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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1318 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.

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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.

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