The size of armies alone does not mean parity. You must also consider what is there to replenish those armies as the inevitable casualties come. If one side has a huge population base behind it, 300,000 can be mowed down by an enemy who comparatively loses only 200,000 of its own. But if the guy who loses 200,000 has no population behind him, eventually the guy who lost 300,000 will overwhelm him, which is exactly what happened in the civil war: even though the south took out something like 100,000 more yankees than did the north take out confederates, the north still won because they had superior population numbers to sustain them through the war.
In addition, Southerners were all drafted for the duration, and Northerners served on average only about a year.
Yet another indicator of the odds being against the south. The north had enough manpower to do this. The south did not. Soldiers who fight for the duration get a lot more worn down by the war's end than do those only serving a year.
Yet, the casualty numbers you seem to allude to do not exist. The kill ratios are within 10% of parity and given the south fought most of the war on the defensive, that just doesn't figure until you realize that the stomach to win was simply not present in the south as a whole.
I am not certain as to what statistics you are refering to, but most historical estimates put souther casualties at 258,000 compared to northern ones at 361,000. Direct immediate battle deaths for the south are at 94,000 compared to 111,000 for the north. Death from battle inflicted wounds and diseases is similarly high on the northern end, even though the confederates lacked the continuous medical supplies posessed by the north. About 164,000 confederates died from wounds and disease, compared to about 250,000 yankees. The statistics are clear: more yankees died in the war than did confederates. Over 100,000 more, to be specific. That is hardly anywhere near the "10% in parity" you speak of.
And that was probably true. But the CSA leadership never developed a grand strategy
In some ways, no they did not. In others, they had a very clear strategy oriented around (a) the defense and continuation of the confederate government in Richmond and (b) achieving a decisive victory inside the boundaries of a northern state, as was attempted in Antietam and Gettysburg.
Most historians sell what people want to read, not the simple truth.
May I ask then upon what authority or source do you base your opinion, which seems to contradict a clear historical consensus?
If you go back to the literature written on the war following the war, you will find this point quite clearly brought forth by many southerners.
If that is so, the burden lies upon you to provide such a source and make the argument you do with that source. Until then...
Again, you are talking nonsense about numbers. Yankee armies in the field on many occassions were not as organized or as numerous as you imply.
I am citing a total calculation of casualty reports for each side directly compiled from each battle. On the confederate side during the appomatox campaign, this also includes "missing" reports due to the fact that records of exact casualties from these battles (i.e. wilderness, cold harbor) are limited and therefore persons missing were presumed dead. That is hardly a "nonsense" figure. If you dispute the numbers I gave above, please provide some alternative numbers and the method that arrived at them, as well as your reasons for disputing my numbers. Simply saying "well, historians write what they can sell and some anonymous account published a few years after the war says otherwise" does not cut it.
Again, many more Northerners served, but not for long.
Which is PRECISELY the problem. A fully replenishable army will eventually wear down a non-replenishable one given time, no matter how many more members of the replenishable army are killed by the non-replenishable one than are suffered by that same army. From day one Hood was a man killer. He fought with great elan but depleted his resources far too quickly and with little wisdom. He never changed.
As I said, the south's inability to replenish its resources compared to the north was what won the war for the north. So far you have actually assisted my argument. I ask then, if we are in agreement over this point, why are you arguing it?
Lee's Fredericksburg was not at all solid, but lucky. Burnside's mistake was one taken with the counsels of his fellow officers, and if you have ever walked at Fredericksburg the error becomes entirely understandable.
I have walked Fredericksburg and what Burnside did was virtual suicide. I additionally do not see how you could make the above assertion had you yourself walked the battlefield and Marye's heights. Burnside marched his soldiers two by two over the Rappahanock right into a confederate firing squad. They were literally mowed down from confederate positions along the sunken road. Add an elevated battery on top of it all, and Burnside was toast. Lee's success there came from his ability to anticipate what Burnside was doing, which was essentially a by-the-book conventional attack in an unconventional situation.
Lee's position was nearly an optical illusion, and it looks far weaker than it really was.
I take it then that you did not ascend the steep hill with all the cannons on top of it when you visited, nor did you cross the sunken road right next to the visitor center, nor did you read the sign pointing out there were groundworks along it and provided by it. In all honesty, I am seriously beginning to wonder if you are talking about the battlefield you think you are. There were 4 of them fought in about a 10 mile radius from there, you know, which means you probably visited more than one of them if and when you stopped by there. In case your memory needs a little jogging, Fredericksburg was the one early in the war. The confederates took a defensive position on a large hill located right next to where the visitor center is today. It also has a cemetary on top of it with casualties buried there. It was also covered in gun emplacements. There's a road in between the hill and the visitor center. It was sunken at the time and had groundwork and fence along it, providing a defensive position from which to shoot. It all looks out across the area from which Burnside made his assault. The river is beyond that. The position controlling the battlefield could not be more clear. That is why Lee used it. It's effectiveness was also proven in battle. 10,000 yankee casualties occurred in the charge on Marye's heights, and not one of them even made it to the wall along the sunken road before the hill.
