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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 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
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.
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.
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.
See Fort Henry and Fort Donelson for what happen when you adopt this tactic. Fortifications are force multipliers, not a replacement for maneuver.
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.
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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.
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Buffalo soldiers after the war performed well- the Indians seemed to generally regard them as extremely capable, the equal of white infantry.
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