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Could the South Have Won?
NY Books ^ | June 2002 ed. | James M. McPherson

Posted on 05/23/2002 8:52:25 AM PDT by stainlessbanner


The New York Review of Books
June 13, 2002

Review

Could the South Have Won?

By James M. McPherson

Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America

by William C. Davis

The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War

by William W. Freehling

Lee and His Army in Confederate History

by Gary W. Gallagher

The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia
by Brian Steel Wills

The field of Civil War history has produced more interpretative disputes than most historical events. Next to debates about the causes of the war, arguments about why the North won, or why the Confederacy lost (the difference in phraseology is significant), have generated some of the most heated but also most enlightening recent scholarship. The titles of four books reveal just some of the central themes of this argument: Why the North Won the Civil War (1960); How the North Won (1983); Why the South Lost the Civil War (1986); Why the Confederacy Lost (1992).

Answers to these why and how questions fall into two general categories: external and internal. Exter-nal interpretations usually phrase the question as Why did the North win? They focus on a comparison of Northern and Southern population, resources, economic capacity, leadership, or strategy, and conclude that Northern superiority in one or more of these explains Union victory. Internal explanations tend to ask, Why did the South lose? They focus mainly or entirely on the Confederacy and argue that internal divisions, dissensions, or inadequacies account for Confederate defeat.

The most durable interpretation is an external one. It was offered by General Robert E. Lee himself in a farewell address to his army after its surrender at Appomattox: "The Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources."[1] This explanation enabled Southern whites to preserve their pride, to reconcile defeat with their sense of honor, even to maintain faith in the nobility of their cause while admitting that it had been lost. The Confederacy, in other words, was compelled to surrender not because its soldiers fought badly, or lacked courage, or suffered from poor leadership, or because its cause was wrong, but simply because the enemy had more men and guns. The South did not lose; Confederates wore themselves out whipping the Yankees and collapsed from glorious exhaustion. This interpretation became the mainstay of what has been called the Myth of the Lost Cause, which has sustained Southern pride in their Confederate forebears to this day. As one Virginian expressed it:

They never whipped us, Sir, unless they were four to one. If we had had anything like a fair chance, or less disparity of numbers, we should have won our cause and established our independence.[2]

In one form or another, this explanation has won support from scholars of Northern as well as Southern birth. In 1960 the historian Richard Current provided a succinct version of it. After reviewing the statistics of the North's "overwhelming numbers and resources" two and a half times the South's population, three times its railroad capacity, nine times its industrial production, and so on Current concluded that "surely, in view of the disparity of resources, it would have taken a miracle...to enable the South to win. As usual, God was on the side of the heaviest battalions."[3]

In 1990 Shelby Foote expressed this thesis in his inimitable fashion. Noting that many aspects of life in the North went on much as usual during the Civil War, Foote told Ken Burns on camera in the PBS documentary The Civil War that "the North fought that war with one hand behind its back." If necessary "the North simply would have brought that other arm out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that war."[4]


At first glance, Current's and Foote's statements seem plausible. But upon reflection, a good many historians have questioned their explicit assertions that overwhelming numbers and resources made Northern victory inevitable. If that is true, the Confederate leaders who took their people to war in 1861 were guilty of criminal folly or colossal arrogance. They had read the census returns. They knew as much about the North's superiority in men, resources, and economic capacity as any modern historian. Yet they went to war confident of victory. Southern leaders were students of history. They could cite many examples of small nations that won or defended their independence against much more powerful enemies: Switzerland against the Hapsburg Empire; the Netherlands against Spain; Greece against the Ottomans. Their own ancestors had won independence from mighty Britain in 1783. The relative resources of the Confederacy vis-à-vis the Union in 1861 were greater than those of these other successful rebels.

