l incoln’s s hadow 57
administration. Yet the very conventionality of his background proved
his undoing, for in situations that required imaginative approaches he
remained wedded to orthodoxy.
To secure its independence, the Confederacy might have pursued
several paths, each implying a particular military strategy. First, the
South might have induced outside powers, specifically Britain and
France, to break the blockade, grant diplomatic recognition, or impose
a peace agreement on the North. To do that, the Confederacy would
have had to have shown that the blockade was ineff ective and demon-
strated that it could defend its territory successfully. Davis wanted the
British to declare that southern ports were open, but he never pursued
a naval campaign to demonstrate that the Union had failed to meet
what London had long held to be the legal standard for a blockade.
Second, the South could have sought outright military victory and
compelled the Lincoln administration to sue for peace on southern
terms. Yet triumph through arms seemed unlikely, since the Union
could replenish its losses much more readily than could the Confed-
eracy. Th ird, as the lesser side in an asymmetric war, the Confederacy
might have outlasted its foe, extending the struggle until a war-weary
North demanded that its leaders accept southern independence. Here
the South could have capitalized on its enormous territory, trading
space for time, disrupting the lines of communication of invading
Union armies, and harassing occupying forces until the North con-
cluded that conquest was too costly.
Davis never considered this third course. To the observer today, in an
era when non-state insurgencies have become commonplace, it seems
an obvious option. But to suggest that Davis might have considered it
is not just a modern conceit. Harassment by irregular forces had been
familiar in the Civil War era, too. Th e term “guerilla” originated during
the French eff orts to subdue Spain and Portugal during the Napoleonic
period, as Spanish irregulars conducted eff ective attacks on the extended
French communications while French armies tried to bring Welling-
ton’s smaller British-Portuguese force to bay. More to the point, the
American South had a historical legacy of insurgent warfare dating to
the American Revolution. After the defeat of regular American forces in
1780 in South Carolina, local resistance took the form of raids by
irregular troops led by the likes of Francis Marion (renowned as the