Honest question for amercian history peeps.
What the fuck was the south thinking in the first place.
They had less man power AND industry then the north, such a conflict was doomed from the onset.
And from what I know about the amercian civil war, they faught agressivly? I may be wrong here.
But that just compounds it, the only chance, the ONLY chance you have against a superior foe is to bunker down, and bunker down hard, defenders have the advantage...
Okay, here's the thing about the Civil War.
Both sides didn't even think there was going to be actual war in the beginning. It was essentially just them showing off.
No one wanted an all out war. But as things went along, and the fighting got more heated the South did start to fight defensively.
PM box is Closed, Indefinitely Friend Code: 3368-4181-6850Actually the south's plan was to fight defensively from the very beginning. They knew they had no chance in hell of actually beating the Union in a fight so they wanted to drag it out to the point that 'the yankees would get sick of the blood shed and forfeit'.
Lee went up north a few times inorder to just screw with the North but Gettysburg is where it really costed him dearly and pretty much broke his army into fragments. It was never that strong again.
and the south really wasn't on a winning streak, it's just that before Grant came along and started getting shit done the Union generals weren't aggressive enough to seize the initiative to destroy the south's army.
edited 30th Sep '15 12:40:19 PM by Bcom
Should also be noted that both "North" and "South" weren't as monolithicly singular in goals as the names imply - each side had plenty of factions who really went along to varying degrees as it suited their goals. Ex: The South's initial withholding of cotton wasn't a Confederate government decision, it was a relatively spontaneous decision by private cotton plantation owners.
The damned queen and the relentless knight.there's also the fact that over time the experienced commanders of the confederacy started getting picked off leaving them with inexperienced leaders leading inexperienced troops.
if that isn't a recipe for disaster I don't know what is.
it's possible that over time, and due to the loss of the more well trained leaders, the rookies decided to get too aggressive but eh I might just be guessing at this point.
Gettysburg is all Lee's fault though, from going that deep into enemy turf with rookies to pickett's charge. and this is from someone that's related to him.
(@Mega) shush, I am hypothesizing
bcom, you are a Lee of Old Virginia?
I've always thought Gettysburg was a case of one last strategic chance at ending the war on favorable political terms for the South because the North's advantages would only get stronger with time.
edited 30th Sep '15 12:59:08 PM by megarockman
The damned queen and the relentless knight.I'm not gonna say yes or no, because I don't feel like dishing out personal info on a site as unsecure as this place. but my mom's side of the family has been in the maryland/virginia area for a long time.
and it actually seemed more like a supply raid and an attempt to demoralize the north. but yeah it was still all Lee's idea when he possibly could have saved the western area from the ass kicking grant was dishing out.
edited 30th Sep '15 1:00:52 PM by Bcom
@Imca if you're still here: Also the south had plantations, and therefore food, kinda like how North Korea used to make fun of the South for having so much farmland until they realised that the ROK also had all the food and the North just had cities and coal so everyone's starving now. And also cotton (and other agricultural supplies but mostly cotton and tobacco). That was what they were expecting to win them the war — they thought that if the UK wanted to make sure they kept getting their cotton supplies, they'd back up the South. What they didn't anticipate was that England had actually gotten a surplus of cotton recently and therefore decided wading into a foreign war they didn't really need to fight wasn't in their best interests.
edited 30th Sep '15 1:16:08 PM by WonderSquid
Both really. The point was that by the 1860's most of the most fertile land in the South was being used to grow cash crops which made the (few) plantation owners rich...so long as they had a way to sell it overseas.
In addition, the UK saw the Civil War clouds and stockpiled on cotton in the late 1850's (helped by a good series of cotton harvests in those years), while much of Europe saw food crop failures in the early years of the Civil War, which mean pissing off the North would have been a doubly bad idea.
The damned queen and the relentless knight.

yah it is
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