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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'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.
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 potentually 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.
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