DK - The American Civil War

THE SOUTH’S CHALLENGE

The key Confederate strategists and

commanders were well aware of the

Union’s material advantages.

PUSH FOR VICTORY

When General Robert E. Lee assumed command

of the Army of Northern Virginia in June 1862, one

of his chief goals was to win swift battlefield

victories. These, he hoped, would shatter enemy

morale before the Confederacy collapsed under the

weight of Northern industrial superiority.

GUERRILLA WARFARE

The wide expanse of Confederate territory,

especially in the West, made it perfect for guerrilla

activity 224–25 ❯❯. This successfully hampered

Federal operations by tying down large numbers

of Union troops in occupation and garrison duties.

But the guerrillas were not above preying on

Southern civilians as well as Northern soldiers,

which made them a problematic military tool.

small detachments of organized forces.

In addition, the South’s rudimentary

road and rail network made logistics a

nightmare for any invading army.

While the Confederates could see

British struggles against the sweep

of American geography during the

American Revolution as a heartening

example for their own war of

independence, they could also draw

lessons from the eventual collapse of

British political will at the time.

During the Revolution, internal

divisions in Britain allowed the

Americans to exhaust their former

rulers and win independence. In

the Civil War, while the fall of Fort

Sumter unified Northern opinion

behind a struggle for Union, what

Union really meant remained a point

of political contention, even among

Republicans. Questions of Federal

authority, involving issues such as

emancipation, conscription, and

the draft, would be points of

partisan controversy within

the North. For their part,

the Confederates were

united behind the more

straightforward goal of

sovereign independence.

Even the South’s enslaved

population gave it certain

advantages. An economy based

on slavery and cotton-cultivation

allowed the Confederacy to

mobilize an unprecedented

percentage of its white male

AFTER

of railroad crisscrossed the North.

In the South, by contrast, there were

just 9,283 miles of railroad, less than

30 percent of the Northern total.

31,246 MILES

Manufacturing might
Smoke belches from the chimneys of the Jones and
Laughlin iron mills, on the Monongahela River south of
Pittsburgh. Enterprises like this gave the North an
industrial edge over the South.

population of just over 9.1 million,
of whom more than 3.6 million were
African Americans—most of them
slaves and holding dubious loyalty to
their white masters. In the financial
sector, Southern banking before the
war had been based not in any major
Southern city, such as New Orleans or
Richmond, but in New York.

The South’s advantages
Counterbalancing the North’s larger
pool of material resources was the
Confederacy’s immense size. This
offered important geographical
advantages. The South occupied
about the same amount of territory
as Western Europe, which gave it
what military historians call “strategic
depth.” This allows an army defending
its territory to retreat in the face of a
stronger force, obliging the invader to
disperse its strength in garrisons and
outposts over an ever-increasing area
in order to defend vulnerable lines of
communication against guerrillas and

population. Because fewer white men

of military age were needed to keep

the basic domestic economy running,

around three out of four of them

became soldiers—and one in five

would die during the war. Eventually,

however, the Union turned African

Americans living in the Confederacy

into a potent resource for

victory by arming many of

them and enlisting them

as U.S. soldiers.

Underlying weakness

Despite the Confederacy’s

important advantages, the

more advanced state of

industrialization in the North,

its larger supply of natural

resources such as

iron and coal,

and its greater

economic

strength, enabled

it to sustain war for

a longer time than the

South could. And, unlike

Britain during the American

Revolution and the War of

1812, the North did not have

to cross an ocean to bring its

military power to bear.

“The Army ... has been compelled

to yield to overwhelming

numbers and resources.”

ROBERT E. LEE, FAREWELL ADDRESS TO THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA, 1865

King Cotton?

A Southern senator once declared: “No,

you dare not to make war on cotton.

No power on the earth dares to make war

upon it. Cotton is King.” He was wrong.