What did the south have to do to accomplish its goal in the Civil War?

Answer 1

The following is a far reaching and nuanced discussion of particulars, that includes economic, political and military considerations. Numerous theories have been advanced on this subject for just shy of 150 years, often focused on the centrality of either the impossibility of Southern victory due to the industrial disparities of the belligerents (the view of the "Lost Cause" movement of pro-Confederates) or the possibility of Southern victory had Southern generals (Lee in particular) been able to competently respond to the revolutionary (and controversial) adoption of "Total War" by the North during the latter succesful stages of the War instead of continuing to rely on obsolete Napoleanic tactics (the post WW1 British analysis).

The argument as such, is here explored, but not resolved.

The South could have won the civil war in many ways and at various points, even late into the war. There were several major reasons the South did NOT win the war, which included:

1.) Insufficient supplies (gear, weapons, food, horses, etc.)

2.) Insufficient troop numbers (not so bad in the beginning, but desertion and lack of fresh manpower meant the South could not replace losses and every battle won or lost, brought them closer to the end)

3.) Politics and bad General Officers (General Braxton Bragg probably the best example. Jefferson Davis is ultimately to blame here)

Nevertheless, the South could have won. Here are some of the many ways:

A.) Following up early victories (like Shiloh) and breaking the will of the north early on while the South was fresh, relatively well supplied and had high morale. The South had a limited amount of time before the above factors would wear her down.

B.) Lee had a golden opportunity at Gettysburg and threw it all away. The death of Stonewall Jackson was the single biggest blow. Even so, had southern commanders been more aggressive on Day's 1 and 2, the tactical positions would not have gone to the Union and Lee would have pushed them right off the field. Still... Picketts charge was a foolish decision and completely unnecessary. Lee should have simply picked up and move around the union troops and either picked another field or marched on Washington itself. Lee might have ended the war with such a seige without having to take Washington. As it was, those in D.C. acted like the rebs were outside the gates and were in a panic. Even if the only thing Lee did was march through the north, he would have been using Northern supplies and making the northern armies follow him around, while instilling dread throughout the north. Had he followed Sherman's "Total War" principle in the north, Lee would be as infamous as hitler, but the South would be its own country.

C.) As General Longstreet later put it, "We should have freed the slaves first and then fired on Fort Sumpter". If the South had freed the slaves at any point prior to Lincolns emancipation, the south would have had an infinitely better shot at European assistance.

D.) A few more early victories. The south was making a serious bid for English and French assistance and they darn near had it. Both were looking for just a little bit more proof that the south had a real chance and French and English support would have ended the naval blockade as well as the supply shortage. They just wanted to be sure they were backing the eventual winner. The loss at Gettysburg and ultimately, the emancipation ended this as a real possibility.

E.) Stopping Sherman before he reached Atlanta. Despite fighting a losing war, the south was wearing down the will of northern civilians. The south had far more victories than they were expected to have, the casualty tolls were far higher and Lee continued to outmanuever the Northern commanders until late in the war. After years of fighting, Lincoln was himself sure of defeat absent a miracle. Had Jefferson Davis and a few southern generals gotten their act together and fought with this goal in mind, they may have pushed Sherman back to almost pre-war borders. With Lincoln's defeat to a candidate running on a platform of ending the war, a ceasefire and peace agreement would likely happen in early 1865. Any effective break in hostilities would mean a win for the South and possibly a new chance of European support if the war continued.

Yes. Although the South was so much weaker than the North that they never could have waged an offensive campaign that ended the North's ability to make war, they could have done well enough on the battlefield as to convince Northern voters that winning was not worth the price in blood and treasure and thus Lincoln could have been defeated in 1864 and replaced with somebody committed to making peace on the basis of Southern independence. It is my opinion that the South's best opportunity to achieve this was at the battle of Shiloh, in April of 1862. At Shiloh the Confederates came very near to defeating, and forcing the surrender of, a union army under the command of U.S. Grant, with William Sherman under him. If that had happened, then the victories won by Grant and Sherman in the west in 1862 and 1863 would not have happened. It would have taken time for the North to put a new army into place. It would have been commanded by less talented officers than Grant and Sherman. It's first mission would have been to drive the Confederates back because they probably would have followed up that victory with an offensive into Ohio. Thus, with the North on the defensive in the West in 1862, not regaining the offensive until late that year or sometime in 1863, and Grant not in command, there is no way at all that Vicksburg could be captured in 1863. If Vicksburg does not fall in July of 1863, then the Union offensive from the west into the heart of the Confederacy can not occur in 1864. Even as Sherman was advancing in the Summer of 1864 many voices in the North were proclaiming the war lost and it looked as though Lincoln would lose the election. It was only Sherman's capture of Atlanta in early September that secured Lincoln's political fortune. If the South had won at Shiloh, there is absolutely no way that Atlanta could have fallen in 1864, the North would have been lucky to take Vicksburg that year without Grant. Study his Vicksburg campaign of 1863, it is sheer genius and nobody else had any idea how to take the city. So, although there are other scenarios, the South's best chance was at Shiloh.

