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As a non-American I was always under the impression that the Confederation never actually stood a chance. But I might be completely wrong here.

• avhon1 3y ago
  The Confederacy was never going to win outright, and they knew it. Their goal was to force a stalemate, allowing them to continue to exist as a separate country from the United States. edit: and for the first few years, it looked like they might be able to do that.
  • toast0 3y ago
    The US war of independence is considered won, and the US didn't conquer England. I'm sure I have all sorts of wrong headed bias, but I never thought the Confederacy had any larger goal than independence? Why would it be a stalemate and not a victory for them if they were allowed to exist as a separate country?
    • bee_rider 3y ago
      I think it would have to be a military stalemate, and then a negotiated victory. But it would be a very silly thing for the Union to give up, having a hostile country so close would be a recipe for disaster. It doesn’t seem like a real stalemate would be possible, in the sense that the North’s economy was so much bigger. Stalemate today? Keep building factories, keep up the blockade, check again tomorrow.
  • remarkEon 3y ago
    >allowing them to continue to exist as a separate country from the United States. This inadvertently makes a point I like to make when discussing the US Civil War with those unfamiliar with it. The US didn't really have a civil war. It split into two separate countries and then had a regular war, where one country conquered the other.
    • actionfromafar 3y ago
      So, what is a true civil war then?
      • remarkEon 3y ago
        I think the best example of a "true" civil war is probably the Chinese Civil War. I say that because it was fought across the entire geography, for a long time, where the belligerents were never sure who was friend and who was foe. The US civil war, relatively speaking, is pretty boring. When it started, everyone was already on "their" side of the line. So you didn't have kidnappings, murders, other horror show stuff that's common in civil wars throughout history.
      • pocketarc 3y ago
        I assume one that doesn’t involve breaking up to create a new country. Plenty of wars like that, like the English civil wars between different political factions[0]. But I’m still going to call it the US civil war. It’s what it’s called, even if it might not the fit the traditional definition. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War
  • zw123456 3y ago
    In some ways, I think it continues to exist as a separate country within the United States. Every demographic map you look at, political, health, education etc. you can see it. And whenever I have visited some of those states, it almost feels like another country. They even speak a different language, or at times sounds like it.
    • atdrummond 3y ago
      The outcomes are primarily due to race, not the contours of the Confederacy. Nearly all of these “red state demographic maps” are isomorphic to the percentage of African Americans within a given state/county/city.
      • actionfromafar 3y ago
        Well, race and the Confederacy are linked though.
      • zw123456 3y ago
        Right, and you know how when you visit another country, how the racial make up of that other country is often different. So, that sort of is the point I was making, it's like another country with in the U.S.
      • giraffe_lady 3y ago
        Black life being so different in the south is the contours of the confederacy.
  • euroderf 3y ago
    They still seem to be winning the grand culture war.
  • LAC-Tech 3y ago
    I think maintaining their independence was "winning outright" for them.
• NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  If you like alt history, Turtledove does this in one of his 4 or 5 "alternate Civil War" stories. Not the one with the time-traveling Appartheidists, nor the fantasy version where the slaves are all magic-less blond people. The other one. Well, one of the other ones. In it, Lee manages a string of early victories, gets within striking distance of DC before Lincoln can flee, and takes it. The US capitulates. It's not a 1-in-a-billion thing, but it certainly does read like a 1-in-5,000 thing.
  • 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
    Didn't Lee get within striking distance of DC in real life? See the second two maps here: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/battles-us-civil-war/ https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/battles-us... IIRC, there was a point at which everyone in DC was gloomy because they thought it would be captured.
    • bee_rider 3y ago
      DC is just some town, right? The industrial base was in the Northeast mostly, IIRC. NYC alone appears to have had a population around 1/4 of the entire Confederacy’s non-enslaved population. Quite a few guns were made in Springfield, MA. Capturing DC would just be the start of things.
      • 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
        Well DC is where the people leading the war effort were, so it had the potential to be very disruptive / demoralizing. Is the Union going to pause their war effort in order to elect a new set of representatives and a new president? I don't know though. Maybe there was a plan to evacuate the capital which would've worked if push came to shove.
        • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
          More specifically, if it demoralizes the leadership (Lincoln, and Congress), then they could surrender. Any Union generals still fighting after that are war criminals and the Union's leadership is obligated to stop them and put them on trial. Or leadership could remain defiant, and they're little more than hostages. Disruptive to the war effort, but hardly the end of things.
• Kamq 3y ago
  You have to define "win" here a little better. Especially in a war. Win as in conquer the rest of the US? lol, no. That wasn't going to happen. The industrial base just wasn't there. Win as in make it so costly to re-take the South that the rest of the US doesn't want to devote the resources? That was probably possible at certain points in the war.
• 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
  The North was stronger on paper, but the South had better generals. A number of initial battles happened fairly close to Washington DC (remember DC is directly adjacent to Virginia, and Virginia was a Confederate state!), so things were touch-and-go early on. Furthermore, at the time of the split, there were still lots of officials in the US federal government who were sympathetic to the cause of the South. I don't believe the Confederacy had to worry as much about the loyalties of its officials. In any case, even after the immediate threat to DC was addressed, the Union wasn't making a lot of progress during the first years of the war, and there were a lot of people in the North who wanted to give up and let the Confederacy exist as an independent country. The North's eventual win came at very high cost. In my opinion, we should memorialize Union soldiers more than we do. There was so much discussion of Confederate monuments the other year, but no one ever mentions the many Union monuments across the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monuments_and_memorials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monume... A lot of people paid the ultimate price, fighting for the promise that "history will remember you for helping to end slavery!", and yet we don't remember them that much. It actually makes me rather upset to be honest.
  • hef19898 3y ago
    Which Confederate General was actually better? The only decent one would be Lee. No idea where this idea comes from, the idea that the loosing side in a war had better Generals. For the Wehrmacht it's the same. People tend to forget thatbthise Generals lost their battles, and the war, at the end.
    • brailsafe 3y ago
      I don't even know much about the U.S civil war, but are you saying you don't understand how a great leader could be fighting for an unlikely victory?
      • hef19898 3y ago
        No, I am saying that there os a narrative around Generals of the loosing side being "better" than those on the winning side. Which, more often than not, is just plain wrong.
• bee_rider 3y ago
  They didn’t have the industrial base to win. Maybe if Europe had gone all in on supporting them with trade, refused to recognize the blockade, that sort of thing? But that’s a pretty big “what if?”
• c5karl 3y ago
  The Union had a much larger population, far more resources, and almost all of the divided nation's industrial production capacity. In most cases, it's factors like those that determine the eventual victor in a war (see WWI and WWII for good examples of this). But the weaker party doesn't need to defeat the stronger one. They just need to make the cost of the war greater than the price the stronger side is willing to pay. That's how the USA won its independence from Britain, after all. Part of what made the price too high in that case was assistance from the French (it was the French navy, not Washington's army, that sealed the victory in Yorktown, for example). The leadership of the Confederacy was well aware of this and had diplomats all across Europe seeking help for their cause. If they had succeeded, history might have taken a very different turn. A good book about Union efforts to keep Britain and other European powers out of the war: Our Man in Charleston, by Christopher Dickey.
  • bee_rider 3y ago
    The British/US comparison seems a bit hard to line up, though. The British Empire had a whole planet to keep an eye on, losing in NA was of course not what they wanted, but it wasn’t existential or anything. America was a far away colony for them, long way to go to hold on to, basically, a resource extraction colony. The US was a lot more motivated to take the South back. It is a big border, right near our population centers, far too risky to have a hostile country there. If, like, Wales had tried the same strategy as America, I bet they wouldn’t have beat the English.
• pdonis 3y ago
  A case can be made that if Great Britain had officially recognized the Confederacy as a separate country, they might have won the Civil War. Not all historians would agree with that, though.
  • Phoenix12052023 3y ago
    I'd argue that this is the only way the Confederacy could have won. Otherwise, they would have just been ground down in any long-term attritional fight. It was a real possibility: Abraham Lincoln was worried sick about this. He knew the Union didn't stand a chance against a fully focused Royal Navy.