A defensive war would have it’s own problems because of the Confederacy’s organizational structure and ideology. Send a bunch of small, diversionary forces to go around the south setting things on fire (note that this strategy depends on Union commanders being willing to set things on fire) and wait for the governors to recall their armies to protect the plantations, and pretty soon there won’t be a central army to fight at all, and you can easily overwhelm strategic objectives and then pick the states off one by one. Are you telling me that the “states’ rights” people are going to sacrifice for the sake of a collective, centralized war effort? It’s a wonder they had any coordination to start with. And you can’t exactly do guerilla warfare when you’re fighting to keep a significant portion of the populace enslaved. That’s to say nothing of the north’s superior production capacity and the supply shortages in the south that only became worse the longer things went on.
The south was bound to lose any long term, defensive conflict because of those fundamentals, so imo it does make sense to try to end it quickly, even if it’s a longshot.
Joseph E Brown, governor of Georgia. They were their own worst enemies.
Another thing to add to this pile is railroads. The South had different railroad companies in each state with their own proprietary rail sizes. So trains couldn’t go straight from Texas to Georgia. They had to load and unload all of their cargo/people whenever they crossed into a new rail company’s territory. Union railroads were built on a standard, so any company could make non-stop trips from Maine all the way to the Virginia border.
When the war was underway, the South took longer to move from one area to another when the North commandeered railroads for wartime. Just absolute buffoonery that was only fixed after the war because Sherman destroyed Confederate rails while rampaging across the South.
A defensive war would have it’s own problems because of the Confederacy’s organizational structure and ideology. Send a bunch of small, diversionary forces to go around the south setting things on fire (note that this strategy depends on Union commanders being willing to set things on fire) and wait for the governors to recall their armies to protect the plantations, and pretty soon there won’t be a central army to fight at all, and you can easily overwhelm strategic objectives and then pick the states off one by one. Are you telling me that the “states’ rights” people are going to sacrifice for the sake of a collective, centralized war effort? It’s a wonder they had any coordination to start with. And you can’t exactly do guerilla warfare when you’re fighting to keep a significant portion of the populace enslaved. That’s to say nothing of the north’s superior production capacity and the supply shortages in the south that only became worse the longer things went on.
The south was bound to lose any long term, defensive conflict because of those fundamentals, so imo it does make sense to try to end it quickly, even if it’s a longshot.
Joseph E Brown, governor of Georgia. They were their own worst enemies.
Another thing to add to this pile is railroads. The South had different railroad companies in each state with their own proprietary rail sizes. So trains couldn’t go straight from Texas to Georgia. They had to load and unload all of their cargo/people whenever they crossed into a new rail company’s territory. Union railroads were built on a standard, so any company could make non-stop trips from Maine all the way to the Virginia border.
When the war was underway, the South took longer to move from one area to another when the North commandeered railroads for wartime. Just absolute buffoonery that was only fixed after the war because Sherman destroyed Confederate rails while rampaging across the South.