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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3201 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 20, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Let's say you're redoing the Civil War and you get to play one of two characters: Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis.

Would it actually be easy to win the war playing as Jefferson Davis?

Obviously, the South would never have been able to conquer the North. The North had immense economic, technological, naval, and manpower advantages. But they didn't need to. They just need to impose enough of a cost on the North that the North would come to a settlement. This doesn't appear that far-fetched. The re-election of Abraham Lincoln was no sure thing in 1864. Had the war not turned decisively in favor of the Union, its possible that McClellan could have won. In the end, he still captured 45% of the votes and won three states (NJ, DE, KY). If McClellan prosecuted the war as President like he did as a General, its likely the South could have held out for a long time. Situations like the starvation of Union prisoners in Andersonville, and the sheer awfulness of the conflict would have likely have proven intolerable without a sure path to victory.

So what could the South have done?

Fabian tactics. They should have simply refused to give battle whenever possible, and harassed Union communications. Johnston did just that as he retreated in the face of Sherman's army. But then he was replaced by the Confederate government because they preferred someone who wanted to fight. Then Sherman took Atlanta.

Lee's incursion into Pennsylvania was a fatal mistake that did more to weaken the Confederate cause than anything. He may have been a good tactician but this strategic blunder is unforgivable.

But the real weak point here is Jefferson Davis. He often involved himself in military decisions and wanted commanders who took an aggressive posture. While appropriate for a stronger force, this is entirely inappropriate for a weaker one. Confederate doctrine should have been preservation of precious manpower, avoiding giving battle, never fighting when not intrenched etc... That last part is also key since the Civil War showed some signs of a proto-WWI type environment.

In any case, in hindsight, the war seems eminently winnable for the South. Which character would you play: Lincoln or Davis?

I agree with most of what @Shrike and @birb_cromble have to say about a Fabian strategy not working. But I want to put a finer point on it. Your thought experiment is in a pretty common vein among history buffs, and while these can be fun, as intellectual exercises they are often lacking. The reason for this is that the participants too often presume to second-guess the actions of the real-world participants with the benefit of knowing how everything ends. It's illustrative that you bring up Joe Johnston's actions in the Atlanta campaign and point to them as wise and prudent, in contrast to the recklessness of John Bell Hood. This is a pretty common take among Civil War buffs. Almost no one, however, says the same thing about Johnston's actions during the Peninsula Campaign two years earlier, or equates Lee's actions in the Seven Days to Hood's in Atlanta. It's because we know now that Lee's actions spooked McClellan enough that the Union ended up withdrawing from the Peninsula entirely. If you're going to take the position that Davis should have undertaken a Fabian strategy you don't get to apply it only to the situations where, with hindsight, that would have worked. You can't just tell Lee to not invade Pennsylvania; you also have to tell him to fall back to Richmond during the Seven Days, and to be prepared to abandon it if the situation became untenable. No stupid shit like dividing his army to attack a larger force. Of course, had the South actually pursued this strategy, the war would have been lost in 1862, even with an idiot like McClellan in charge of Union forces.

In 1862, Johnston had strategically retreated against a less aggressive general while he was more evenly matched in terms of manpower. By July 1864, he had spent the previous two months strategically withdrawing in good terrain for defensive battle. By the time he reached Atlanta, the situation had worsened. If I'm Jeff Davis, by that point I'm waiting for a telegram saying that he doesn't like the looks of Sherman's position and the only prudent thing to do is abandon the city before Sherman outflanks him, cuts the rail lines, and lays the city under siege. Remember that you aren't fighting some idealized war with the benefit of hindsight; you're taking a position on what Davis should have done given what he knew at the time, using the people who were actually involved. Whatever ideas you have about what Johnston should have done had he stayed in command, he probably wouldn't have done them. If he had any intention of fighting a decisive defensive battle for Atlanta, the time to do it was weeks earlier when he had a terrain advantage. Part of the reason he got canned in the first place was because he chose to retreat to a less defensible position.

And even if he had, so what? People act like he could have just hung out in Atlanta indefinitely, and that the North would have grown restless and elected McClellan to end the war. First, he couldn't have stayed in Atlanta that long. When Hood attacked Sherman, it was to prevent Sherman from positions that were disadvantageous to the Confederacy. What you're suggesting is that Hood should have just let the Union take these positions unopposed. From this perspective, Hood's attacks, while costly in terms of manpower, allowed him to stay in Atlanta about a month longer than he otherwise could have. If the Union had taken the Macon railroad on their first shot at the end of July, they Confederates would have given up Atlanta a month earlier than they did in the historical timeline, not later. And even in the unlikely event that Johnston could have held Atlanta until November, and McClellan won the election, you still need to keep in mind that Lincoln was in office for another four months. There was no way that Atlanta was surviving the winter intact with that much of a Union advantage, and developments elsewhere, particularly Virginia, would have meant that by the time McClellan took office on March 4, the war would have been over anyway.

