Given that the Confederacy had a third of the population and an eleventh of the industry of the North, the South’s defeat was, according to this view, unavoidable.
But that view is wrong. This book contends that the South most definitely could have won the war, and shows in a number of cases how a Confederate victory could have come about.
Beyond the actual opportunities presented to the Confederacy, we should remember a broader fact — there is nothing inevitable about military victory, even for a state with apparently overwhelming strength. The Greeks beat the Persians at Marathon, Alexander destroyed the Persian Empire, the Americans defeated the British in the Revolution, Napoléon Bonaparte hobbled huge alliances in his early wars. In all of these cases the victor was puny and weak by comparison with his opponent.
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Three men more than any others determined the outcome of the American Civil War — the Confederacy’s president, Jefferson Davis, and two generals, Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Jackson figured out almost from the outset how to win the war, but neither Davis nor Lee was willing to follow his recommendations.
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Davis was opposed to offensive action against the North. He wanted to remain on the defensive in the belief that the major European powers would intervene on the Confederacy’s side to guarantee cotton for their mills, or that the North would tire of the war and give up.
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Lee, on the other hand, was focused on conducting an offensive war against the armies of the North. He did not see the war as a collision between the Northern people and the Southern people. He saw it as a struggle between the governments and the official armies of the two regions.
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Recognizing the need to adapt to the new kind of war in which they were immersed, Jackson developed a polar opposite approach. He proposed moving against the Northern people’s industries and other means of livelihood. He wanted to avoid Northern strength, its field armies, and strike at Northern weakness, its undefended factories, farms, and railroads. His strategy, in short, was to bypass the Union armies and to win indirectly by assaulting the Northern people’s will to pursue the war. He proposed making “unrelenting war” amid the homes of the Northern people in the conviction that this would force them “to understand what it will cost them to hold the South in the Union at the bayonet’s point.”
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Significantly, William Tecumseh Sherman won the war for the North by employing precisely the strategy that Stonewall Jackson had tried but failed to get the South to follow: he conducted “unrelenting war” on the people and the property of Georgia in his march from Chattanooga to Atlanta, and from Atlanta to the sea, in 1864. This campaign broke the back of Southern resistance.
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But wars are not won by heavy losses heroically sustained. Wars are won by ingenious plans correctly implemented.
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Three decades before the Civil War, the great Prussian strategist Karl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) argued that in a country involved in an insurrection or torn by internal dissension, the capital, the chief leader, and public opinion constitute the Schwerpunkt, or center of gravity, where collapse has the greatest chance of occurring.
Following this theory, the Confederacy’s most glittering opportunity lay not in defeating the Northern field army in Virginia but in isolating or capturing Washington, evicting Lincoln and his government, and damaging Northern industry and railroads in order to turn public opinion against the war.
British Colonel G. F. R. Henderson, the famed biographer of Jackson, made this point graphically in 1898: “A nation endures with comparative equanimity defeat beyond its own borders. Pride and prestige may suffer, but a high-spirited people will seldom be brought to the point of making terms unless its army is annihilated in the heart of its own country, unless the capital is occupied and the hideous sufferings of war are brought directly home to the mass of the population. A single victory on Northern soil, within easy reach of Washington, was far more likely to bring about the independence of the South than even a succession of victories in Virginia.”
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Lee, who was named commander of the Army of Northern Virginia on June 1, 1862, after Johnston was wounded, sought from first to last to fight an offensive war—that is, a war of battles and marches against the armies of the North. After Davis’s rejection of invasion, Jackson turned to a new approach to warfare. Lee resisted this approach, which called for luring the Union army to attack against a strong Confederate defensive position, repelling that attack and thereby weakening enemy strength, morale, and resolve, and then going on the offensive by swinging around the flank or rear to destroy the Union army. Lee expressed his fundamental attitude about battle most cogently to his corps commander Longstreet on the first day of the battle of Gettysburg, on July 1, 1863. When Longstreet implored Lee not to assault the Union army forming up in great strength on Cemetery Ridge directly in front of him, Lee replied, “No, the enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there.”
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Stonewall Jackson urged Lee to move the Confederate army north of Washington, where it would threaten Baltimore, Philadelphia, and the capital’s food supply and communications. If the Confederate army held such a dangerous position, Jackson said, the enemy would have no other option except to assault it. Lee rejected Jackson’s advice once again, deciding to move west into the Cumberland Valley, far away from the center of Northern power. There he expected to fall on the Union army, not wait for it to fall on his army.
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Although Jackson’s death handed the South a devastating blow, the Confederacy could still have won if Lee had accepted Jackson’s defend-then-attack plan when he invaded Maryland and Pennsylvania a month later. James Longstreet believed he had extracted a promise from Lee to do just that. But at the very first challenge Lee faced in Pennsylvania, he reverted to direct confrontation. This led to head-on attacks on all three days of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863, ending with General George Pickett’s disastrous charge on the third day, which wiped out the last offensive power of the Confederacy.
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My purpose is to show that, despite the odds, wars are won by human beings. When superior military leaders come along and political leaders pay attention to them, they can overcome great power and great strength. That is a lesson we need to remember today.