The strategy was tried and failed with both Southern invasions being blunted at Antietam and Gettysburg. The Civil War was NOT a war that favored the attacker. Unlike George Washington, who realized that it was futile to fight the English on their terms, and that his sole objective was to keep his Army intact, the Confederacy failed to realize this concept and permitted the Army of Northern Virginia to be pinned up around Richmond and Petersburg. All the South needed to do was to keep on fighting until the North got tired of fighting.

Possibly, if certain Southern mistakes had been avoided. Lee's invasion of the North in 1863 leading to defeat at Gettysburg may have been a mistake, though if his subordinates had performed better on the second day, it might have been a Southern victory, which would've been hard for the North to swallow. But Lee's invasion of the North in 1862, leading to defeat at Antietam, was almost certainly a mistake, as the Southern troops were not in shape to fight or do damage in the North, and they were facing a scared Northern general (McClellan) who wouldn't have invaded them again. As bloody as Antietam was, the North could afford to lose the troops more than the South. If the South did not fight there, the Emancipation Proclamation wouldn't have happened when it did, and the Northern War effort would have looked more hopeless. Another factor is the Army of Tennessee. Another contributor here said that Shiloh was the key; if the South could've won that, they could've prevented Sherman's taking of Atlanta, and thereby prevented Lincoln's election. Maybe, but if the Army of Tennessee had performed better after Shiloh, Atlanta might not have been taken either. The main commander of the Army of the Tennessee in late 1862 and 1863, Bragg, was someone who alienated his staff, and divided his army. He got lucky at Chickamauga, but didn't exploit it fully. And there is no way he should have lost Chattanooga; Thomas's charge at Missionary ridge was far more suicidal than Pickett's charge at Gettysburg (if Pickett's charge was suicidal) yet it succeeded. The explanation for this has to be Bragg. And Jeff Davis knew that he was a problem, but did not remove him until it was too late.

You can't, however, forget the reason that Lee went on the Northern campaign in the first place, and that was to obtain shoes. On of the sole (no pun intended) resons that Lee decided to make a run into the North and chose Gettysburg was because there was a shoe factory in the vicinity that could provide his army with a much needed resource. Supply lines were cut and the only place to get these resources was in the North, and that greatly affected Lee's decision.

Yes. If the South had had more soldiers and supplies, they probably could have won the war. Anybody has a chance of winning a war. Am I ever glad they didn't win, though!

Of course, anyone has a remote chance of winning a conflict or an encounter. However, the actual war, strategies, and maneuvers aside, there are other factors to consider, some of which may have been mentioned before.

Others have mentioned that this war was not one that favored the aggressor. At the time, all the South actually had to do was to repel the North enough and with enough casualties (in terms of men and money) to hold their own, shoes or no shoes. If the North finally decided not to pursue occupying the South militarily, the South would have succeeded in their objective to leave the Union.

Timing is an issue in the Civil War as well. The Industrial Revolution had just really gotten underway in Europe and America in the 1850's. Before then, it is likely that had the Civil War broken out, the South may have been outnumbered but it would not have been handily outstripped supply-wise by the North. Man for man, early in the war, the South showed that through their knowledge of the terrain and the fact that they were fighting on "home turf" the southern soldiers were more competent than their northern counterparts. Had the secessions and the war effort begun earlier in the 1850s it is likely that the South would have had a better chance of success than it did when the war actually started.

But even if the war had begun earlier, it is possible that the North could have held on until its industrial might began pulling its own weight and then really begin pounding the South militarily. It is difficult to gauge if the people of the North would have been willing to fight a war for nearly a decade if only to keep the United States united (mind you, if the war had begun sooner Abraham Lincoln, a firm believer in the "united" part of United States and a strong exerciser of federal power, may not have been in office), even if eventual victory was guaranteed.