I say all this as someone who thinks that the Confederacy could have won the war, and who thinks that Jeff Davis and others made a lot of bad decisions. I don't think that Union victory was inevitable. But I'm reluctant to point to any specific tactic or strategy that the Confederates could have used to win the war.

Yeah, the confederacy would have been better served by a more aggressive strategy, because they were going to lose a war of attrition and needed a decisive victory early.

in hindsight, the war seems eminently winnable for the South.

That's pretty much the opposite to the opinion I've come to. In my view, the South bet a slightly better prepared soldiery (in 1860) and wish-and-a-prayer magic-thinking diplomacy against.........everything else. Confederate diplomats made a mess of things, their greatest triumph was getting arrested off a British boat, thereby creating an incident. Britain was heavily anti-slavery and had already turned the Royal Navy against the slave trade. They weren't going to finance a pack of slavers, and in fact might have invaded/blockaded if the Union failed to defeat the Confederacy. Nobody else in Europe was going to piss off the Royal Navy for Jeff Davis.

Lincoln meddled as much as Davis did, but he could afford to fuck up several times, and Davis couldn't. Could a perfect storm of events and unstinting genius on the part of 100% of the confederate officials and generals have hypothetically given them a result that could be called victory? Yes. Was it ever likely? Not even for a nanosecond. The confederacy lost the minute they seceded. It just took the Union a bit of fumbling and a quarter million casualties to make it happen.

I think you're basically correct (hence the repeatedly desperate combination of pleading, cajoling, and threats from Confederate leadership to get England involved) but there was a genuine streak of pro-Confederate sentiment in Europe, particularly in England, which is why the Confederates were able to keep buying warships there while the British pretended that ships fitted for cannons could be used for practically anything. Charles Francis Adams was a very busy man!

Lincoln probably could’ve done a bit better, he could’ve maybe sacked McClellan earlier, but he is rightfully considered a great wartime leader. There were also political constraints; he couldn’t start off hard war/total war immediately without destabilizing the north and possibly scaring the hoes/border states. There isn’t much more he could’ve done better, and a lot he could’ve done worse.

If John C Fremont was president, you probably would’ve had a souther victory through sheer extremism and heavy handedness and arrogance. I think a replacement level northern republican leader would’ve won. They likely would’ve gotten a worse deal though. Maybe a Brazil style gradual emancipation and/or unchallenged Black Codes in the South.

The Southern case is interesting, though. The North materially can beat them; the only way the South gets independence is if the North decides the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. If they can keep the war reasonably competitive by November of 1864 such that there is years more combat in front of the north, I think they got a shot at a very desfavorable for them peace. It would involve things like the union controlling the Mississippi River and key Southern forts, but they would still get legal independence.

Of course with the cotton crash of the 1870s, there goes their economy. Welp. They are probably reabsorbed by the 1880s, with most Southerners considering it a terrible failure.

IMO the war was never winnable for the South. Yes, they had favorable terrain in the east and the Army of Northern Virginia did a respectable job of operating in that theater, but the western theater was a wide open disaster and it's hard to think up a counterfactual in which Grant and Sherman wouldn't be able to break it open sooner or later with superior manpower and materiel, not to mention near total naval supremacy.

More to the point, even if the South were to "win" in some fashion, what's to stop the north from licking their wounds and gearing up for another invasion in a few years? The US was never going to tolerate a competing power on the continent if it didn't have to and I seriously doubt a European power would've been willing to spend the resources required to credibly defend the Confederacy given their other global commitments.

The British would have loved to have a competing power effectively encircling the United States, particularly one that was mostly interested in exporting raw materials and importing finished goods. This could have worked for the Confederacy... if Britain wasn't the most fanatically abolitionist of all the Great Powers.

I agree that the CSA would have fallen into the British sphere of influence. I assume that some alternative legal structure for unfree plantation labour could have been worked out that wasn't technically chattel slavery and therefore was acceptable to the British* - something similar was done with unfree sugar plantation labour in various British colonies which never had chattel slavery, although not in the Caribbean. I don't know if the CSA leadership would be savvy enough to do that.

* The UK didn't abolish criminal penalties for breach of employment contracts until 1875, and employment contracts which would constitute indentured servitude according to the modern definition were common.

Other commenters have given good reasons why winning the war was more or less out of JD’s hands. You’re relying on foreign recognition and the addition of more border states to even force a stalemate.

Lincoln, on the other hand, has a few opportunities to avoid Union disasters. Several of them involve McClellan.

I think the more interesting question is: the North won the war and you play as Andrew Johnson. What do you do so that 130 years later people no longer identify with the cause of the South?

