Download Causes of Confederate Defeat in the Civil War

Causes of Confederate Defeat in
the Civil War
Contributed by Aaron Sheehan-Dean
The surrender of Confederate general Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern
Virginia at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, effectively ended
the American Civil War (1861–1865). But why did Lee surrender? And
why in the spring of 1865? Historians have argued over the answers to
these questions since that day at Appomattox. Explanations for
Confederate defeat in the Civil War can be broken into two categories:
some historians argue that the Confederacy collapsed largely because of
social divisions within Southern society, while others emphasize the
Union's military defeat of Confederate armies. These arguments are not
mutually exclusive—no historian would deny that Southern society was
riven by racial, class, gender, and regional antagonisms and, similarly, all
historians recognize the enormous force brought to bear by Northern
armies and the high casualties suffered by Confederate soldiers.
Nonetheless, the disagreement has produced sharply different explanations
for why the Civil War ended as it did.
Although from today's perspective, Union advantages in manpower (a
five-to-two edge), draft animals, and industrial capacity suggest that
Union victory was inevitable, few Confederates believed that at the war's
start. In fact, most Confederates assessed the size of their new nation
(750,000 square miles), the length of their coastline (more than 3,000
miles), and their assumed martial superiority and concluded that Union
victory was impossible. They used the American Revolution (1775–1783)
as their historical guide, when an outnumbered and underequipped force
defeated a larger enemy through effective strategy, valuable alliances, and
a willingness to absorb punishment. Although the much-desired European
help never arrived, Confederates effectively used all their society's
resources to resist the Union through four brutal years of warfare. The
effectiveness of Confederate resistance can be seen in the fact that the
North was forced to modify its initially conciliatory strategy and adopt a
much-harder war policy toward South. This so-called hard war, felt
particularly in Central Virginia and Central Tennessee, created great
difficulties for Southern families. In addition, the Confederate government
imposed a variety of policies—including the draft, impressment, and taxin-kind—that drove up the cost of goods and created greater scarcity.
Confederate civilians disliked these policies, sometimes on the grounds of
states' rights, even though they understood that their purpose was to give
the state the tools it needed to prosecute the war successfully.
Some historians interpret the criticism that Confederate civilians directed
at Confederate president Jefferson Davis and other leaders as evidence that
they rejected the war effort itself. The criticism of Confederate leaders
impeded their ability to lead effectively and, among a smaller group,
probably represented a true shift in allegiances back to the Union. But a
majority of recent studies of Virginia and other Southern states
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demonstrates that even when Confederate civilians disparaged the policies
of their government they rarely supported reconciliation with the North. In
some cases, these Confederates accepted the things they did not like as the
price of winning the war; others blamed hardships on what they regarded
as their ultimate source—the "Yankees." Without ignoring Confederate
dissent, these historians emphasize the degree to which white Southerners
supported the Confederacy. In their accounting, the end of the war came
not because of internal divisions but because Union forces eroded the
ability of Confederates to fight.
Union military successes began outside of Virginia and gradually
encircled the state. These included securing control of the Mississippi
River (attained with the capture of Vicksburg in July 1863), blockading
the Confederate coastline (a process mostly complete by early in 1864),
and steadily penetrating the Confederate interior. Union control of western
Virginia actually began in 1861 and led, by 1863, to the creation of the
Unionist state of West Virginia. The success of Union armies in the transAppalachian region of the state buoyed the hopes and secured the lives of
Unionists. These individuals, mostly located in counties that bordered the
Ohio River, stayed loyal to the Union throughout the conflict and, in doing
so, denied Virginia resources (both human and natural) that they had
counted on to sustain the Confederate cause. In addition, Union control of
this region was a strategic gain because it allowed the North to launch
repeated forays into the Shenandoah Valley and beyond.
In eastern Virginia, Lee and his men kept Union forces at bay through
mid-1864. With the success of the Overland Campaign, Union general-inchief Ulysses S. Grant pinned Lee's army down inside its defenses around
Petersburg and the end of the war became a question of time. Once he had
Lee confined, Grant could exploit the Union's significant advantages in
matériel and manpower. Although the siege of Petersburg lasted for
almost ten months, even Lee anticipated the eventual outcome. Previous
Union commanders in Virginia (especially George B. McClellan,
Ambrose E. Burnside, and Joseph Hooker) had failed to exploit the
Union's manpower advantage. Grant did not idly waste his soldiers' lives
(as some wartime critics complained and Lost Cause arguments continue
to maintain) but he did use the larger size of his army to great advantage.
Similarly, Grant destroyed the means of sustenance in Confederate
Virginia in effort to further reduce Lee's fighting effectiveness. The
desperation of Lee's men in April 1865, when hundreds collapsed from
hunger along the road to Appomattox, revealed the effectiveness of this
strategy.
The question of exactly what weight to ascribe to the various elements—
both internal and external—can never be fully resolved. What did emerge
clearly in the aftermath of the war was that regardless of which factors
compelled the Confederates to lay down their arms, only a small minority
of white Virginians celebrated their return to the Union. A significant
number of them refused to concede the most basic accomplishment of the
war—emancipation—for many years. Black Virginians, for their part,
rejoiced in the end of the war and the terms on which it had been
concluded.