The Confederacy waged a strategically defensive war to protect from conquest territory it already controlled and to preserve its armies from annihilation. To "win" that kind of war, the Confederacy did not need to invade and conquer the North or destroy its army and infrastructure; it needed only to hold out long enough to compel the North to the conclusion that the price of conquering the South and annihilating its armies was too great, as Britain had concluded with respect to the United States in 1781 or, for that matter, as the United States concluded with respect to Vietnam in 1972. Until 1865, cold-eyed military experts in Europe were almost unanimous in their conviction that Union armies could never conquer and subdue the 750,000 square miles of the Confederacy, as large as all of Western Europe. "No war of independence ever terminated unsuccessfully except where the disparity of force was far greater than it is in this case," pronounced the military analyst of the London Times in 1862. "Just as England during the revolution had to give up conquering the colonies so the North will have to give up conquering the South."[5]

Even after losing the war, many ex-Confederates stuck to this belief. General Joseph E. Johnston, one of the highest-ranking Confederate officers, insisted in 1874 that the Southern people had not been "guilty of the high crime of undertaking a war without the means of waging it successfully."[6] A decade later General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, who ranked just below Johnston, made the same point: "No people ever warred for independence with more relative advantages than the Confederates."[7]


If so, why did they lose the war? In thinly veiled terms, Johnston and Beauregard blamed the inept leadership of Jefferson Davis. That harried gentleman responded in kind; as far as he was concerned, the erratic and inadequate generalship of Beauregard and especially Johnston was responsible for Confederate defeat. In the eyes of many contemporaries and historians there was plenty of blame to go around. William C. Davis's Look Away! is the most recent "internal" study of the Confederacy that, by implication at least, attributes Confederate defeat to poor leadership at several levels, both military and civilian, as well as factionalism, dissension, and bickering between men with outsize egos and thin skins. In this version of Confederate history, only Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson remain unstained.

For any believer in the Myth of the Lost Cause, any admirer of heroic Confederate resistance to overwhelming odds, the story told by Davis (no relation to the Confederate president) makes depressing reading. It is a story of conflicts not on the battlefields of Manassas or Shiloh or Gettysburg or Chickamauga or the Wilderness they are here, but offstage, as it were but conflicts between state governors and the Confederate government in Richmond, between quarreling Cabinet officers, between Jefferson Davis and prominent generals or senators or newspaper editors and even his vice-president, Alexander Stephens. Davis chronicles different examples of internal breakdown under the stresses not only of enemy invasion but also of slave defections to the Yankees, of Unionist disloyalty in the upcountry, particularly in such states as Tennessee, of galloping inflation and the inability of an unbalanced agricultural society under siege to control it, of shortages and hunger and a growing bitterness and alienation among large elements of the population.

These problems seemed more than sufficient to ensure Confederate failure, but they were greatly exacerbated by the jealousies and rivalries of Confederate politicians, which remain Davis's principal focus. He does not explicitly address the question of why the Confederacy lost, but his implicit answer lies in the assertion that "the fundamental flaw in too many of the big men of the Confederacy... [was] 'big-man-me-ism.'"

There are, however, two problems with this interpretation. In two senses it is too "internal." First, by concentrating only on the Confederacy it tends to leave the reader with the impression that only the Confederacy suffered from these corrosive rivalries, jealousies, and dissensions. But a history of the North during the Civil War would reveal similar problems, mitigated only by Lincoln's skill in holding together a diverse coalition of Republicans and War Democrats, Yankees and border states, abolitionists and slaveholders which perhaps suggests that Lincoln was the principal reason for Union victory. In any event, Look Away! is also too "internal" because the author is too deeply dependent on his sources. It is the nature of newspaper editorials, private correspondence, congressional debates, partisan speeches, and the like to emphasize conflict, criticism, argument, complaint. It is the squeaky wheel that squeaks. The historian needs to step back and gain some perspective on these sources, to recognize that the well-greased wheel that turns smoothly also turns quietly, leaving less evidence of its existence available to the historian.

