The Confederacy did put up a hell of a fight for a number of years.
Outside help was not coming, but as a cohesive unit the Confederacy was bigger and much more unified than the Thirteen Colonies - bear in mind Washington and the other patriots didn’t even have solid support from many of their own people, such as they were. The Confederacy was one of the largest areas of land a power has ever sought to take by force in a single war up to that point in history, and it was, for a variety of reasons, geographically difficult to assault.
Tactically, the Confederacy has as many successes as failures; it was strategically that they failed. Even granting they could not match the North’s industrial output, they did not, as the Union did, come around to a modern concept of how to organize and fight a war on a continental scale. (In any event it’s not like Confederate soldiers often went without guns or ammo; they actually did remarkably well in that regard.) The political nonsense that plagued both armies at the beginning of the war was done away with on the Union side in favor of a proper, modern command structure and a national war-making strategy. The Confederacy never really did that.
Indeed – early on, awareness of he geographic challenges that would face any invading union forces may have contributed to a certain complacency on the part of
Confederate leadership. It was widely felt in the South that “we are too big to conquer.”
Outside help makes all the difference in the world. The US colonies held out early on because Britain didn’t have much assets at first. If the colonists got no help from France and Spain then they are doomed.
A better comparison would be Japan and the US during WW II: both countries were largely slogging it out on their own and both were committed. The overwhelming economic might of the US was irresistible. The South likewise had no chance.
That may be, but it was hardly lost on the South that many of its critical cities (read: industrial and commercial centers) were located on the edges of that geography. Tennessee and Virginia were vulnerable to attack, and the coast was a major weakness. Even if they had such illusions, after the first year of real fighting the Confederates had virtually ceded the coast apart from key strongpoints, and faced Union control in important regions of those two states as well. The Union Navy was able to take control of ports more or less at will; the limiting factor was simply the time and resources involved in getting a fleet and transports together. And Richmond itself nearly fell in that first year.
Of all the southern commanders, Joe Johnston was the major proponent of Fabian tactics, but he had a contentious relationship with Richmond and Jeff Davis was 100% for field battles, no matter how costly or self-defeating. Overall, southerners seemed to prefer a gloriously loss, much like the Romans in Fabius’ day.
This. Not because I know much about it, but, my history professor explained it plausibly, and I have, of course, forgot everything that he said.
However, not only the battle, but the hit in morale combined with the still strong feeling of a lot of people that the war wasn’t worth it to save the Union, and could possibly have swayed the upcoming election.
I don’t consider myself any sort of expert on Civil War history but I’ve read Shelby Foote, watched Ken Burns, and a been exposed to a number of resources over the years.
I don’t think a single battle could have saved the CSA. The Civil War was, from the South’s point of view, a means of trying to establish its autonomy from the US. It was far more important for the US to ‘win’ militarily than the CSA. The CSA merely needed to win through attrition and to exhaust the will of the Northern electorate to support the North’s campaign to preserve the original Union.
The best chance for the South to achieve success was probably in the first 12-24 months of the war. There were probably quite a few in the Union who were sympathetic to Southern grievances. Perhaps some of those might not have cared about preserving the Union. The point is, the people who were indifferent to issues like slavery and state’s rights probably felt the war was a wasteful exercise and might have felt a sense of urgency in bringing it to a close under the right circumstances. If they could seriously threaten or even capture Washington, and if they could win a brutal battle such as Antietam, that definitely would have had a tremendous psychological impact.
The great problem, however, is that the South didn’t win at Antietam. And they didn’t capture Washington. And they probably lost their most capable general in Thomas Stonewall Jackson. But a secondary problem is that Northern sentiment changed. An animosity toward the South developed, and it intensified over time. The battle at Gettysburg also allowed Lincoln the opportunity to turn the Civil War into a moral crusade. At that point, the South absolutely had no chance. The resolve of the North had reached a point of no-return. With its limited but still just barely sufficient resources, and against an indecisive and divided opponent, the South had the capacity to force a negotiated end to the war. Against a Union of states that were by now embittered and inspired to destroy the Confederacy, and with the South’s resources now dangerously exhausted, the South had no chance.
I don’t precisely disagree with anything you wrote. However, even that’s over-complicating things. The Confederacy never had a coherent strategy; their goal was to win the war by winning random battles, whether or not those battles had anything to do with the war itself. Lee, for all his battlefield acumen, was utterly lost in the world of strategy, unable to weigh his costs or even define what victory would be.
Winning the war had little to do with any of the battles. Those were merely temporary obstacles in the way of carrying out a strategy.
Just barely, McClellan might have won the 1864 election if Atlanta hadn’t fallen. That and the subsequent march through Georgia gave the Union some badly needed tangible evidence of progress when morale was shaky. However, the outcome there wasn’t really the result of a single battle but of the South’s untenable strategic position. Let’s just say, if the South had had near-miraculous good luck in maintaining the supply lines into Atlanta for four or five more months.
I wouldn’t say the luck required was incredible. Sherman’s own supply lines were long and exposed to raids. His army was larger on paper, but in practice his actual combat force was none too large for the job at hand.
I’m no expert, either, but AIUT, Lincoln was making plans to be turned out after his first term of office, to me that hardly speaks of universal Northern resolve.