[wideawake]

I guess Union generalship was more so - they lost most of the early battles.

In the East, yes. Not in the West.

And his decision didn’t save both the north and the south??

Nope. The guerrillas would not have been able to project force into the North, so they would be forced to live off the Southern people - and most Lost Causers don't like to discuss it, but the majority of the Southern people were sick and tired of the war and a sizable minority of Southerners were sick of the Confederacy, period.

For the last two years of the war, almost no one from North Carolina was bothering to respond to draft orders, thousands and thousands of Confederate soldiers were deserting, and areas like East Tennessee, southeastern Mississippi, northern Alabama, northern Georgia and western North Carolina more or less ignored the Confederate government and the Confederate war effort.

Read "Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War" by David Williams. To survive and succeed, a guerrilla army needs to "swim in the sea of the people" and the people of the South did not have a whole lot of resources for guerrillas to live off and not much tolerance for guerrillas after they had already been despoiled by successive waves of deserters moving through their territory.

Or like Sherman’s troopers.

Before Sherman set foot in Georgia, Lee's troopers had been through western Maryland three times as well as southwestern Pennsylvania. While Lee's commanders often claimed they paid for what they took, the reality is that sometimes they offered receipts "reimbursable" by the Confederate government and sometimes they didn't. But they took whatever they wanted and destroyed what they wanted to destroy.

When Lee invaded the north during the Antietam campaign, a number of Confederates refused to follow him as they stated they were fighting to protect their own country, not to invade somebody else’s.

And just before Antietam, some Union units refused to fight because by their reckoning they had reached the end of their enlistment and they claimed that it was not because they didn't want to fight - it was a matter of honor and legal principle.

I would suspect a similar psychology.

I have never read anything about the Southern army burning the homes and farms of southerners.

Then you should read up on the so-called "Free State Of Winston" - a region of northern Alabama that "seceded" from the Confederacy and whose inhabitants had their homes and property seized or destroyed by the Alabama home guard - a home guard that consisted in large part of well-connected Alabamians who were excused from having to fight at the front because they owned a sufficient number of slaves to meet the exemption.

The three Curtis brothers - Joel, George and Thomas - of Winston, AL were one example of Southerners victimized by Southerners.

Joel refused to take up arms against his country, so he was assassinated by a sniper.

George, enraged by this, left home and signed up with the Union Army. Incredibly, he actually returned home on leave. An informer told the authorities, and the home guard broke into his house at dinner and murdered him in front of his wife and children. Thomas logically feared for his life and fled to Texas. An Alabama home guard informed on him in Houston and Texas Confederate soldiers took him outside of town and shot him execution-style without trial.

Their homes were seized and their wives and children evicted to live in the hills of northern Alabama.

The Curtises were far from alone. Winston, AL and its surrounding towns raised the 1st Alabama Cavalry US Volunteer regiment that rode with Sherman through Georgia and fought against the Confederate Army that had claimed their homes and livelihoods.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

Thanks for the recommendation on the David Williams book. While I like to believe in the honorable instincts of most of the CSA rank and file actually on the firing line of combat, the stay at home Confederate power structure was too often a sorry, greedy and vicious lot. No wonder admirers of the Confederacy rarely seem very eager to talk about them. Reb government of the home front casts grave doubts on the idea that all the world's ills would have been eliminated if the CSA had only won the war/

The sad stories you relate from Winston in North Alabama sound like the events I've been studying about in Tennessee and North Georgia. I've been researching a brave Unionist in Catoosa Co. Georgia by the name of Presley Yates. The rather elderly Mr. Yates voted against secession in the Georgia convention and after the rebellion started he continued to boldly speak out for the old Union. For that he got the typical Home Guard treatment - a shot in the head from a cowardly sniper. But the tough old man survived the attack, lived to welcome the Union army to Catoosa as liberators and, along with other Union men of the county, did what he could to aid Sherman's efforts in the opening stages of the Georgia campaign.