As for the rest of the battle, had Meade been properly supported on the Yankee left
...there's always the "had beens" about battles, and I have a feeling you would be kicking and screaming and jumping all over me if I made a similar assertion pertaining to "had beens" at Gettysburg. But unfortunately, history doesn't work that way.
when he broke the Confederate line in two
Meade did not "break the line." That entails a fight through the line. Meade conveniently walked in an area between two stretched out positions, both of them solidly in confederate hands and virtually impregnable, at a point in between where no fighting existed. His action was not even during the main part of the battle, which occurred in the yankee suicide run on Marye's heights. In addition, Jackson repulsed what made it through of Meade's force when confederate reinforcements arrived.
Even if Meade had been reinforced, it is unlikely that it would have turned the battle - at most, only reduced the union casualties slightly. That is because a key problem lied in getting the troops over the river. Franklin had a southern bridge, while Burnside focused on the northern one. The northern bridge took them straight into the heights, which basically controlled the entire position with its batteries. The heights, as has been noted, were impregnable during the battle and no yankee even made it within 100 feet of the confederate defensive position on them. the day would have gone very differently indeed.
Not likely. Most of the battle had already been fought and lost by the union at Marye's heights. 10,000 of the 12,000 union casualties came from Burnside's assault on it. In addition, any reinforcements to Meade that crossed the Rappahannock and joined him quickly enough before the confederates moved in would have eventually been met by confederate reinforcements and fought, at best, to a standstill while never even coming anywhere close to taking the heights. To assert otherwise in light of what happened when the larger main union force tried to attack the heights is wishful thinking at best. Meade literally would have had to pull off a Dick Dowling to make that happen, and as his actions throughout the war indicated, he was nowhere near that lucky or capable.
There is no greater intellectual dishonesty than that which attempts to make a silk purse out of the wretched sow's ear of the Confederacy.
Ah, but claiming the confederacy constitutes sow's ear is inherently your own subjective judgment. Intellectual dishonesty occurs in the realm of factuality, not in the realm of personal opinion. You may hate the confederacy and think it to be all bad - that's your opinion which you are entitled to. But others find honorable things did exist in the confederacy. Yes, it had its blemishes in slavery. But so did the north in its slave trade, its factory conditions, its war camps, its slave owning generals grant and sherman, and its war crimes committed against southern civilians. So to claim that the north was some morally pure force taking on the evil that was the south cannot in any reasonable sense be said as something factual.
The truth is that the history of that period has long been cooked by this simple minded pro southern infantile mythology.
If that is so, I suspect you won't mind providing evidence? Or is your evidence similar to your presentation of Fredericksburg: perfectly clear in your own mind, but flat out absurd in the real world. As for simple mindedness, I would tend to think that those who pass off the civil war as something as simple as a "morally pure" north sweeping in to "liberate" the "eeeevvviiiillll" that was the south are the ones taking the simple minded view of things. The civil war was far more complex than persons of that outlook could even begin to imagine.
We have come a long way from the days that the economic collapse of the south and the barbaric and disgusting society that caused it have fallen into their deserved moldy graves.
Have we? How about the barbaric and disgusting society of the north at the time? You know, the slave trade, the factories, the war crimes committed against southern civilians throughout the war and during the reconstruction period, you name it. And have we as a society moved away from barbarism all together? Slavery may have ended in america, but barbarism is still there. It's there in things like abortion, and ironically the most pro-abortion areas of the nation are in the northeast.
Time to put away childish and stupid things and grow up.
I suggest you take your own advice, as it is you who are propagating a childish elementary school rendition of the civil war while simultaneously refusing to consider the enormously complex intricacies surrounding it.
Be an American. Be proud.
I am an American and, to a degree, I am proud of some aspects of our country. Other aspects of it, or more specifically, its government and those who run it, repulse me.
Give up the garbage of lost traitors and illiterate white trash
It is interesting that you speak of garbage propagated by illiterates, considering that your view of the civil war, not mine, seems to be the more simplistic and grade school of the two. Similarly, your knowledge of at least one specific battle is weak at best, and rests entirely around your speculation about an event that never even happened. That too suggests the less educated understanding of that particular battle between the two of us. So why is it that you imply a lack of education on my end of the argument, when, at least as far as the above comments are concerned, the more educated position seems to be on my side of this argument? And in addition, why is it you feel the need to interject an unrelated skin color into this debate, seeing as we have not even taken up in detail any of the race related issues of the war?