past is a foreign country, & mindsets were different. Very different.
I don’t think so. If you have superior intelligence and a smaller force, you can just dance around out of reach of the enemy and pick off important strategic targets.
Small armies move faster than large ones, so the South doesn’t have to fight any battles it doesn’t want to. And well-fed armies move way faster than ones that keep having their supply lines cut.
War hasn’t been about who has more bodies to throw at each other since guns were invented. All things being equal, the larger army has an advantage. But I’d bet on an army with magic perfect intelligence against an army 20 times its size without it.
I disagree, obviously. Even with perfect intelligence as to Grant’s movements, Lee’s choice was confronting him and risk destruction or avoiding him and losing Richmond. I think Grant would have settled for Richmond - and the seizure of the Tredegar Iron Works - as a secondary prize for its ability to damage the CSA’s ability to manufacture worked metal, ammunition and rail tracks.
So Lee’s choice would be to confront Grant and be overwhelmed or avoid Grant and lose his country. It takes far more than good intel to win a conflict, it also takes logistics, supplies and a distribution network. The best-informed army in the world will lose if it gets no bullets.