That is a more interesting one.

The Republican Reconstruction agenda which Johnson opposed mostly made it into law anyway. He stirred up a lot more resentment against it, but I can’t say if it would have been more or less enduring if he had rubber-stamped everything. I suspect that ship had sailed after his first year, by which point several Southern states had reconstituted their old governments and sent their war heroes to Congress.

Maybe you could preempt the Lost Cause by refusing amnesty to Confederate personnel? But then you’ve still got the remnants of the aristocracy trying to hold on to their plantations, putting up statues and moaning about the good ol’ days. Can you avoid that without going full damnatio memoriae?

Also, preventing ex-Confederates from getting into state or national government probably reduces support for black suffrage. That would give voting southerners license to, well, recreate their whole underclass again. That’s an injustice and probably still reinforces the aristocratic myths.

Do people really identify with the cause of the South now? The Confederacy fought for a very specific slave based political economy. That economy was destroyed by the war and never came back. All political fights in the US are within the political-economic universe created by the victorious Union.

I consider modern people who use Confederate imagery as similar to Ukrainians who dress up like the Nazis; they are appropriating the dress and iconography of a previous movement despite not advocating for that goals of that previous movement.

I’d use a test along the lines of “would believers in the original cause endorse my goals?” Or maybe “would I care about endorsement from the original cause?” So neo-Nazi groups might count even if they don’t have a specific opinion about Versailles. But they’d have to deploy that iconography in service of a Nazi-approved goal like, say, purging ethnic Russians from a region. Merely defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity wouldn’t count.

By this standard, there are definitely people who still identify with the Lost Cause. They’re not expecting to bring back plantation economics but they do still want to maintain a black underclass. Or they have strong opinions on federal authority: courts, banking, interstate commerce. It’s a different world but I think you can still show continuity, especially when it comes to civil rights.

There are two versions of the "cause of the South" that were live issues in living memory and which Yankee elites would have preferred to suppress for good reasons.

The notorious one is race-based citizenship rights. Jim Crow was a live issue for a century after Appomattox, and the last unrepentant segregationist in active politics was Trent Lott as late as 2007. The strand of MAGA thought that talks a lot about "heritage Americans" is being deliberately ambiguous about where ADOS blacks (and feather Indians) fit into their ideal America. The Confederate Battle Flag and the veneration of Confederate veterans was, in fact, used as a symbol of opposition to the Civil Rights and an attempt to link Southern regional pride to the political project of opposing Civil Rights, which is why the symbols are as controversial as they are.

The more serious one in the 21st century is the idea of the United States government as a foreign invader. PJ O'Rourke writes in the introduction to the British edition of Parliament of Whores that the genius of the Anglosphere is that we see bad government as more like a broken toaster than a hostile god. Seeing the government as a foreign invader (either in general, or only when it does something you don't like) isn't that. My (limited by youth and distance) understanding of the symbolism when I was growing up was that the Confederate Battle Flag was used as a symbol of this kind of anti-government sentiment (in much the same way that the Gasden flag is used now) in the 1980's and 1990's before it became a red rag to anti-racists.

Do people really identify with the cause of the South now?

If by "cause of the South" you mean "very specific slave-based political economy", maybe.

But if by "cause of the South" you mean "anti-do-what-anyone-else-tells-you, accepting that you go your way and I go mine, and [to a lesser extent] that fighting if neither of us can do that is good and necessary, even if we die on our feet rather than living on our knees"? That's the reason the General Lee has the Stars and Bars on it (and why it's the symbol of the Dukes of Hazzard in the first place), and is also why even in other nations people reach for this symbol (for they have no native culture of their own) to evoke that particular kind of childish American-style liberty.

That's kind of what "States' Rights (to [insert your favorite moral opprobrium here])" misses- the entire point of that is so that you may do in your area what you and your people have decided to do (i.e. good faith is assumed, per liberalism). One notes that "States' Rights" also includes "to murder your children and get away with it so long as you are a woman", but most don't actually realize that because they're focused on Muh Slavery.

despite not advocating for that goals of that previous movement

I mean, yeah, the Nazis would have put all of Ukraine in concentration camps if they could. The Ukrainian Nazis are generally fighting the Russians (re: Azov) so obviously they don't advocate for that goal; so does the "never ask a white supremacist the race of his girlfriend" thing.

I think there's a lot of emphasis on words and not really on actions, but you have to be paying attention to said actions to know that.

I've met at least one guy younger than me who was like "yea I'd fight for the Confederacy." It wasn't a pro-slavery stance, it was essentially regional patriotism.

