Why didnt the South win the Civil War - Essay Example

Lost of Civil War During Civil War the North and South engaged each other for four long years. More than half a million people were killed. Families were torn apart, towns destroyed. And in the end, the South lost. For the past 130 years Americans have argued over the reasons for the Confederacys downfall. Diverse opinions have appeared in hundreds of books, but the numerous possibilities have never adequately been summarized and gathered together in one place.When the question is asked about the South lost of civil war, it kind of presupposes that the South lost the war all by itself and that it really could have won it.

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 South, it lacked the wherewithal and the resolution to follow up on its early victories, such as First Manassas in the East and at Wilsons Creek and Lexington in the West. From the above discussion it seems clear that the South could have won the war . . . if. If it had more and better-equipped men, led by more capable generals and a wiser president.

If it had a more unified purpose and was more aggressive. If it faced a different opponent. The last condition should not be underestimated. By the end of the war, Lincoln and his powerful army were remarkably proficient at prosecuting war according to Grants simple strategy. As historian William C. Davis has succinctly put it, "the North won it."Works CitedHolness, E. Gail Anderso, (1996). South lost the Civil War and must not win the flag war. New York Amsterdam News, pp. 2.