The Civil War reminds me of a football game played in bad weather, between two greatly mismatched teams.
The stronger team fumbles every third play but often recovers its own fumble. Most of the game is played in the weaker team’s end of the field, but occassionally thru luck or surprise, the weaker team recovers field position.
It’s only till the middle of the fourth quarter the stronger team firmly establishing its dominance.
Thank you for jump-starting my morning and giving me a damn good laugh! 
You sure about that? It seems like McClellan had a pretty good opportunity to wipe out the Army of Northern Virginia before and possibly even after the battle of Antietam/Sharpsburg early in 1862.
I’m also not sure that I buy the argument that the South couldn’t acheive their aims by fighting a basically defensive war. Look to the American revolution for an example: Washington’s continental army was vasty inferior to the British army in nearly every respect, and in many ways the Confederate armies vs. the Union were in the same situation.
Washington and the Americans won by basically keeping the army together and not letting it get rolled up and destroyed. The conferderates might have been able to accomplish something similar but their inability to break the blocade of their ports meant that they had far less time. The defensive stand at Sharpsburg lost Lee 25% of his army, and the failed charge at Gettysburg was similarly disaterous. Had those been avoided, the AofNoVa might have had enough strength left to hold off the Army of the Potomac long enough for the North to lose the fighting spirit, especially with Lincoln’s assasination.
Well, also, the freeze on cotton sales hurt them. When the war started, the Confederacy decided to withhold its cotton crop from British and French buyers, in the hope that that would encourage/intimidate the British and French into recognizing the Confederacy. It didn’t work, and it meant the Confederacy passed up a chance to get hard currency early in the war, before the Union blockade made international shipment difficult for them.
And T-Keela, I’d say that every time the Confederacy went on the offensive, they lost, and lost badly. The invasion of Kentucky, Sharpsburg, Gettysburg. . . all were major Confederate military disasters. Military technology was shifting to favor the defensive, and the Confederacy didn’t have enough men to replace the higher losses that an offensive war would require.
They were fighting downhill.
In some ways, the best war analogy is Vietnam. Virtually all the war was fought in southern or border states. The war was physically a distant thing for the people in the north (except Gettsberg and Antietam, and that mainly caused more people to sign up to fight the maurading hordes), who went on with their lives in an almost normal manner. The south was forced to fight an almost total war, devoting every bit of its resources. It did not have the manpower to both fight and support the war simultaneously.
But the north had so much extra that homesteading in the Midwest took place continuously during the war years. The north also received more than a million immigrants during those years, something that I believe to be unique. (When else in history have huge numbers of immigrants gone to a country in the midst of a mjor war?) Many of the immigrant fought in the war, either to get work or as substitutes for people who got out of the draft by hiring them. The north is thought to have more men of fighting age at the end of the war than at the beginning.
The idea that the south could have won the war is romantic fiction. It was helped along by the fact that Civil War history for two generations after the war was dominated by southern writers who naturally placed a spin on the war’s causes and events that wound up pervading the culture. Modern theories of war as an economic and technological entity have destroyed the notions of heroic god-fearing generals determining a war’s outcome over the ability to feed, clothe, arm, and move your soldiers.
By what definition of “defeat” is it that when one side of a conflict surrenders, they have not been defeated? Is this some kind of hair-splitting that says because the South surrendered, the North did not actually defeat them? If we’re playing chess and I see the inevitable mate in two moves and topple over my king, does that mean that you didn’t really defeat me?
Similarly, how can you say that the North did not win? Their objective was to keep the South from secession. They achieved that objective, therefore they won, therefore they were the winner. “What was won?” Keeping the Union intact. Seems totally clear to me. Or if you’re asking what physical thing was won by the North, how about the lands of the sourthern states?
The South could have won, if by “win” we mean convince the North that the cost of the war was too great. If the North continued to fight the South was doomed. They had no hope, as shown by the production and industrial numbers above. But wars don’t always go to the stronger nation. Sometimes weaker nations win, because the stronger nation can’t bring their strength to bear. Bringing in Vietnam, the US lost because we weren’t willing to pay the price to win, and because due to the Cold War we were unable to overrun the north. Eventually we got sick of it and pulled out. The Union could have decided the same thing.
While it is true that there was no way the south could win a straight fight with the north, that presumes that the north be willing to slug it out and weather any setbacks along the way. History proves they could and did, but it was not as far from going the other way as has been suggested.
If the rebs could have kept their economy afloat long enough and played hide and seek with the union armies, stinging them enough to hurt when they got the chance, it is entirely possible that the north would have lost their will to fight.
This is part of the reason why the emancipation proclamation was such a brilliant piece of statesmanship. It galvanized the nothern abolitionists to demand nothing less than total victory, as that is the only situation that would make the proclamation effective.
On preview I see Lemur has basically made the same point…
A political solution might have been reached had Grant and Meade emulated their predecessors and retreated back above the Rappahannock in 1864 after the bloody non-decisions at Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. It probably would have required a major setback for Sherman outside of Atlanta as well.
George McClellan was running against Lincoln that year on a party platform which originally called for an immediate cessation of hostilities, but which McClellan himself said he would not follow. I’m curious to know when McClellan said that–it sounds like something one might say after, say, the fall of Atlanta.