You've got to understand that a lot of the people who fought for the South didn't fight for slavery in the sense that they did not stand to benefit by it and had little or zero economic investment in it. Like, plenty of poor people who basically did not benefit from slavery at all still fought for the South because they were invaded by a hostile foreign power. And by 1860, the culture war over slavery had grown beyond slavery in the sense that it had become about whether slavery was right or wrong or should be legal or illegal, but about a clash of cultures and ways of living. (You can see this in today's culture war as well, arguments as soldiers and all of that.)

And in the South, moreso than most other parts of the United States, those people didn't go anywhere, they had kids and grandkids and those great-grandkids still live there and still have an emotional attachment to their ancestors (who fought bravely despite very long odds and were defeated) and their land (which was economically devastated by the war) and their culture (which has been mocked in popular culture ever since). So (despite your assertion about political fights in the US today) the differences in the cultures and ways of living never really went away. Many, perhaps most people in the South, are still regionalized patriots. I think (particularly in the past) people were likely to display a Confederate flag similar to how someone in Texas might display the Texas flag instead of the United States flag. (Not that I would suggest there was zero correlation between wearing the Confederate flag and certain beliefs about race...!)

Perhaps the best way I might explain this to someone who is either too close or too far from the question to understand it might be: imagine a patriotic Englishman who strongly supported the Saxons at Hastings (I suspect a pretty common position) despite modern England being fundamentally a Norman invention.

This is not Confederate apologia, by the by, I'm just trying to explain something to you. Happy to elaborate to the best of my ability.

I think all of your arguments are true, and it tracks my experiences with Southern family and living in the South, and I think we may have a bit of a terminology dispute. When I read, “the cause of the South”, I interpreted it as specifically “the Confederate cause” rather than “fighting for Southern wellbeing in general.” While people fought for both the Union and Confederacy for tons of individual reasons, the Confederate leadership was pretty unified that the purpose of secession was the maintenance of the slave system and planter dominance in the South.

Tons of later Southerners viewed themselves as having kinship to the Confederacy, but almost none of them wanted the socio-political-economic system that was the raison d’etre of the Confederacy. Even the Redeemers after the Civil War had a very different class and social basis than the pre-war Planter class. They may use Confederate iconography or argue for the nobility of certain Confederates or even the cause as a whole, but I don’t consider that really supporting the Confederate cause.

Your average guy who has a Confederate flag is either a Southern regional patriot or Red Tribe person who dislikes Blue Tribe and/or people who don’t like the South. I view it as similar to a Ukrainian who uses Nazi/Banderite iconography today; they don’t support Nazi Germany or probably even the politics of Stephan Bandera. They are just using the symbols of a previous fight for their use in a current fight without endorsing the politics of the previous fight.

One thing I don't understand is that, at some point not too long ago, Confederate apologia was relatively common in the North. I mean, for Pete's sake, a Canadian band wrote a sympathetic song about the South, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".

Now the common take is that the south was evil, no good, they sucked in every way, etc... The Dixie Chicks are just the Chicks. Lady Antebellum is Lady A.

What changed?

Its not what we would normally expect. In the 1920s I would expect the antebellum South to be the outgroup. In the 2020s, they are the fargroup. You would typically expect hatred to lessen as the conflict becomes a distant memory. Instead, it has increased.

Regardless, I thank God for the defiant oppostionalism of the Borderers. They guard my right flank. Without them, the leftist hate mob would be after me.

I think it was Dylan Roof shooting up a black church while wearing Confederate and Rhodesian flag patches. It was pretty soon after that, that Amazon and such stopped selling Confederate flag merchandise, and streets and schools started getting renamed.

Literally who?

I don't doubt the chronology, but the stage has to be set ideologically. The spark didn't really cause the fire, it was inevitable with enough dry timber. If Dylan Roof, who I honestly don't remember, had never existed do you think that the schools wouldn't have been renamed? Of course they would have. And if a Dylan Roof didn't exist it would have been necessary to invent him. Like we have now with the lynching hoaxes.

The civil war wasn’t really about slavery- I mean sûre, slavery is how I’d explain it to children, it was the proximal issue, so it’s not totally unfair to call it that. The civil war was about whether southern elites should have a veto over US policy on the whole. This is, in the minds of liberals(and perhaps nowhere else), a live issue again. You should just read liberal propaganda and connect the threads.

What changed?

A cynical and short answer is that American politics did (the South stopped voting for Democrats).

There's always going to be a sort of romance and pathos in defeat that I think is attractive, and I think that US culture went from elevating rebels to viewing them as an insidious threat. In fact, I think it's super interesting the degree to which US establishment culture grew extremely censorious while still pretending to be the old rebellious culture, but of course the easy answer is that they are the same culture, just all growed up.

The south became roughly as republican as the national average in the late seventies and was more republican by the nineties. Your timelines don't match up.