One must also not forget that the basic premise of the South's secession from the Union was that individual states could be sovereign entities, that states had rights that extended to dissolution of the union between them and the federal government. While the conclusion of the Civil War and the history of the United States thereafter thoroughly buried that idea, it must be considered in the context of the times. Because each state in the Confederacy operated on this basic premise, each Confederate state therefore also believed (and this was shown to be the case during the war), in much like today's libertarian spirit, that it had rights that superceded the Confederacy's dominance of (what amounted to in their minds as) an alliance between states. In fact, Texas was known to have held back from sending troops to the east, where most of the major battles between North and South were fought, and the Confederate government (much like the new American government under the Articles of Confederation which preceded the Constitution) had difficulty maintaining internal order and cooperation among the Confederate states (i.e. in raising armies and taxing the people). So even if the war had begun sooner, the basic ideas upon which the Confederacy was based (slavery only became a major issue in the actual war after the Emancipation Proclamation, which, in a rather brilliant political move, added a moral component to the war and permanently placed the South on the side of the "wrongdoer" that required chastisement, which ultimately came in excess in the form of the Reconstruction) also served to weaken it in times of war.

And while it may seem that everyone in the South desired a separate and new nation under rules of state confederation, one must keep in mind the fact that while many men from border states (Kentucky and Virginia, for example) joined the southern cause, just as many (if not more) joined the northern cause of a United States of America (in fact, that was a major reason why West Virginia became its own state, separated from the rest of Virginia). Not to mention that a large proportion of the South's actual population was tied up in slavery (only near the end of the war did the South actually consider using its resident slave population as miliary fodder), some of which actually defected to the Union and fought against the South (and the vast majority of which, if not neutral to the Confederate cause, certainly did not favor it). It must be remembered that not everyone in the South was for the the sovereignty of the South free of the Union. And while the opposite might be true for some in the North, the South needed numbers, and every Southerner who did not believe in a separate Confederacy was a Southerner who would not defend it, and one less Southerner who would fight the Union armies.

And lest one slight the actual war actions, while it is generally accepted that the Southern commanders were among the best in their field (and in the field), the Northern commanders, while at first new to the fight, eventually began improving (as did the men in their armies), and began to compare favorably against their Southern counterparts. With all the materials, men, logistical support (while the South actually did have supplies even into the end of the war, its transport and communications systems needed to distribute these supplies effectively was systematically destroyed by ingenious Northern commanders) and other numbers at their disposal, these Northern commanders and their armies, once up to snuff, would have been difficult, if not impossible, to defeat, as was shown at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Sharpsburg (MD), and Perryville (KY), all of which occurred even before the Union armies reached true maturity and their real potential.

After operation Anaconda was completed trade in and out of the south had dropped down to 10% at that point the Union could have down a defenisive war but Lincoln fearing that the next person in line would notice what the war was doing and stop wanted to annilate the CSA and after Getteysburg seeing that he had a good postition took charge making the march to the sea(bringing trade down to 5%) and other just general victories wanted to maintain his advantage but cutting off the CSA from everything and thus achvieing a win because it made Lee go North to Appotomax where the Union army at this point outnumbered the CSA 3 to 1 so nowing that life wasnt a factor Grant would break stalemates without worry and letting him win by dogging Lee every he went.

The union soldiers never were the equal of their southern counterparts. General Sherman said so after the war, saying he could conquer the world with Northern artillery and Southern infantry. The real truth is, the south lost the war because of the sheer weight of numbers. At Sharpsburg, the Union had a three to one advantage, yet Lee fought McClellen to a draw, boldly holding his lines, awaiting an attack which never came. He then withdrew the next day. He had signal victories at Fredricksburg, and Chancellorsville, again greatly outnumbered.

The South could have easily won the war. Lee had way more experience. I was just that the didn't have enough supplies. If they had more and had it come down to a single battle between Lee and Grant, Lee would have won. Also if the South had not fired upon Fort Sumter and instead built up there navy and food supplies the war would have gone to the South. And another thing for all you people out there that think General Robert E. Lee was a bad man and owned slaves, you are wrong. He owned 0 slaves and he was a respectable man. The only reason he didn't fight for the North was because he had true loality to his state. I don't think anyone today has anywhere close to that amount of loality. If you do I would like to meet you. Lee was Lincoln's first choice for the North. Had he fought for the North the war would not have lasted very long. I hope this has cleared up anything for you people out there.

Get Educated.

A.) Following up early victories (like Shiloh) and breaking the will of the north early on while the South was fresh, relatively well supplied and had high morale. The South had a limited amount of time before the above factors would wear her down.