Look Away! falls within one tradition of internal explanations for Confederate defeat. More prevalent, especially in recent years, have been studies that emphasize divisions and conflicts of race, class, and even gender in the South. Two fifths of the Confederate population were slaves, and two thirds of the whites did not belong to slaveholding families. What stake did they have in an independent Confederate nation whose original raison d'être was the protection of slavery? Not much stake at all, according to many historians, especially for the slaves and, as the war took an increasing toll on non-slaveholding white families, very little stake for them either. Even among slaveholding families, the women who willingly subscribed to an ethic of sacrifice in the war's early years became disillusioned as the lengthening war robbed them of husbands, sons, lovers, and brothers. Many white women turned against the war and spread this disaffection among their menfolk in the army; in the end, according to Drew Gilpin Faust, "it may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War."[8]


If all this is true if the slaves and some nonslaveholding whites opposed the Confederate war effort from the outset and others including women of slaveholding families eventually turned against it, one need look no further to explain Confederate defeat. In The South vs. the South, however, William W. Freehling does not go this far. He says almost nothing about women as a separate category, and he acknowledges that many nonslaveholding whites had a racial, cultural, and even economic stake in the preservation of slavery and remained loyal Confederates to the end. But he maintains that, properly defined, half of all Southerners opposed the Confederacy and that this fact provides a sufficient explanation for Confederate failure.

Freehling defines the South as all fifteen slave states and Southerners as all people slave as well as free who lived in those states. This distinction between "the South" and the eleven slave states that formed the Confederacy is important but too often disregarded by those who casually conflate the South and the Confederacy. Admittedly, some 90,000 white men from the four Union slave states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware) fought for the Confederacy, but this number was offset by a similar number of whites from Confederate states (chiefly Tennessee and the part of Virginia that became West Virginia) who fought for the Union.

But Freehling's central thesis that "white Confederates were only half the Southerners" raises problems. This arithmetic works only if virtually all black Southerners are counted against the Confederacy. At times Freehling seems to argue that they should be so counted. At other times he is more cautious, maintaining that "the vast majority" of Southern blacks "either opposed the rebel cause or cared not whether it lived or died." Freehling does not make clear how important he considers that qualifying "or cared not." In any event, let us assume that all three million slaves who remained in the Confederacy (as well as the one million in the border states and in conquered Confederate regions) sympathized with the Union cause that would bring them freedom. Nevertheless, their unwilling labor as slaves was crucial to the Confederate economy and war effort, just as their unwilling labor and that of their forebears had been crucial to building the antebellum Southern economy. These Confederate slaves worked less efficiently than before the war because so many masters and overseers were absent at the front. Unwilling or not, however, they must be counted on the Confederate side of the equation, which significantly alters Freehling's 50/50 split of pro- and anti-Confederates in the South to something like 75/25.

Freehling draws on previous scholarship to offer a succinct narrative of the political and military course of the war, organized around Lincoln's slow but inexorable steps toward emancipation, "hard war," and the eventual mobilization of 300,000 black laborers and soldiers to work and fight for the Union. This narrative is marred by several errors, including the repeated confusion of General Charles F. Smith with General William F. "Baldy" Smith, the conflation of combat casualties with combat mortality, the mislabeling of a photograph of Confederate trenches at Fredericksburg as Petersburg, and the acceptance at face value of Alexander Stephens's absurd claim, made five years after Lincoln's death, that the Union president had urged him in 1865 to persuade Southern states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment "prospectively," thereby delaying the abolition of slavery five years. Nevertheless, Freehling has made a strong case for the vital contribution of the two million whites and one million blacks in the South who definitely did support the Union cause. Without them, "the North" could not have prevailed, as Lincoln readily acknowledged.


Freehling does not take a clear stand on the question of whether Union victory was inevitable. At times he seems to imply that it was, because the half of all Southerners whom he claims supported the Union (actively or passively) doomed the Confederacy. But at other times he suggests that this support was contingent on the outcome of military campaigns and political decisions. No such ambiguity characterizes the essays in Gary Gallagher's Lee and His Army in Confederate History. In this book and in his earlier The Confederate War, Gallagher has argued forcefully and convincingly that Confederate nationalism bound most Southern whites together in determined support for the Confederate cause, that the brilliant though costly victories of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia reinforced this determination, and that morale even in the face of defeat and the destruction of resources in 1864 1865 remained high until almost the end.