Cultural shifts don't happen on a dime, and oftentimes are the product of generational replacement - so a shift taking place in the 1980s during the Reagan Revolution, being put on hold for a bit to allow Bill Clinton to enjoy his Presidency, and being kicked into high gear during W. and then manifesting about the time 90s kids started using social media sounds about right to me.

I freely admit this is at best a answer, and at best a simplistic one - very open to alternative explanations.

Reconciliation between the North and the memory of Dixie was a symbol of reconciliation between the two halves of the country, so naturally it ratchets back up with the culture war (the 1920s culture war was along different lines, like prohibition, that didn't match to North/South, but nowadays the South, as well as anywhere up North that would fly the flag, is Deplorable country).

I don't know for sure. Until 2015 the creed of the "Children of the Confederacy of the United Daughters of the Confederacy" stated that the war was not fought to sustain slavery, which means you can identify with the CSA without advocating for slavery.

I think it’s important to disambiguate the cause of the CSA from the Redeemer and post war conservative Southern causes. The core telos of the CSA was the maintenance of slavery and planter dominance. All of its leadership agreed on that. Post war Southern conservatives from the Redeemers onward desired different things. There is overlap, such as both wanting to limit Yankee power more or less and support for white supremacy until the 60s, but they are different political projects.

Groups like Daughters of the Confederacy use the history of the CSA for their own purposes, but they don’t share the same ends. The CSA response to the question of “Was the US Civil War about slavery?” Is “YesChad. Slavery needs to protected.”

The confederacy fought because they believed the planter class was owed a veto right over federal policy, and they had pre-abolitionist dust ups over this regularly. They seceded after losing control of the senate and then the presidency in quick succession, not in response to any specific policies.

In the 1860’s, this was specifically manifested as slavery. But they’d previously gotten into it with pro-slavery presidents. The non-slavery parts of the CSA constitution are also revealing- all about Plutocracy and the natural rights of large landholders to govern.

The #1 most plausible scenario for a confederate victory is not a Fabian strategy- union logistics were too good. A Fabian strategy works by interrupting the opposing army’s logistical chain until they can no longer sustain an army large enough to win against the opposing force- which for the confederacy would have required major offensives to destroy union depots, rail facilities, etc. The U.S. army was designed to crush steppe nomads at the beginning of the war, so it was unusually good at logistics. Without that it’s just an insurgency, and insurgencies typically fail. The South’s economic basis- large, highly visible farms with an unwilling labor force that would run away if given protection for doing so- is uniquely unsuited for a guerrilla campaign.

No, the south was stuck with the strategy they adopted- attempt to win a war-ending victory in their northeastern front. They failed at this, obviously. They could have succeeded, it’s a lot more plausible than them conducting offensives into Union territory at will. But their deadline was pretty harsh- early enough in 1864 for news to reach the country’s voting population. The alternative for the Confederacy was to capture enough Union territory to force a surrender, which they likely couldn’t do- it would probably entail something like occupying all of Pennsylvania and laying siege to New York City.

I studied the American Civil War in graduate school, and the books I read (and my professor) did not think highly of the Fabian thesis. They pointed out that

  1. The material and morale cost imposed by having a hostile army rampaging all over your countryside was extremely high (this is part of the reason Lee invaded Pennsylvania, Virginia had been marched over by armies of both sides so many times).
  2. A standing army was a necessary symbol of the legitimacy of the South to its people (and also helpful to foreign sponsors) as a nation-state.
  3. Aggressively defending its territory was necessary as the South was a slaveholding state, and the North was freeing slaves in territories it entered. This is a pretty serious problem when you are at war, the men are off fighting it, and you need to make sure your armies are fed. Allowing retreating in the face of their superior armies meant that the Southern economic base would evaporate.

There are also some who suggest that the South was unable to wage a guerrilla campaign (e.g. in the aftermath of Lee's surrender) because of poor or brittle morale. This is untrue; the South accepted an outrageous percentage of casualties that would probably have folded up other nation-states, including the Union.

Highly recommend Gallagher's Union War and Confederate War on this question.

If I was going to try to win the Civil War for the South as a time-traveler, I would have used the tourniquet in Albert Sidney Johnston's pocket to save his life and do my best to make sure the Union troops were routed at Shiloh on the second day. Johnston was regarded by many as the best commander in the United States going into the war, and American literature over-indexes on the fighting in the East. The truth is that the Western campaign was arguably the most decisive. (Focusing on Gettysburg is arguably a bit of pro-Confederate myopia that glorifies the South's high-water mark in the East while overlooking their relatively poor generalship in the West, although you aren't wrong about the potential electoral consequences.) A victory over Grant there could have removed the North's most effective commander.

