Here's another partof BCF you'll want to discount:
"The North had a potential manpower superiority of more than three to one (counting only white men) and Union armed forces had an actual superiority of two to one during most of the war...blah blah blah blah"
Uh, Walt - why would I want to discount that? I have no problem with the fact that the north had superior sizes in population and in fact this was a critical factor to their victory.
In economic resources and logistical capacity the northern advantage was even greater. Thus, in this explanation, the Confederacy fought against overwhelming odds; its defeat was inevitable. But this explanation has not satisfied a good many analysts. History is replete with examples of peoples who have won or defended their independence against greater odds: the Netherlands against the Spain of Philip II; Switzerland against the Hapsburg empire; the American rebels of 1776 against mighty Britain; North Vietnam against the United States of 1970.
That's nice and all, but whether or not the Netherlands was successful against the odds in a fight with Spain bears no relevance to the confederate fight. I might also add that while McPherson cites a number of against the odds victories, more often than not they are simply not the case. Normally the big and powerful army wins, or advances at least temporarily. In the course of world history far more peoples have been conquered than have survived as underdog challengers to a more powerful force, though often the underdogs do put up valiant, honorable, and temporarily successful efforts before the inevitable happens.
Given the advantages of fighting on the defensive in its own territory with interior lines in which stalemate would be victory against a foe who must invade, conquer, occupy, and destroy the capacity to resist, the odds faced by the South were not formidable.
Nonsense. Every conquered people in history has had those same advantages when fighting to preserve their homes from invaders. If those advantages were as great as McPherson purports them to be, every invaded nation in history should have won. But that is simply not the case of reality - most invaded places fighting off a bigger and more powerful enemy are overrrun. Kuwait had the advantage of home territory to defend simply to a stalemate, did it not? But that didn't stop Iraq. Chaing Kai-shek had the advantage of home territory to defend in China, but that didn't stop first Japan and then the communists. South Vietnam had the home territory to defend but that didn't stop Ho Chi Minh. The same goes for the bad guys as well as the good guys - Germany had home territory to defend but that didn't stop America and Russia. Do you believe otherwise and maintain that it should have, Walt? McPherson seems to think so. Rather, as another category of interpretations has it, internal divisions fatally weakened the Confederacy: the state-rights conflict between certain govern on and the Richmond government; the disaffection of non-slaveholders from a rich man's war and poor man's fight; libertarian opposition...blah blah blah"
That's nice and all, but similarly flawed reasoning. Every country has its own internal struggles. They were there in the south, but to suggest as McPherson does that they somehow turned the tide of the war from a sure victory to a lose is silly and unfounded. The fact of the matter is that southerners fought to the bitter end at the cost of 250,000 lives and for the course of four long bloody years. In the process they killed 350,000 yankees before being overrun. If the confederacy were compromised by McPherson suggestions the north could have overrun them with ease as was the original plan. Before first Mannassas the northerners were convinced it would be a quick march to Richmond and then it would all be over. This belief was largely shared by the northern leaders. Seward remarked back in February of that year that the secessionists would self destruct before summer and everything would be back to normal. Lincoln thought that anti-secessionist sympathies would emerge at the sight of the union flag and shortly thereafter the southern states would come back. But all of this was simply not so with no surer proof of the error in those suggestions being the war itself.
As usual it appears that McPherson's editorializing is much like the rest of his beliefs on the war including those I exposed at the beginning of this thread. He pushes a heavily slanted and historically fraudulent brand of 100% yankee produced pure unadulterated bullsh*t, slaps the label "history" on the can, and markets it to suckers such as yourself for consumption. Sadly his loyal clientel lines up begging for more without a clue in the world as to what they are actually eating, and this even though those who have picked up on the McPherson scam attempt to warn the rest with readily available evidence.
Not true. They “killed” less than 200,000 “yankees”. The rest died of various "Camp Fevers" from poor sanitation and exposure to the elements, which plague an invading force much more than a defending force. In the 19th Century it was statistically nearly as dangerous to be in a camp as it was to be in combat.
Another point that seems to be overlooked was the number of troops assigned to logistical functions in the Union Army vs. the Confederate army. The Union Army provided the vast majority of its own logistics from teamsters to ambulance corps to railroad gangs to trench diggers. They also typically had much longer lines of supply to maintain and defend which takes large chunks of men away from combat operations. The Confederates relied very heavily on local slave populations either volunteered or "requisitioned" from their owners to perform most of the logistics functions. The result was that the Confederates could field a much higher percentage of their forces for actual combat operations than could the Union army. The so-called “2 to 1” advantage quite often did not manifest itself on the battlefield.
Maybe people can fight better in wooden shoes. The sesesh should have tried that. What they -did- try was a miserable failure.
Walt