Why didnt the South win the Civil War Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Why didnt the South win the Civil War - Essay Example One answer is that the North won it. The South lost because the North outmanned and outclassed it at almost every point, militarily. Despite the long-held notion that the South had all of the better generals, it really had only one good army commander and that was Lee. The rest were second-raters, at best. The North, on the other hand, had the good fortune of bringing along and nurturing people like Grant, William T. Sherman, Philip Sheridan, George H. Thomas, and others. The South was way outclassed industrially. There was probably never any chance of it winning without European recognition and military aid. And we can now see in retrospect what some, like Jefferson Davis, even saw at the time, which was that there was never any real hope of Europe intervening. It just never was in England or Frances interests to get involved in a North American war that would inevitably have wound up doing great damage, especially to Englands maritime trade. Industrially the South couldnt keep up in output and in manpower. By the end of the war, the South had, more or less, plenty of weaponry still, but it just didnt have enough men to use the guns. It is one of the factors of lost that south was inherently weaker in the various essentials to win a military victory than the North (Holness, 2). The North had a population of more than twenty-two million people to the Souths nine-and-a-half million, of whom three-and-a-half million were slaves. While the slaves could be used to support the war effort through work on the plantations and in industries and as teamsters and pioneers with the army, they were not used as a combat arm in the war to any extent. So if the South were to win, it had to win a short war by striking swiftly--in modem parlance, by an offensive blitzkrieg strategy. But the Confederates had established their military goals as fighting in defense of their homeland. In 1861, when enthusiasm was high in the