Of course, saving Johnston's life might not really matter in the long run – I like it because it's an interesting "what if," a small change of the sorts that spawn alternate-history books. There are lots of other things an effective time traveler could do, such as ensure Grant did not get the early sweep at Forts Henry and Donelson (possibly more important than saving Johnston), pick up Special Order 191 before it was recovered by Union forces, give advice on how to win/not lose at Gettysburg, kick the early trial plans to free slaves to act as soldiers into higher gear, or possibly even persuade South Carolina not to fire the first shot.

I also do think that the South could have used more effective defensive tactics without going purely Fabian. Lee (who had an early war nickname of "the King of Spades") imposed massive costs on the North via effective trenchworks and defensive tactics later in the war. But at the end of the day, particularly in premodern war, "eating the other guy's corn" versus "letting the other guy eat your corn" is a big difference.

Highly recommend Gallagher's Union War and Confederate War on this question.

Seconding this. Great books.

American literature over-indexes on the fighting in the East. The truth is that the Western campaign was arguably the most decisive.

I've always thought that Vicksburg was probably the most important fight of the war. What's your take?

I'm not sure. I did a course in it, not an entire degree, and to the extent I focused on anything it was actually the naval war, so I don't have a strong opinion on the single most important battle. But Vicksburg, if memory serves, was what really allowed the North to implement Scott's Anaconda strategy on the Southern interior.

How about, after the shocking victory at First Manassas, just blasting north and rolling into an unprepared Washington DC? Having the White House surrounded by graycoats might have gotten Honest Abe to rethink a few things.

This is off the top of my head based on what I recall from coursework like a decade ago, but if memory serves:

  • Southern troops were exhausted from the battle and the maneuvering leading up to it and not in a condition to pursue
  • Washington, D.C. was likely fortified (I know it was later in the war)
  • Northern troops were falling back in that direction, would benefit from interior lines, and would have a numerical advantage on the defensive

I'd need to do more research to have a really solid opinion, but it strikes me a lot like the people saying Hannibal should have just thrown his army at Rome after Cannae, ignoring that the Romans had the superior numbers.

Aside from the high casualty rates, this would not have ended the Union’s ability to fight- the confederate army would probably have needed to reach, like, NYC.

There are also some who suggest that the South was unable to wage a guerrilla campaign (e.g. in the aftermath of Lee's surrender) because of poor or brittle morale. This is untrue; the South accepted an outrageous percentage of casualties that would probably have folded up other nation-states, including the Union.

The South did eventually wage a successful Fabian/guerilla campaign. The first attempt (the first Klan) was crushed, but the white South ultimately "won" (in the form of Redemption and Jim Crow) by maintaining the capacity for organised political violence while exhausting the Feds' willingness to keep enforcing Reconstruction. The South may not have been able to do that under the leadership of the planter class - the Redeemer leadership was much less aristocratic than the CSA officer corps or the first Klan leadership.

Ignoring "lose the war but win the peace", I agree with @Shrike that Shiloh was the easiest place to win the war for the South, in hindsight. If AS Johnston (or even Beauregard, who seems to have been a perfectly competent general) defeats Grant's and Buell's armies in detail (as it looked like they probably would on the eve of the battle) then they hold Corinth, which gives the Confederacy a working east-west railway line, and even at a purely tactical level delays the Vicksburg campaign by a year (or indefinitely if the political impact of being routed at Shiloh ends Grant's career). Delaying Vicksburg by a year means that the war is indecisive by polling day in 1864 and McClellan beats Lincoln. In the best case, a victorious Johnston supported by sufficiently talented political leadership is able to flip Kentucky and the war west of the Appalachians is over. Is the minimal intervention for a time traveller to flip the American Civil War simply warning Johnston about the strategic importance of the hornet's nest?

Ending reconstruction was not losing the peace for the Union. Their war goal was not racial equality in the south, or even really overturning the south's social system. The war goal was to end the southern planter class's veto power over the republic's politics- which they did quite effectively.

Interesting. I knew that my post would bring out some people with deep Civil War knowledge. I'll fully admit that anything I can think many others have thought of before, more deeply.

When it comes to the slaves, I wonder if hundreds of thousands of freed slaves streaming North would ultimately have become a burden. Potential culture war issue: were regiments composed of freed slaves actually useful (I don't trust the academy to give me an honest answer here).

Definitely the south should have never fought outside of an intrenched position, but they did so regularly and at great cost, even when defending their own territory. But I can imagine why soldiers and commanders would prefer gallant charges over sitting inside fortifications for months making staged retreats.

The biggest difficulty I see for the south is that Union naval dominance was inevitable. Perhaps the Union could have fought its own defensive war and just starved the South out over time via naval blockade without taking a lot of casualties. I wonder if President McClellan might have gone for that.

were regiments composed of freed slaves actually useful (I don't trust the academy to give me an honest answer here).