Gallagher does not slight the problems of slave defections to the Yankees, class tensions among whites, personal rivalries and jealousies among Confederate leaders, and other internal divisions that have occupied historians who see these problems as preordaining defeat. But he emphasizes the degree of white unity and strength of purpose despite these faultlines. Plenty of evidence exists to support this emphasis. A Union officer who was captured at the Battle of Atlanta on July 22, 1864, and spent the rest of the war in Southern prisons wrote in his diary on October 4 that from what he had seen in the South "the End of the War...is some time hence as the Idea of the Rebs giving up until they are completely subdued is all Moonshine they submit to privatations that would not be believed unless seen."[9]

"Until they are completely subdued." That point came in April 1865, when the large and well-equipped Union armies finally brought the starving, barefoot, and decimated ranks of Confederates to bay. Gallagher revives the overwhelming numbers and resources explanation for Confederate defeat, shorn of its false aura of inevitability. Numbers and resources do not prevail in war without the will and skill to use them. The Northern will wavered several times, most notably in response to Lee's victories in the summer of 1862 and winter spring of 1863 and the success of Lee's resistance to Grant's offensives in the spring and summer of 1864. Yet Union leaders and armies were learning the skills needed to win, and each time the Confederacy seemed on the edge of triumph, Northern victories blunted the Southern momentum: at Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Perryville, Kentucky, in the fall of 1862; at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863; and at Atlanta and in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in September 1864. Better than any other historian of the Confederacy, Gallagher understands the importance of these contingent turning points that eventually made it possible for superior numbers and resources to prevail. He understands as well that the Confederate story cannot be written except in counterpoint with the Union story, and that because of the multiple contingencies in these stories, Northern victory was anything but inevitable.


Much of the best scholarship on the Civil War during the past decade has concentrated on the local or regional impact of the war. A fine example is Brian Steel Wills's The War Hits Home, a fascinating account of the home front and battle front in southeastern Virginia, especially the town of Suffolk and its hinterland just inland from Norfolk. No great battles took place here, but there was plenty of skirmishing and raids by combatants on both sides. Confederates controlled this region until May 1862, when they were compelled to pull back their defenses to Richmond. Union forces occupied Suffolk for the next year, staving off a halfhearted Confederate effort to recapture it in the spring of 1863. The Yankees subsequently fell back to a more defensible line nearer Norfolk, leaving the Suffolk region a sort of no man's land subject to raids and plundering by the cavalry of both armies.

Through it all most white inhabitants remained committed Confederates, while many of the slaves who were not removed by their owners to safer territory absconded to the Yankees, adding their weight to the Union side of the scales in the balance of power discussed by Freehling. White men from this region fought in several of Lee's regiments, suffering casualties that left many a household bereft of sons, husbands, fathers. Yet their Confederate loyalties scarcely wavered.

Northern occupation forces at first tried a policy of conciliation, hoping to win the Southern whites back to the Union. When this failed, they moved toward a harsher policy here as they did elsewhere, confiscating the property and liberating the slaves of people they now perceived as enemies to be crushed rather than deluded victims of secession conspirators to be converted.

Wills does not make a big point of it, but his findings stand "in sharp rebuttal" to the arguments of historians who portray a weak or divided white commitment to the Confederate cause as the reason for defeat. "These people sought to secure victory until there was no victory left to win." In the end the North did have greater numbers and resources, wielded with a skill and determination that by 1864 1865 matched the Confederacy's skills and determination; and these explain why the North won the Civil War.

Notes

[1] The Wartime Papers of R.E. Lee, edited by Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin (Little, Brown, 1961), p. 934.

[2] Quoted in Why the North Won the Civil War, edited by David Donald (Louisiana State University Press, 1960), p. ix.

[3] Richard N. Current, "God and the Strongest Battalions," in Why the North Won the Civil War, p. 22.

[4] "Men at War: An Interview with Shelby Foote," in Geoffrey C. Ward with Ric Burns and Ken Burns, The Civil War (Knopf, 1990), p. 272.

