Conclusion and consequences 311Soviet Union and the People's Republic of
China; the Southern Confederacy had no
such patron. In Vietnam, moreover, the
United States imposed restrictions on where
its ground troops could advance. No massive
ground invasion took place in North
Vietnam, and the United States only blocked
supply shipments by water in the late stages
of the war. During the Civil War, the
Confederacy was the primary battleground,
and an ever-tightening blockade, working in
conjunction with land troops, had choked
off imports to the Confederacy almost
completely by 1865.
Selected scholars have argued that the
difficult)' of quelling the guerrilla war in
Missouri and Tennessee demonstrates just
how effective it could have been on a larger
scale. But two factors undercut that
assertion. First, Missouri remained in the
Union, and an overwhelming percentage of
its people opposed the Confederacy. Three of
every four men from Missouri who entered
the army donned the Union blue. Federal
authorities had to deal with the people of
Missouri respectfully, because so many
supported the Union. Tennessee also had a
strong pro-Union contingent, especially in
the eastern part of the state. In other
seceding states, Federals had no reason to
protect the people, except for pockets of
hill-country Unionists.
Second, by the late stages of the war, the
Union had begun to adopt the raiding
strategy, which targeted civilians and
property, along with soldiers in the field, as
the enemy. This was ideally suited to crashing
guerrilla activities by destroying or
confiscating property and making life a hell
for Confederate civilians and soldiers alike. As
Emma LeConte recorded in her diary, when
her Uncle John, a prisoner of war, discussed
the possibility of guerrilla fighting with a
soldier in Sherman's army, the Yankee replied,
'Well. I hope the South won't do anything of
that kind, for of course in that event we
would not spare or respect your women.'
Beneath his bluster, the soldier's comments
suggested both the hardened nature of Union
troops and their growing callousness toward
Southern civilians. They possessed just the
right attitude to combat guerriilas.
National approaches to war are products
of social structure, economy, technology, and
culture. Confederate whites were a
propertied people, who seceded from the
Union in order to protect what Mississippi
called 'the greatest material interest of the
world.' Their constitution attempted to
secure two elements of that society, white
persons and property, and they entered
military service to defend both of those
elements. A guerrilla war policy would have
exposed their families and that property to
Federal destruction or abuse, a strategy that
would have undercut the very reasons for a
Southern Confederacy. And by drawing food
and supplies from the Southern people,
while at the same time exposing their homes
and property to Union destruction,
Confederate guerrillas would have alienated
them from the cause as well.
In organizing for war, Confederates drew
on what they perceived as the Southern
military tradition. They aspired to build
armies along Washington's model, which
would exploit martial aspects of Southern
character and establish for the Confederacy a
credibility with other nations of the world
that guerrilla forces would not. Their
heritage, secessionists believed, would more
than compensate for any manpower
advantages that the Union possessed.
When asked some years afterwards why
the Confederates lost at Gettysburg, George
Pickett replied, 'I think the Yankees had
something to do it with.' That same
argument best explains why the Confederacy
lost the war. For all the sacrifices, for all the
losses, for all the hardships, for all the narrow
defeats, the Confederacy simply could not
overcome the Union. Internal strife, patchy
leadership, and many other factors hindered
its war effort. The same, of course, could be
argued for the Yankees. But in the end, the
Union defeated the Confederacy; the
Confederacy did not defeat itself.
Many scholars believe that the Union
won because of overwhelming numbers,
what one scholar has called 'the heaviest