The South had several opportunities to win the war. One of the best was in the fall of 1862, when Lee led the Army of Northern Virginia north into Maryland. The Confederates were fresh off of two decisive victories over Union armies in Virginia that summer. Their numbers were diminished and their supplies were low, but they were facing Union forces under George McClellan, a timid and inept battlefield commander. Lee figured correctly that McClellan would not attack him, so he divided his forces and sent Stonewall Jackson to capture the Union arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Jackson took the arsenal and 12,000 Union prisoners, but meanwhile McClellan had a stroke of rare fortune. One of his cavalry scouts found a copy of Lee's orders, which revealed that the Rebel forces were divided. Emboldened by this knowledge, McClellan attacked Lee at Antietam Creek, before Lee could fully reunite his army. The Confederates barely escaped from that battle with their army intact. If McClellan had been a better commander, they would have been destroyed.

If McClellan had not found the orders, it is very unlikely he would have attacked Lee. Although he outnumbered Lee nearly 2-1, he was convinced the opposite was true. His leadership in Virginia and at Antietam had been marked by extreme caution, and he led several chances for victory slip away because he saw threats where none existed. Had he not found the orders, McClellan would have waited while Lee reconcentrated his forces in the vicinity of Hagerstown, MD. Lee would then have marched north toward Harrisburg or York, PA. McClellan would have followed cautiously, and would finally have been drawn into battle to prevent the Confederates from isolating Washington and possible capturing Baltimore or Philadelphia. Lee would have fought this battle on ground of his own choosing, and it almost certainly would have been another CSA victory. The Union army would still exist, but it would be bloodied and utterly demoralized. Lee would not be strong enough to take Washington, but he could lay siege to it and keep his army in Maryland until the Congressional elections that fall. Lincoln's Republicans would have been turned out of office in droves, and a Congress dominated by peace Democrats would have forced Lincoln to accept the mediation offers that the British and French would have surely proposed. The South would have won its independence.

I have also always wondered what would have happened if southerners had voted in the presidential election of 1863. McClellan ran on the platform of ending the war, and he gained more popular votes than Lincoln, but the electoral college went with Lincoln. The North still considered southern states part of the Union and could not have denied them the vote without also recognizing the legitimacy of secession. It would have violated their principles of southerners to consider themselves part of the Union and vote, but as a strategic move, it might have been brilliant. Once Lincoln is out and McClellan is in, then they continue fighting (the North considered them part of the Union at that point, and they could have continued fighting while recognizing the Union's perspective) until they negotiated a peace with McClellan. And the Confederacy

would have gained legitimacy and won.

The best opportunity for the Confederacy to win the Civil War was in July 1862 on the sixth day of the Seven Days Battles. During this engagement which was fought near Glendale, Virginia, Lee had an excellent opportunity to completely encircle and destroy the retreating Union Army of the Potomac. At this point McClellan had already withdrawn from the battlefield ahead of his army without naming a second-in-command or providing his corps commanders with specific routes of withdrawal. This meant that each of the army's five corps were essentially operating independently while their retreat was bottlenecked due to inadequate roadwork.

Had Lee's battle plan been executed more efficiently, the Confederate's would have prevented the Army of the Potomac's escape and likely destroyed it altogether. More specifically, Stonewall Jackson was uncharacteristically hesitant as his divisions failed to attack the Union rear guard in support of the main offensive, which enabled the Union to prevent their line from being split in two.

It is very likely that the destruction of the Army of the Potomac would have encouraged Great Britain and France to intercede of behalf of the Confederacy. The summer of 1862 was the closest that the European powers came to officially recognizing the CSA, as their economies were feeling the burden of the cotton shortage. In fact, Lee's subsequent invasion of Maryland in September was partly motivated by the British government's desire to see the Confederate army follow up the Peninsula Campaign with a major victory.

If in the aftermath of a devastating loss at Glendale, the governments of Britain and France had offered to broker a peace agreement with the condition that the CSA remain independent; it is likely that Lincoln would have reluctantly agreed. The implied threat of British and French intervention would have been impossible for the Union to ignore.

The first answer above hits on some very important points, but I'd like to emphasize them a bit more and expand on that, as these are the keys to a Southern victory. If you look at what modern historians are writing about the subject, the unanimous answer is that the South could not have won a military victory, even if the outcome of several of the existing battles had changed significantly. One must remember that for the better part of the Civil War, particularly in the Eastern Theater, the South won a substantial majority of battles (that is, for the years 1861-1863, the South's win-loss record is roughly 2:1 vs that of the Union).

