Conclusion and consequences
United States
The Union army demobilized in rapid order,
from one million strong at the end of the
war to 80,000 men a year later. Yankee
soldiers returned to their rendezvous point,
received back pay, signed documents, and
were officially mustered out of service.
Others viewed the delay as another
ridiculous government policy and simply
walked home. Several decades later, when
they applied for veterans' pensions, that
decision proved nettlesome.
Confederate soldiers simply headed home.
Men who owned their horses were allowed
to take them. Some received railroad
transportation as far it would take them,
which in the aftermath of Sherman's
marches was not usually very far. For the
men from Texas, it took up to two months to
make it back home.
Scholars and military experts have
posited a host of reasons why the
Confederacy lost. Immediately after the war,
a prominent Virginia journalist and
numerous military leaders blamed Southern
defeat on Jefferson Davis's incapacity as
commander-in-chief. Hatred of Davis
motivated most of these early critics. Later
scholars who attributed Rebel defeat to
Davis lacked the hatred of that earlier
generation. They derived their criticism of
Davis largely by comparing him with
Lincoln. Yet all American presidents pale
whenever they are juxtaposed with Lincoln,
and recent military historians and
biographers of Davis have demonstrated
clearly that, despite some weaknesses,
Davis was certainly a competent
commander-in-chief. Other students of
the Civil War have argued that internal
dissension undid the Confederacy, or that
Southern whites lost the will to resist. But
by comparison, dissension in the North was
at least as powerful, and every nation that
suffers a defeat ultimately loses the will to
continue the fight.
In more recent years, some scholars have
embraced the idea that the Confederacy
should have adopted a guerrilla war.
Brigadier-General Edward Porter Alexander,
perhaps the most thoughtful young officer in
the Confederacy, proposed the idea to Robert
E. Lee in the waning days of the war. At the
time, Lee rejected it, insisting that the
Confederacy had borne the battle for four
long years, and a guerrilla war would only
extend and increase the suffering on both
sides, with no real benefit. Nonetheless, a
handful of historians have challenged Lee's
assessment as faulty. They draw on the
partisan success of the Rebels in the
American Revolution, and the triumph of
North Vietnam against the United States in
the 1960s and 1970s. These scholars point
out how vexing the guerrilla war was in
Missouri, and how much difficulty the
Federal army encountered in trying to protect
Unionists in Tennessee and Kentucky.
Each of these views, however, suffers
from serious flaws. During the American
Revolution, partisans in the South performed
successfully because they served in
conjunction with traditional armies.
Nathanael Greene and his Continentals
fought alongside the guerrillas, and George
Washington in New York and later Virginia
commanded a standing army. By contrast
with the American Revolution, which was
fought in a pre-industrial era, warfare in an
industrial age requires mass production,
either by the nations at war or by sponsor
nations that provide it to them. When a
nation adopts guerrilla warfare, it exposes its
people and land to enemy invasion, thereby
endangering its ability to produce munitions
and other materiel that are necessary for war.
Vietnam received massive support from the