Could the South Have Won the War?

By March 1865, it was obvious to all but the most die-hard Confederates that the South was going to lose the war. Whether that loss was inevitable is an unanswerable question, but considering various “what if” scenarios has long been a popular exercise among historians, novelists and Civil War buffs...

Perhaps the most common scenario centers on the actions of Gen. Robert E. Lee...

What many fail to recognize is that Northerners were just as committed to winning as the Southerners. Some saw it as a war to free the slaves, while others fought to ensure that their republican form of government survived. Northerners believed that America was the world’s last great hope for democracy, and if the South destroyed the Union by force, that light of liberty might be extinguished forever. Lincoln once said the North must prove “that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”

The South may have been fighting to preserve a way of life and to protect its perceived constitutional rights, but so was the North. If the Southern people kept fighting even after the devastating defeats at Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chattanooga, why should we not believe the North would have kept on fighting even if the Confederates had won Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chattanooga? The fact is that both sides were equally brave and equally dedicated to their cause. Commitment and morale being the same, the stronger side prevailed.

The population of slaves in the decade prior to the Civil War increased 23%, compared to an overall population growth of 36%.

The population of slaves was confined entirely to the Southern states. That 23% increase was very significant in states that saw very little in the way of new immigrants.

The overall 38% population growth was for the entire nation and spurred by immigration from Europe, primarily Ireland and the German states, and that immigrant population was primarily concentrated in Northern states.

The South was becoming short on new lands for plantations (and the needs for slave labor) while the North was looking for new lands for single family farms for the new immigrants.

Hence, the conflicts over Homesteading, Dred Scott, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the expansion of slavery to the Western territories.

It wasn't slavery per se that caused the Civil War... it was the conflict over the expansion of slavery that caused it. In other words, who would win the West. Freemen or Slavery.

dangus: "Yeah, there's a modest increase in the 1850s, but nothing near enough to bring it up to previous historical norms.
Calling that a 50% increase is misleading through cherry-picking data..."

Thanks for posting a most interesting chart.
I think it helps confirm what I quoted above.
As I read that chart, you have a string of low-price years in the 1840s, ending about 1850 after which prices doubled -- ie., from 5.8 in 1849 to 11.7 in 1852.

Sure cotton prices were occasionally higher earlier in the century, but not often, and those years were before wide-spread use of cotton gins, when production was orders-of-magnitude lower.
Further more, those earlier prices were irrelevant in the 1850s, because what mattered then was all the cotton plantations which survived the low-priced 1840s were positioned to prosper mightily in the higher-priced 1850s.

And that's the whole point being made here: during the 1850s, with greatly expanded land under cultivation (1/3 more) and higher cotton prices (nearly doubled), total US cotton production rose from $74 million in the 1840s to over $207 million (tripled) in 1860.
Meanwhile, inflation rose just 33% during the 1850s.

The result of this unprecedented prosperity was average slave prices rising from $925 in 1850 to $1,658 in 1860 (79% increase).

So, it seems to me this picture of Southern prosperity is consistent and long-term, during the 1850s.
What exactly is your problem with it?

BJK: "...total US cotton production rose from $74 million in the 1840s to over $207 million (tripled) in 1860."

This brings us to my humble opinion on how the Confederacy could have won their independence.

In 1861 there was yet another bumper crop of cotton -- at least $200 million worth -- sitting in rail cars and at docks from Galveston Texas to Norfolk, Virginia.
For reasons which defy logic, that $200 million worth of cotton never shipped, was never sold and so far as I know was lost to the Confederacy.

Had it been shipped, sold & banked, $200 million in 1861 would have purchased hundreds of thousands of repeating rifles, with ammunition (circa $100 each), plus the latest equipment to produce more, plus dozens of state-of the art war-ships ($500,000 each), field artillery, plus steel for rail & engines, copper for telegraph wires, etc., etc.
So right away, the Confederacy would start with a huge material / technological advantage.

Next, it required patience, patience and diplomacy -- take all those Fire Eating hot-heads and put them in political straight-jackets until the time is right.
Delay the start of war until the first blows can be overwhelming and decisive.
Wait, wait, wait... until the new Confederate army is equipped, trained, lead & supported logistically (railroads) like none ever seen before.

Under no circumstances pick a fight until you're certain you can win, and in the mean time be as nice, as diplomatic and legalistic as humanly possible.

Indeed, if you really wanted to win, don't ever start the war.
If you have $200 million in the bank in 1861, how much does your average Congressman cost in those days?
Why not just buy off a bunch, and get them to approve your secession, legally, constitutionally, peacefully?

US states with the highest cotton production in 2007:

Don’t be too mystified about the cotton sitting on rail cars. The effect was like OPEC: The North was the South’s market for that cotton. With the cessation of trade, the price of cotton went up five-fold, MORE than making up for lost volume. Also, keep in mind, the cotton wasn’t owned by the government, but by the wealthy plantation owners whose fortunes the war was being fought to protect. They could no more have requisitioned the cotton cost-free than they could have requisitioned more rifles or warships cost-free. Finding alternative markets for cotton would have meant sea-faring, but the South’s PROBLEM was a lack of an industrial base to build up a navy.