Geography was against the South - it was simply never going to be able to make that "knock-out" blow that would win it a military victory; Washington DC was too heavily defended for even a siege to be successful, and logistical lines were too long for the Southern armies to attack any of the significant Union cities - even Philadelphia was out of reach, let alone make it to New York or Cleveland or Chicago (Boston being completely out of the question). It never had the industrial base to produce sufficient war material to supply its existing armies (depending heavily on captured Union supplies), and didn't have the manpower to feed the meatgrinder tactics that made the ultimate Union general (Grant) so successful. No matter the outcome on the battlefield, the South wasn't ever going to be either outlast or destroy the Union from a military standpoint.

The South did have two possibilities in winning, one that it didn't effectively capitalize on, and one that it couldn't possibly take. The best way for a Southern win was to attack the Union public's morale - that is, get the Union public to give up, and force the government to negotiate with the rebels. Most of the South's leadership vaguely understood this concept, but failed to really push for the next logical step: use the Southern armies to attack the Northern public morale, not the Union armies. What the South needed to do was an equivalent of Sherman's March to the Sea - it needed to do a scorched-earth campaign through central PA and OH. The point would not have been to destroy actual material things (though that would have to happen), but to shock the Union public to its core, and force an outcry for a settlement. That is, the South had to make it appear to the North that a Northern victory would be so hideously expensive that they would decline to pay the cost for victory. No historical documents have indicated that there was a serious and concentrated effort to affect this policy; half-hearted attempts were occasionally made along these lines, but no one in the South seems to have grasped that this strategy was the South's only real hope of winning.

The South's second best avenue to victory was the one it was institutionally incapable of making: freeing its slave population. This move would at once both remove a major Union diplomatic advantage, and give the South a huge extra pool of manpower to draw on. A slavery-free South would have been so much more capable of getting European support (which was effectively required to get desperately needed war material), and remove a major Union psychological advantage - after all, if the Union was no longer fighting to free the slaves, a huge section of its population were much more lukewarm (or completely indifferent) to the concept of "maintaining the Union", and Union morale would have plummeted (probably leading to the aforementioned diplomatic negotiation, which is a Southern win). But, abolishing slavery effectively destroys Southern culture. They were trapped in a dilemma. To paraphrase a Vietnam-era aphorism: They had to destroy the South to save the South.

To add to the free-for-all, there is only one way that the South could have won. It could have adopted a Fabian Policy, similar to that which Washington adopted in the early yars of the Revolutuion. The point is not to win, but to prevent the enemy from achieving a decisive victory. If instead of fighting set battles, they had conducted widespread guerilla campaigns, picking off stray units, harrassing the enemy, encouaging the Union to overstretch its supply lines and then severing those supply lines and defeating the Federal forces in detail, after they were cut off from supplies and reinforcements, seeking pitched battles only when the odds favored Confederate victory. Unfortunately, such a policy demands steady supplies of materiel, and the mobility to strike when required and disburse to prevent destruction and capture. Could the Confederates keep up such a strategy, the North may have grown tired of the war and been willing to vote Lincoln out and sue for peace. It worked for Washington, early on until he received support from France, and it worked for Ho Chi Minh. Minh dragged he war beyond America's tolerance, and we pulled out.

I would take an opposing view. Jefferson Davis thought that preventing the North from occupying the South would force them to accept the seccession of the Southern States.

Had he used the intial advantage the South had in quality of troops and pressed home an immediate attack on Washington he could have forced the North to submit. Containment wasn't the answer because time would always be on the side of the North in terms of military power.

Had Gettysberg been a decisive Southern victory, there may have been a swelling of the anti-war movement in the North but then if Napoleon had won at Waterloo he may have have remained Emporor of France for the rest of his life.

Answer 2

Get England to join their cause, plus, use their Navy to; break the blockade. They could have used guerrilla tactics and could have fought a more defensive war. Used cavalry to make raids on northern cities sending the populace in a fit much like we have today, in the north.

Answer 3

The best and maybe the only chance the CSA had to gain a win over the

Union was to gain an alliance with a European SuperPower. That is either

France or England. Either could quickly break the Union blockade with the

superior Naval Forces they had. The inability of the CSA to keep commerce

open for export starvred their ability to import essential war supplies. The

failure to find a European partner was only one of the factors that insured

CSA failure in theCivil War.

Answer 4

Many scholars and military historians think that if the Confederacy had won a decisive victory at Gettysburg, it may well have turned the tide of the war in their favor, and led to a defeat of the Union forces. We'll never know for sure.