I think the answer is "yes" in Union service, and it's unclear how they would have performed in Southern service, since their options were basically fighting for freedom or surrendering for freedom. (However I do think that freeing them was better than the slightly insane plan to conscript the slaves to fight as slaves.)

Even if one agrees for the sake of argument that freed slaves wouldn't perform as well on the battlefield (and setting aside any of the culture war reasons, at least in the South a lot of troops went into the war with a deep familiarity with firearms we would not expect most slaves to possess) being able to use them in logistics, screening, and garrison roles is useful.

Definitely the south should have never fought outside of an intrenched position

See Fort Henry and Fort Donelson for what happen when you adopt this tactic. Fortifications are force multipliers, not a replacement for maneuver.

Perhaps the Union could have fought its own defensive war and just starved the South out over time via naval blockade without taking a lot of casualties.

The South was an agrarian society. You could have made them poor this way, but not actually starve them out. Furthermore...although the Union blockade was successful, the Confederacy's commerce raiders punched above their weight and imposed real economic losses on the North. Northerners might not have seen a "sit and wait" strategy as politically acceptable while the South was tearing through their commerce and whaling. However see Winfield Scott's similar Anaconda Plan, which was ultimately essentially implemented because Scott was more correct than most other early war leadership about the length and cost of the war.

I'm not sure Northern naval dominance was quite as inevitable as one might imagine. Certainly they had the superior manufacturing, but the Confederacy's early war goals were to procure European ironclads and obliterate the Northern wooden-hulled fleet. However they were unable to procure a European ironclad until late in the war. I doubt buying a few ironclads would have prevented a resolute North from eventually beating them at sea with their greater manufacturing capabilities, but it might have set the blockade back at a crucial time.

Okay, you clearly know a lot more than I do. I'm slightly skeptical of the value of black troops in northern service only because of the culture war implications where obviously any modern historian is going to be forced to say they were incredible fighters and even contemporaneous accounts from northern leaders would not want to cast shade on their own troops. I wonder what southerners said about them.

In any case, what would you do if playing as Jefferson Davis to try to win the war?

I mean, probably the same thing he did in real life. It's very hard to fight a war against a larger enemy without an offsetting advantage. The only offsetting advantage that the South had was that their troop quality was superior.

Since troop quality tends to equalize over the course of a war (very noticeable change, for instance, in the capabilities of Southern cavalry relative to their Northern peers over the course of the war) fighting an aggressive campaign to rack up as many victories as possible and break the enemy will to fight early on is pretty smart.

I am sure that in hindsight there is a lot of things Davis could have done differently, but my study of the war didn't focus very specifically on him and thus I am likely ignorant of many of them.

I think Lee can perhaps be criticized for being willing to win costly victories early in the war, but ultimately the South was never going to win a war of attrition, and Lincoln basically needed to cycle through commanders until he found one (Grant) that understood this and was willing to throw his own men into the meatgrinder, so fighting to optimize for casualties probably doesn't help you win the war if it means you are losing more often - this was basically McClellan's strategy (McClellan as far as I can tell was actually very good at training and loved his men - if anything, this was a problem, he wasn't willing to let them die) and he was pretty evidently ill-suited for actually winning the war.

But it seems to me that there wasn't much Davis could do differently in most cases. What is he supposed to do about Johnston or Jackson, tell them "don't die"? Or tell Lee "good job, try to get fewer people killed"? He could have put Lee in charge sooner, or perhaps put him in charge in the West, but Lee wasn't ultimately capable of beating Grant. Maybe he could have tried to have Grant assassinated after Shiloh, or something similarly off-the-wall.

The one thing I know I would push for if I woke up tomorrow as Jefferson Davis, newly elected President of the Confederacy, is push to free slaves to fight sooner. But a lot of that is because I think such an effort would be better for the postwar South (regardless of who won) rather than thinking that it would win the war. There's also a real problem here in terms of timing - something like this became more politically viable late in the war, but arguably too late to matter. If Davis had been able to free the slaves on Day One, it might have made a difference in terms of Northern political will, and garnered additional support from England. But obviously that was politically impossible. The best he could likely have done would have been to launch pilot programs earlier in the war. Maybe that would have worked well, or maybe not.

Most historical accounts suggest that the segregated Colored Troops performed bravely and reasonably well, given their limited battlefield experience. Their high casualty rates seem to stem from how they were employed during battles, and a general take no quarter and ask none attitude between them and Confederate troops.

Buffalo soldiers after the war performed well- the Indians seemed to generally regard them as extremely capable, the equal of white infantry.

Am I allowed to abolish slavery as the CSA?

You're allowed to play as Jefferson Davis which means exercising a lot of dictatorial powers, but not unlimited power. You could try to abolish slavery. But if you did, you'd probably get deposed or killed which would end the game in a loss.