The South’s problem wasn’t a lack of cash; They couldn’t simply buy more guns, more steel, etc.

The doom of the South was that they were insanely quick for war. Confederate apologists always take Lincoln’s talking down war and interference as insincere politics, but that’s absurd: if he were planning an invasion, the last thing he would do would be to politically undermine the case for war. The Union was withdrawing from nearly all southern bases. The notion that Ft. Sumter was some sort of effort to build a single, stronger base is belied by the utter failure to defend it.

A strategy for the continuation of the Southern cause would have been to build economic strength while exhausting all political and legal avenues to defend the notion of the States’ political autonomy.

The effect was like OPEC: The North was the South’s market for that cotton.

I'm not so sure about that. Great Britain and Europe was the chief market for the south's cotton. That was the reason for the naval blockade which effectively cut the south off from its markets.

The rest of your analysis holds true.

An interesting (to me at least) aside was the privateer blockade runners. They were offered Letters of marque and reprisal and given incentives to act as an ad hoc confederate merchant navy in order to obtain the desperately needed munitions and supplies.

Only the privateers quickly responded to the pressures - and profits - of the market and devoted much of their talents at smuggling to bring silk and Champagne and other fineries to the slaver hoi polloi.

dangus: "The North was the South’s market for that cotton.
With the cessation of trade, the price of cotton went up five-fold, MORE than making up for lost volume"

No, 75% of US cotton was shipped overseas:

"European and New England purchases soared from 720,000 bales in 1830, to 2.85 million bales in 1850, to nearly 5 million in 1860."
"By the late 1850s, Southern cotton had accounted for

77 percent of the 800 million pounds of cotton consumed in Britain,
90 percent of the 192 million pounds used in France,
60 percent of the 115 million pounds spun in the German Zollverein, and
as much as 92 percent of 102 million pounds manufactured in Russia."[2]"

[Lincoln's] "...blockade restricted naval and merchant access to Confederate ports.
It proved to be highly effective, decreasing cotton exports to Europe from 3.8 million bales in 1860 to virtual nothing in 1862..."

So, if you read all that carefully, what it tells us is that Southern cotton exports in 1860 were approx. 5 million bales, worth $200 million, of which 75%, or 3.8 million bales worth $150 million, went to Europeans.
But even that 25% which went to Northern US mills need not have stopped, had serious efforts been made to keep the peace.

So, you say the Confederate government could not realistically requisition / tax / confiscate all that cotton?
But the market withholding action was not ordered by the Confederate government, it was voluntary, and resulted in the complete loss of that crop!

Of course, my proposed scenario for Confederate independence is not realistic, since it defies human nature and historical realities.
But hey... isn't that what this thread is all about?

Had it been shipped, sold & banked, $200 million in 1861 would have purchased hundreds of thousands of repeating rifles, with ammunition (circa $100 each), plus the latest equipment to produce more, plus dozens of state-of the art warships ($500,000 each), field artillery, plus steel for rail & engines, copper for telegraph wires, etc., etc. So right away, the Confederacy would start with a huge material / technological advantage.

Speculation in commodities markets can be a risky business. A lot of factors can affect the price and it's easy to go wrong. The British were stockpiling raw cotton and unsold fabric was building up in warehouses. Just what the optimal solution would be could be difficult to figure out.

If you were the Confederacy, you'd have to choose between selling as much as you could now and possibly deflating the price, or waiting until cotton was in greater demand (which would involve greater risk for your investment). You had the Union navy to worry about, and also, as we now know, the UK would turn to other suppliers of cotton soon enough.

Also, I'm not sure you'd want to be committing your money and labor power to building railroads when war loomed. You'd need those resources for other things, and it would be surprising if the lines were actually built by the time you did go to war.

But certainly, patience (which was in short supply) could really have helped the Confederate government. Maybe their best hope was to call Lincoln's bluff. If they didn't attack federal positions, there wouldn't have been support for federal action against the rebel states. Lincoln would have been bound by his word not to strike the first blow. If he went back on it, Northerners wouldn't have supported him.

In any case, the more time passed without war, the more secession and Southern independence would become irreversible real world facts. The problem was that Davis and the other secession activists wanted a border that was substantially further north than what they had in early 1861, so they were willing to make aggressive moves that would eventually have led to war even if Fort Sumter weren't an issue.

x: "Speculation in commodities markets can be a risky business.
A lot of factors can affect the price and it's easy to go wrong..."

But it's hard to imagine anything more wrong than letting cotton sit rotting on docks while your customers find alternate supply sources.
What were they thinking?

It might help to remember that Jefferson Davis was the former US Secretary of War, and under him the Army's highest ranking general, Winfield Scott, inherited or developed what eventually became the Anaconda Plan to strangle the South, first economically, then militarily.

So Davis had to know what was coming, once war began.
So how smart did Davis have to be, to know that the best way to avoid strangulation was to, ahem, let sleeping snakes lie?

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