Looking at the Election Atlas, however, I count only about 90 total electoral votes (including the 21 he really did pick up) which could have swung McClellan’s way with less than a five percent swing of the popular vote. Still looks to me like Lincoln would have won unless something very disastrous–or miraculous, depending on whose side you were on–happened.
Once you get into “what if” scenarios, almost any outcome can be plausibly argued. But their counter-scenarios can also be plausibly argued. I can come up with a persuasive argument that there is no way the north would have given up under any circumstances short of a meteor falling on them. Once changes are introduced there is no way to say what the actual outcome would be.
All we are left with is actual history. The OP asked why the North won. It won because its physical superiority was overwhelming and it kept the war going until this became manifest.
The internal divisions of the Confederacy mentioned previously in the thread had to contribute as well.
The govenor of Georgia, for instance, exempted a lot of soldiers in his state from the Confederate draft.
And contrary to the myth that Confederate sympathizers like to push forward, not every Southern citizen was devoted to the cause of Dixie; there were several regions that were pro-Union, and a great deal of just plain apathy in some areas. (The same can be said for Northerns as well, though).
I think it mostly boils down to one thing: Abraham Lincoln’s sheer force of will.
Oh, all the issues (superiority in manpower and money, etc.) others have brought up are entirely legitimate, and they’re all imporant. There was never much doubt that the North had the resources to re-take the South, IF the North had the stomach to endure the inevitable cost. The South’s hope all along was that the North DIDN’T have the stomach for such a prolonged war.
And, frankly, the Southern leadership was quite correct in assuming the North lacked the will to fight to the bitter end. What they failed to grasp was that Abraham Lincoln DID have the will to do whatever it took to win.
Lee was brilliant at strategy, at keeping the offensive, and at moving, manuevering and motivating his men - simply better than anyone on the Union side. But, when the two armies were face to face, Lee tended to attack head on - Gettysburg - instead of choosing a defensive position. a common mistake on both sides. The south simply could not constantly keep replacing the losses in men and equipment. I believe that the south had no railroad manufacturing capabilities, and the combination of constant use and Union attack simply wore the railroad out. With the Anaconda strategy closing southern ports, with the Missisippi in Union hands, food and equipment could not effectively move throughout the south. Each theatre became a local theatre as far as supplies, and these were quickly exhausted. One of the reasons Lee ended up in Pennsylvania was to take his army away from Virginia, where they had stripped everything clean. Sheridan’s and Sherman’s campaigns gutted what was left of the Southern breadbasket.
Until the Union battle victories started appearing, Lincoln had some serious dissatisfaction within his own party, and perhaps even threats to his own renomination. John Fremont, first Republican nominee, was running as a third party candidate, but withdrew for fear his support might draw enough votes away from Lincoln to lead to McCellan’s victory.
The northern battle victories started appearing in 1862 with Antietam, which gave Lincoln the excuse he needed to announce the Emancipation Proclamation. That dashed the last hopes the south had of attracting any European powers to their side.
The almost simultaneous victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg on that July 4th in 1863 meant that the war was over and that the north had won.
But this was the first real example of “total war” and total war cannot be turned off simply because of a battle victory. The deaths, the suffering, the sacrifice, the hatreds, and the sheer momentum of the times meant that the war went on without cease. The south fought hoping for a miracle to save them, or at least give them better terms for a surrender; the north continued to grind down the south a town, a river, a battalion at a time.
Obviously, this is a precarious and anguished state of being for a people to suffer through and the north would have been superhuman not to be dissatisfied with those in charge of the war.
But Lincoln had no real opposition within his party and Fremont’s supporters were an insignificant minority within the Republicans, with few figures of any national significance supporting him. He was never seriously a factor. The Republicans were not going to repudiate their president in the middle of a war. The site you cite even says:
The opposition from the Democrats would have been a major factor were it not for their candidate. Again, from your source:
The election was not very close in terms of the electoral college, but McClellan’s continuing personal popularity and the unhappiness with the unending death toll meant that the Democrats did get a roughly even divide of the civilian vote. The huge majority Lincoln received from the soldiers made any chance of the Republicans losing a moot point.
With both candidates vowing to continue a war which was already obviously won, election what ifs would not change any result. Certainly Lincoln’s resolve and steadiness in the face of adversity are admirable, but notions that the north would give up half the country just because war is terrible are romantic fiction.
tomndeb–you said
True and false. Gatling guns weren’t used during the War, because, Gatling didn’t start making guns until after the war.
But hand-cranked machine guns were used. Gatling did not make the first machine gun. This is a myth. There were over 3 dozen different models used in the Civil War, many with no more than a dozen or so examples of each type. They were added to artillery units, & used defensively.
Here in Murfreesboro, at the Battle of Stones River in 1863, three examples made their appearance. They proved invaluable.
BTW-- armored trains were used…and needed! Confederated guerillas & Partisan Ranger units regularly attacked Union trains. Armed & armored trains operated throughout the Union controlled areas. They carried armored cars with weapons ports for rifles, & some even mounted small cannon.