My idea would be to avoid the Civil War altogether by transforming slavery into technically not-slavery: emanicpate the slaves, but make them owe enough money to the former masters that it would take them 25 years of effectively zero disposable income to repay it. Let Northern abolitionists purchase this debt if they want to prove their virtue.

The civil war was fought over the political power of the planter class, which expected a veto over the republic's policies before the war. 'Slavery' is a reasonable enough term for that, but that kind of emancipation wouldn't address the real cause.

This would almost certainly not have avoided the war, as Lincoln was determined to keep the nation together. It might have taken the wind out of the sails of some of the Radical Republicans and made the CSA more popular in Europe, but Lincoln had a plenty good casus belli already.

Oh, I meant avoiding the war by avoiding the secession.

Ah gotcha.

I'm not sure Fabian tactics would have worked. The Union's advantages in manpower and materiel were staggering. The combined northern military was roughly twice the size of the Confederate forces, and the Union hadn't dipped nearly as deeply into its conscription pool as the Confederates did.

Given the limited industrial base of the Southern states, Union generals could force engagements simply by targeting vital infrastructure and strategic cities, like they did during the historical war. At that point, Confederate generals would be forced to choose between engaging in a battle against a numerically superior and better equipped force, or lose more of their ability to make war with every passing day.

If you put a gun to my head and forced me to step into the time machine, my personal attempt to salvage the situation would probably depend on the date.

Starting the war 10-20 years earlier would negate a lot of the Union's advantages in manpower, industry, and logistics. It might not be enough, but it would be something. It would also offer enough time to stage a proper PR campaign against Northern insurgents like John Brown.

If I had to start on exactly the same date as Davis, I'd likely turn to guerilla actions as soon as possible. Border states like Maryland were already powder kegs. If the Northern war machine couldn't trust the civilian population from Harrisburg to Annapolis (either through organic discontent or agents provocateur), it would seriously limit their ability to move supplies and soldiers through one of the most important corridors of the fighting.

What a fabian strategy actually is is to deny the enemy the ability to field war-winning armies over large portions of the theater by interrupting their logistics- Fabius did this by defeating Hannibal's foraging parties so that he was unable to move his army away from allies, giving Rome a free hand to campaign wherever Hannibal was not.

This... isn't something the south could do. For one thing, the US and Russian armies had far better logistics than most victorian armies did; they were set up to pursue steppe nomads from friendly bases. Due to railroads, depot networks, and conestoga wagons, the union simply had a far longer logistical leash than ancient armies- more than long enough to take war-winning amounts of territory without foraging or advancing their logistical infrastructure into confederate controlled territory. Secondly, the confederacy did try a fabian strategy against general Sherman- it didn't work, he had the manpower to simply eat the casualties, and rice plantations in the tidewater functioned as large supply concentrations enabling more effective foraging. Plantation agriculture is simply not well suited to sustaining guerrilla warfare compared to smallholding.

Yeah, it's hard to successfully carry out the Fabian strategy when you are Carthage by analogy.

Yeah, I'm reading Grant's memoirs right now and he mentions often how his troops were able to eat on the land from abundant food resources during his campaigns in the west.

I recently read 1776 and there was a similar theme of armies finding abundant food as well, even to the astonishment of British troops unaccustomed to such agricultural wealth.

America really is the land of plenty.

I don't disagree with any of that.

The point I'm trying to make is that even if the Confederates were to try and disrupt Union supply lines, they'd be trying to interrupt those supply lines while Union troops were merrily burning down entire cities. They simply couldn't be in both places at once, and like you said, the Union could ignore the pain longer than any Confederate force could maintain the pressure. Sherman was not shy about pillaging the countryside, so supply chain interruptions would have been even less effective.

As for the guerilla warfare aspect, you're probably correct in the tidewater, but the battle of the Wilderness and... basically everything that happened in Kansas makes me think that a more ruthless Confederate approach probably would have had legs further inland. The Confederacy could have potentially maintained a rump government for several years.

A rump government which couldn’t secure the interests of slaveholders wouldn’t have stayed together long.

Agreed - the Appalachian mountain men are the folk heroes of Red Tribe orneriness now, but in the Civil War era they were the least reliable part of the Red coalition, to the point where West Virginia and Kentucky defected from the rest of the south, and the Appalachian bits of Tennessee were not reliable either.

One weakness, if you could call it that, that the North had is that they were unwilling to really go after the civilian population. I am not sure they'd have been willing to do the necessary to root out civilians who were harboring rebels. I'm sure people could point out counterexamples, but in general I don't think northern soldiers would be willing to commit atrocities against southern whites in order to win the war.

The South probably couldn't have stopped the North from taking cities, but I doubt the North could have fully suppressed the countryside. But maybe the South would have had its own motivation problems if Richmond, Atlanta, and New Orleans all fell without big battles.

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