The Confederacy lost because Lincoln and Union troops waged an uncivil war against civilians and civilian property. Unable to win honorably on the field of battle, Union troops resorted attacking civilians and their property. Only after 4 years against overwhelming odds, we were starved into submission.
That would be a whole lot more believable if Sherman's March to the Sea hadn't begun in the middle of Georgia. The south had been repreatedly defeated and in retreat since 1862.
That is the myth. It has little basis in fact.
As late as 1864, Sherman's men found they couldn't begin to carry all the food they found in Georgia, let alone eat it. One corps burned 50,000 bushels of corn in one day.
The reason the armies of the so-called CSA were often poorly provisioned was due to the dilapidated condition of the CSA railroad system, the ineptitude of its leaders, and the provincialism of the states, who raised units that could only be used within state borders, granted widespread exemptions to CSA service, and hoarded supplies badly needed by CSA armies in other theaters. The folly of the CSA government included disenchanting the common soldiers through unfair taxation, exemptions for slave holders, involuntary conscription and other maladroit acts, causing CSA soldeirs to desert by the thousands.
Had the so-called CSA been as committed to the cause as the colonists of 1776 had been, they would have been impossible to defeat.
Walt
Let's brush away the cobwebs a bit:
"Why was the Army of Northern Virginia so frequently ill-provisioned, indeed sometimes on quarter rations, while operating in fairly close vicinity to well-stocked Confederate supply depots in the Richmond area. One would think that any competent army commander, and Lee certainly fitted that description in most respects, would see it as his primary responsibility and duty to cut through or bypass any ineffective bureaucratic supply system in such a situation. Army commanders through the ages have met such situations by a variety of emergency strategies, from coercive foraging to the setting up of soldier-run vegetable gardens, swineyards, leather tanneries, shoe repair shops, etc. Lee did not, and his army was frequently the most poorly supplied of all Confederate armies, a factor which contributed to his constant need to move his army for subsistence rather than military purposes -- and to his army's high AWOL rate. Yet he and his staff never took an active role in procuring and transporting the necessary food and other materials needed to supply his troops when the Confederate quartermaster and subsistence bureaus didn't deliver. WHY?
A possible answer to this question may be found in Gerald Northrop Moore's CONFEDERATE COMMISSARY GENERAL: LUCIUS BELLINGER NORTHROP AND THE SUBSISTENCE BUREAU OF THE SOUTHERN ARMY (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Publishing Company, 1996). Moore cited Douglas Southall Freeman's analysis in R. E. LEE that one of the weaknesses in Lee's training for plantation or military management was his "lack of any detailed knowledge of the service of supply", a menial function normally shunned by plantation society and relegated to plantation overseers and military clerks. Moore then buttressed this line of reasoning by referencing a communication from Northrop to Lee (OR ser. I, vol. 51, pt. 2, 738) in which Northrop angily referred to a statement Lee had made previously during the hungry winter of 1862-3 that he (Lee) had "no responsibility for feeding his troops." Lee held stubbornly to this opinion, even to the extent of repeatedly refusing to lend ex-railroader soldiers to the effort to repair rail communications between Confederate supply depots and the food-short ANV winter quarters, or to assign army wagons to temporary supply-hauling duty in the absence of railroad repairs.
Is this a true picture? Did Lee have a legitimate reason to dodge responsibility for this major factor in assuring the health and military efficiency of his troops? Or did the problem merely illustrate Thomas Sowell's concept of "negative human capital": those cultural attitudes and practices that tend to introduce inefficiencies into the human activities (including economic and military) of a particular society? That is the conventional wisdom on the matter. However, the example in my previous post was a situation where Northrop had managed to stock the supply depots with adequate supplies, but Lee's mistaken priorities and stubbornness were the reason the food did not reach the ANV. This was not an isolated case, but an example of a pattern. As to the "dramatic improvement" in the supply situation after Jeff Davis booted Northrup as Commissary General, much of that improvement had its origins in last-minute changes to uncoordinated and inefficient purchasing, impressment and railroad policies that had long been sought, unsuccessfully, by Northrup.
An additional factor in the sudden improvement was the release in 1865 of large food stocks held in reserve by the Confederate Nitre and Mining Bureau, which St. John, ex-Chief of the Nitre Bureau and Northrup's successor as Commissary General, had accumulated in 1864 BY OFFERING HIGHER PRICES IN COMPETITION WITH NORTHRUP'S SUBSISTENCE BUREAU and subsequently withheld from Lee's army while Northrup was in the saddle. Now, these are some of the many clownish aspects of the Confederate experience, but Lee saw it all. Why didn't he respond in an effective manner with direct action?
During the first month of 1864, Lee penned the following to Jefferson Davis (Document # 602 of Dowdy & Manhurin's THE WARTIME PAPERS OF ROBERT E. LEE): " We are now issuing to the troops a fourth of a pound of salt meat & have only three days supply ..... I can learn of no supply of meat on the road to the army, & fear I shall be unable to retain it in the field." Davis advised him that the emrergency justified impressment -- advice which was ignored. At the time Lee wrote, the standard daily Union army meat ration was one and a fourth pound of salt or fresh beef. J. E. Johnston reported that month from Dalton that his men had only 8 day's rations in reserve and Longstreet complained from East Tennessee that the lack of supplies in his area precluded the possibility of offensive action.
Yet, in the midst of this critical food shortage, that same month, Mary Boykin Chesnut attended a party given by Varina Davis for the elite ladies of Richmond society in which the table fare was described as "gumbo, ducks and olives, supreme de volaille, chickens in jelly, oysters, lettuce salad, chocolate jelly cake, claret soup, champagne, &c&c&c." (31 January 1864 diary entry in Woodward's MARY CHESNUT'S CIVIL WAR). Several of those menu items were imported luxury items. Why didn't Lee take direct action in such circumstances? What greater duty and responsibility did Lee have than to the health and combat effectiveness of his men? Is it to his credit that he didn't act (other than to complain) because it was another's "duty"?"
-- From the AOL ACW forum.
Walt
Grant (as well as Lee) realized it came down to the number of bodies - the Union had a clear advantage in this respect. The Union relentlessly sacrificed soldiers in the final battles of the war. I feel sorry for the Yankee soldiers who were made to run up on Lee's defensive earthworks.
The tech of the civil war was similiar to that of WWI which made defensive war more effective than offensive war its more effective to destroy enemy supplies than to charge their trenches. The higher losses incurred by the North were not due to the lack of fighting ability of the average Union soldier compared to the Southern one but due to the weakness of offensive war vs defensive during that time. When the South went on the offensive like at Gettysburg it got mauled too.