[5] London Times, August 29, 1862.

[6] Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations (Appleton, 1874), p. 421.

[7] Pierre G.T. Beauregard, "The First Battle of Bull Run," in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 volumes, edited by Robert U. Johnson and Clarence C. Buel (Century, 1887), Vol. 1, p. 222.

[8] Drew Gilpin Faust, "Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War," The Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 4 (March 1990), p. 1228.

[9] "The Civil War Diary of Colonel John Henry Smith," edited by David M. Smith, Iowa Journal of History, Vol. 47 (April 1949), p. 164.



TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: books; dixie; dixielist; jamesmcpherson; mcpherson; research; south
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Comment #81 Removed by Moderator

To: CajunPrince
By your logic, that any killing of civilians to shorten a war is bad, then I assume that you consider the Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, and all other strategic bombing of population centers to be war crimes. Oh, and there were lots of people in the north who supported the south. They were the Peace Democrats, AKA Copperheads. They were not hanged en masse.
82 posted on 05/23/2002 1:19:13 PM PDT by Heyworth
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To: wardaddy
I agree with that too loyal Union man that I am, Meade was an okay commander too. The best commander of the war however, Sherman, was on the Union side. The 2nd best was Forrest.
83 posted on 05/23/2002 1:19:44 PM PDT by weikel
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To: Mortin Sult
I don't recall Brasil being considered a pariah even though they had slavery for 2 decades longer than the South....nor was Saudi Arabia ever a "pariah" for slavery until I think the mid 1900s when they finally outlawed it. Contrary to today's highmindedness, the 19th century world was not so pure in ideals.
84 posted on 05/23/2002 1:20:59 PM PDT by wardaddy
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To: weikel
I agree....in reverse of course....LOL...in any event Forrest killed more folks up close and personal...does that count?...again LOL
85 posted on 05/23/2002 1:22:40 PM PDT by wardaddy
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To: weikel
I actually agree with you on that( loyal Union man that I am) Sherman even if you hate him( I'm sure you do) you gotta admit was the greatest military genius of the war and in American History( Nathan Bedford Forrest the Klu Klux Klan guy was the South's best commander).

I hate no one, not even Lincoln or Sherman. But I cannot admire men that waged war on civilians. On 4 Jul 1875, after accepting an invitation to speak with them, Forrest spoke favorably to the "Jubilee of Pole Bearers", a political/social organization comprised of Black Southerners. His speech was reported in the papers, and reprinted in Black Southerners in Gray, (Richard Rollins ed.):

Miss Lewis, ladies and gentlemen - I accept these flowers as a token of reconciliation between the white and colored races of the South. I accept them more particularly, since they come from a lady, for if there is any one on God’s great earth who loves the ladies, it is myself. This is a proud day for me. Having occupied the position I have for thirteen years, and being misunderstood by the colored race, I take this occasion to say that I am your friend. I am here as the representative of the Southern people - one that has been more maligned than any other. I assure you that every man who was in the Confederate army is your friend. We were born on same soil, breathe the same air, live in the same land, and why should we not be brothers and sisters.

When the war broke out I believed it to be my duty to fight for my country, and I did so. I came here with the jeers and sneers of a few white people, who did not think it right. I think it is right, and will do all I can to bring about harmony, peace and unity. I want to elevate every man, and to see you take your places in your shops, stores and but I want you to do as I do - go to the polls and select the best men to vote for. I feel that you are free men, I am a free man, and we can do as we please. I came here as a friend and whenever I can serve any of you I will do so. I came here as a friend and whenever I can serve any of you I will do so. We have one Union, one flag, one country; therefore, let us stand together. Although we differ in color, we should not differ in sentiment. Many things have been said in regard to myself, and many reports circulated, which may perhaps be believed by some of you, but there are many around me who can contradict them. I have been many times in the heat of battle - oftener, perhaps, than any within the sound of my voice. Men have come to me to ask for quarter, both black and white, and I have shielded them. Do your duty as citizens, and if any are oppressed, I will be your friend. I thank you for the flowers, and assure you that I am with you in heart and hand.


