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From the outset, the Union had a massive advantage in EVERYTHING except cotton; people, industry, etc. The ONLY advantage the Confederates had was....cotton. This was equivalent to some guy in high school that's never even worked out thinking he could beat up the quarterback lol.
There were approximately 360,222 Union deaths and 258,000 Confederate deaths in the Civil War.
There were plenty of reasons why the South lost, but not being able to “beat up the quarterback” wasn’t one of them.
From the outset, the Union had a massive advantage in EVERYTHING except cotton; people, industry, etc. The ONLY advantage the Confederates had was....cotton. This was equivalent to some guy in high school that's never even worked out thinking he could beat up the quarterback lol.
The Confederates planned on a short war. They couldn't imagine the Union would mount a four year campaign that would include occupying most Confederate territory as well as blockading all Confederate ports. The idea was that once the Union saw they were serious that they would stop fighting and let the Confederate States be their own nation.
I think there was also an expectation that foreign countries like Great Britain would take their side because of the desirability of cotton exports from the South. What the Confederates didn't understand was that Britain had an ability to compensate for losing those cotton exports. Britain went to places like Egypt and cultivated huge fields of cotton along the Nile River.
Finally, not all the people in the South were totally on aboard with the Confederate cause. The people in western Virginia chose to form their own state. In many ways, North Carolina was never entirely on board either. The Governor resisted draft calls from Richmond. The movie "the free state of Jones" details a group of southerners in Mississippi who resisted the Confederacy and fought Confederate troops. Some southerners saw the government in Richmond as as bad as the one in Washington, D.C. their state had seceded from.
Control of the railroad was the determining factor. It was the major thing McClellen got right. The ability to bring in thousands of recruits on trains with their supplies and arms. Look at the 1860 map of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Porterfield had no support in 1861 to occupy Grafton and in 1863 Jones and Imboden failed to derail the B&O.
If the South had succeeded in 1840, would the outcome been different?
From the outset, the Union had a massive advantage in EVERYTHING except cotton; people, industry, etc. The ONLY advantage the Confederates had was....cotton. This was equivalent to some guy in high school that's never even worked out thinking he could beat up the quarterback lol.
It wasn't the Confederates that wanted War, they were attacked and had to defend themselves. The North had almost twice the casualties of the South but the numbers eventually crushed the South and thank God that slavery was ended.
The United States also had an extremely small army in 1860 consisting of something around a little over 16,000 officers and men for the entire country.
The term "mass formation psychosis" has become popular in recent years but the same can also be applied to the South in 1860-1861.
A paranoia did sweep across the South. For all the extensive historical writing on the Confederacy and late antebellum South, while some touched on this theme, it's not been fully explored.
Most of America was settled by people who wanted to escape political or religious oppression.
The South in particular seems to have pockets of fiercely independent groups. Perhaps the original settlers passed down that independent ideology, making their descendents especially resistant to changing their way of life according to somebody else's new rules.
From that viewpoint, they were defending not just their way of making a living, but also their legacy of independence, and honoring their ancestors.
That might also be behind the persistence of "the South will rise again!" thinking.
Wars are not fought until the last bullet has been fired or the last soldier is dead. They last until one side or the other decides that continuing the conflict is a worse alternative than ceasing to fight, whatever that entails. The South thought the North would be the first to throw in the towel. It was wrong. Like the Argentinians in seizing the Falklands. Like Japan in 1941. On the other hand, sometimes the overmatched power prevails. The American colonists deciding to break away from Mother England. The Finns in 1939.
But wars are full of surprises. Human nature being what it is, assessments of looming conflicts tend toward the rosier ideas of those who have a stake in a successful outcome.
Another element is understand the perception of alternatives for the South. Slavery was not just a practice, not merely an economic issue. It was a lifestyle. And it was, per Southern notions, a means to an end, that end being avoiding the apocalypse of taking their boot off the neck of a black population that would otherwise destroy them. So it was widely believed. When one is facing what one believes to be annihilation, long odds in a conflict suddenly become acceptable, because one has nothing to lose.
"The parties in the conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders. They are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground – Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity at stake."
--James Henley Thornwell, preacher, slaveholder, South Carolina
I've read countless Southern newspaper editorials, letters home from Confederate soldiers, exhortations to rally the cause, which comprise a litany of horrors that will befall the South should the institution of slavery cease. And slavery? It was merely 'regulated freedom', per Mr. Thornwell. Quintessential Newspeak, long before Orwell. Emancipation would mean the destruction of the South, so why not go down fighting, even if the chance of victory were small?
Never mind that the entire premise was false, as history has shown.
To add to what others have already said, in early 1861 the South simply could not imagine the incredible size of the armies that the Union was going to be able to create. Even the South was able to create armies that dwarf anything that came before in North America.
In the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the larger armies were usually 10,000 to 15,000, usually less. In the Civil War, 10,000 to 15,000 was a corps, just one part of an army.
US army size
Before the Civil War --- 16,367 men
Peak during the war --- 700,000 men
For instance, in the 1864 spring campaign Grant had an army of over 100,000 men to go after Robert E Lee and Richmond while Sherman had over 100,000 men to go after Joe Johnston and Atlanta. Probably nobody before the Civil War could picture anything on that scale.
Napoleon's Grande Armee that invaded Russia in 1812 included over 450,000 troops.
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