this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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Funny how the southern states literally only had Mobile, New Orleans, and Charleston. The war should've been a year long no diff ngl. Good generals make a difference, who could've guessed?
If labour is free, you don’t need industrialisation, and that attitude carries over to logistics.
'Good' is a strong word. A lot of '61 was two sets of incompetents flailing at each other, and the dice coming up lucky for the South, while '62 and '63 was largely a series of unforced errors on the part of incompetent Northern generals. The strategic acumen of Lee et co is much overstated.
Tactical Acumen I think. That's the overall reputation of Lee, earned or not. He's never really been noted as a good strategist.
I wasn't saying that southern generals were good, just that most of the northern ones didn't seem to be. Sorry for being unclear.
Ah, yeah, completely correct then.
The northern elite also didn’t want to win at the start of the war: the union as it was, constitution as it is (with slavery that is). For the northern elite the south was a source of cheap cotton and an export market for finished goods, winning decisively would break that balance.
The end of slavery was truly a bottoms up movement, that forced the contradiction to be so great that it could not exist in one country.
John Dolan (aka the war nerd) has a great series on this subject on his podcast: Radio War Nerd.
The north was also fighting in enemy territory. If you ignore that part, for example, then our recent wars in the Middle East don't make any sense.