How Close Was Confederate Victory in the Summer of 1864 Essay

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close was Confederate victory in the summer of 1864?

The so-called 'Myth of the Lost Cause' suggests that it was impossible for the South to have won the war, given the superiority of Northern military might and the North's superior numbers. In the words of one Virginian: "They never whipped us, Sir, unless they were four to one. If we had had anything like a fair chance, or less disparity of numbers, we should have won our cause and established our independence.[footnoteRef:1]" However, many wars of independence were won under similar odds. After all, the obstacles faced by the Confederacy were actually less onerous than those faced by the North: the Confederacy did not have to destroy the North; it merely had to engage in a "strategically defensive war to protect from conquest territory it already controlled and to preserve its armies from annihilation...it needed only to hold out long enough to compel the North to the conclusion that the price of conquering the South and annihilating its armies was too great, as Britain had concluded with respect to the United States in 1781 or, for that matter, as the United States concluded with respect to Vietnam in 1972."[footnoteRef:2] [1: James M. McPherson, "Could The South Have Won?" The New York Review of Books, (June 2002), http://www.

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freerepublic.com/focus/news/688281/posts [4 Aug 2012]] [2: McPherson 2002]

Internal divisions within the Confederate leadership, defections by slaves to the North, and the fact that "two fifths of the Confederate population were slaves, and two thirds of the whites did not belong to slaveholding families" have also been cited as the reasons behind the South's defeat.[footnoteRef:3] Regardless, although the Union victory today seems inevitable, it did not seem as such to the war-weary North during the war. There was substantial resistance to the war in the North, most notably manifested in the nomination of one of Lincoln's former generals in opposition to the President's reelection. However, the actual position of George B. McClellan remains ambiguous. On a personal level, McClellan vowed to continue the war, but the Democratic platform stated that it would negotiate a peaceful end to the war with the Confederacy. The Democrat's selection of McClellan as….....

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