86 posted on 05/23/2002 1:26:57 PM PDT by 4CJ
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To: one_particular_harbour
Bragg held his ground in both Murfreesboro and Chattanooga/Chickamagua amongst other less grand battles yet he never took up the offensive on his "victories". He always either dug in or retreated. He should have been a Yankee general in Virginia during the pre-Meade era....he would have fit in fine. I'm suprised Forrest never stabbed him, I'm sure he thought about it. Bragg was a darling of Davis's and Davis was a worse political commander than Lincoln. Uh-OH!!...I've done it now, my Southern brethren are gonna have my head on a platter.
87 posted on 05/23/2002 1:27:20 PM PDT by wardaddy
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To: CajunPrince
Why not read to the words of people who were actually there?

"...the rank and file of the American army is the most orderly I have ever seen, a circumstance which is due, probably, to the fact of the privates being mostly married, and all men of some kind of education. There is less brutality about the federal troops, and most respect for women, than amongst any soldiery we are acquainted with in the old world. ..." - Edward Dicey, British author and journalist in "Six months in the Federal states" a report on a visit to America in 1862.

"The men have behaved themselves the best I saw them either home or abroad. Every man has seemed to be on his good behavior since we entered Atlanta" write William Dunn surgeon in a Pa regiment to his wife on 27 September 1864 " The women have been dressed up waiting for our men to commence raping but they have waited in vain. There has not been a single outrage commited in this city , a circumstance that the people say they cannot say for the rebel army."

"(...) yankee raiding parties are going everywhere & no one feel safe. Mother writes that so far they have behaved much better than was anticipated from their threats; no house that were occupied have been burned , nor those where ladies where , molested, through out houses are pillaged. (...)" The diary of Miss Emma Holmes, April 18, 1865

" I shall risk it at home. I learne that in Marietta the yankees haven't insulted a lady in no respect." Mrs E.C. Welbourne of Covington to her husband in Virginia

"We are situated three miles from the village, on a by-road, and I flattered myself, our house would not be discovered. But they found us out and paid us two visits of about half hour each. However, they were not insolent to us...Most everyone suffered some, but no violence was offered to the ladies..." Mrs Allston Pringle from Society Hill, SC march 30, 1865

88 posted on 05/23/2002 1:28:09 PM PDT by Non-Sequitur
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To: Charlotte Corday
I tend yo agree. A South Carolinian also commanded at the Alamo. You know what happened to THAT command. Had Travis had the good sense to follow Houston's orders to abandon that fort, Houston could have begun an orderly retreat to the Lousiana border where an American army waited to trounce an over extended Mexican force.
89 posted on 05/23/2002 1:30:04 PM PDT by RobbyS
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To: r9etb
More likely, in fact, Sherman's tactics probably saved a lot more lives than they cost.

You kill people to save them? I'm sure those killed would agree. < /sarcasm >

90 posted on 05/23/2002 1:30:25 PM PDT by 4CJ
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To: wardaddy
Forrest was the best tactician, Sherman was the best strategist( Sherman was not a good tactician at all but he was so good as a strategist that was almost irrelevant). Forrest was the only Southern commander who Sherman feared he said something along the lines of " I want that man killed and I don't care if it takes 100,000 men and bankrupts the treasury". I think one reason Sherman may have been so thorough about destorying supplies is he feared his army would be picked away by guerilla attacks from Forrest if he left anything for Forrest men to eat.
91 posted on 05/23/2002 1:31:01 PM PDT by weikel
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To: CajunPrince
Your credibility is quickly fading. Somehow I doubt that destroying crops, livestock, homes, cities, food supplies of women and children (non-combatants) saved lives.

I see you're still in the mode of post first, think later (if at all).

I suppose Sherman could have done as you'd have him do: pound head-on into the Confederate armies in battle after battle. There are many excellent examples of this during the war, most of which ended up killing a lot of soldiers on both sides. It is quite likely that the North would have lost heart after a while.

Or, Sherman could have done as he did: bypass the Confederate armies, avoid direct battle if possible, and instead remove their ability to fight.

This was very hard both on the confederate soldiers, and on the civilians in the areas affected by Sherman's tactics. However, it is likely that far fewer people died of this, than would have been killed if Sherman had taken the conventional course of action.

And, at any rate, Sherman recognized that the real key to the war was not to defeat the armies of the South, but to defeat the ideological motivations of the South. Had Sherman failed to defeat the Southern will, we'd have probably seen something along the lines of the guerilla warfare described above by Cleburn.

92 posted on 05/23/2002 1:32:36 PM PDT by r9etb
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To: Cleburne
The Southern military leaders hoped to achieve a reasonable surrender with decent terms and had it been left to Lincoln, Grant or Sherman, I think they would have gotten just that and avoided the Radical Republican wrath which was soon to come anyhow. A prolonged guerilla war would have been horrible. Not unlike what we may face here one day over civil issues like RKBA or uncontrolled immigration.

Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, East Tennessee, and the Shenandoah Valley were just a taste of where guerrilla war led and it was not a pretty site for either side but worse for the occupied populace.

93 posted on 05/23/2002 1:34:22 PM PDT by wardaddy
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To: CajunPrince
By bringing a "total war" to the rebels, General William Tecumseh Sherman expedited to end of the rebellion. And in so doing, he actually saved the miserable lives of many Southerners. Lives that would have been needlessly sacrificed had the insurrection continued.

Every month or so, some rebs on FREEREPUBLIC feel the need to re-fight the Civil War. Seems to never change the outcome.

And now a few pics of my hero:

General William Tecumseh Sherman

94 posted on 05/23/2002 1:34:43 PM PDT by pittsburgh gop guy
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To: wardaddy
Lincoln wasn't really a bad commander himself when he interfered it ussually worked out well. His worst decision was to fire Meade after Gettysburg for allowing Lee to retreat( Meade was probably correct that his army needed time to recover and to bring up more supplies). Unfortunatley other than the William Scott Hancock, who was too old for a field command, his initial generals were dumbasses and he was reluctant to micromanage military operations.
95 posted on 05/23/2002 1:36:01 PM PDT by weikel
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To: weikel
They were twin sides of the same coin in many ways. Aside from Forrest, Cleburne, Wheeler (the only Confederate ever recommissioned at rank in the US Army)and a few others, the Southern theater was nearly always a win for the Union forces.
96 posted on 05/23/2002 1:37:18 PM PDT by wardaddy
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To: stainlessbanner
The South lost because they were just dumb, racist hicks who were drunk all the time that didn't know how to fight. At least that what people NOT from the South think.

Me? I think the South damned near won several times. You don't fight a war for years on end against someone who can't fight, so, obviously, the South put up a good fight.

Funny how some people think they are better than someone else. I hear all the time here in Denver how stupid the South is by people who have never been there. It is even funnier how they go there and get taken advantage of.

97 posted on 05/23/2002 1:37:34 PM PDT by PatrioticAmerican
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To: pittsburgh gop guy
Such a pious federalist attitude as yours is why we have the even larger problems with snobby yankees now, comrade.
98 posted on 05/23/2002 1:39:44 PM PDT by PatrioticAmerican
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To: pittsburgh gop guy
I can handle your tooting Sherman's horn but can do without the "miserable" Southern lives remark. I wish folks could simply discuss the war militarily and give credit where it is due or criticize where merited without always going ad hominum.

Oh...by the way...I almost forgot...Yes Slavery was not a good thing. Let me repeat for all the do-gooders:

SLAVERY WAS A BAD THING...ya'll feel better now????LOL

99 posted on 05/23/2002 1:42:03 PM PDT by wardaddy
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To: PatrioticAmerican
Hey...it's those same dumb racist hicks disproportionately fighting over in Afghanistan and elsewhere. We may be just dumb racists but we have good AIM.
100 posted on 05/23/2002 1:44:09 PM PDT by wardaddy
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