Why confederates lost civil war

Now, they collected Confederate relics and instilled veneration for the Southern cause in the younger generation through textbooks and educational outreach efforts. In , the society published the Southern Historical Society Papers , a collection of essays defending every aspect of the Southern war effort.

Early became the most influential figure in propagating these arguments. While initially against secession, Early steadily rose through the ranks of the Confederate Army. After the war, he traveled the South, giving lectures and writing articles to defend Lee and attack Longstreet.

He also espoused the notion that the war in Virginia was the central theater of the war. By the s, many Confederate veteran associations formed to both perpetuate the memory of their fallen brothers and take care of the disabled. These groups consolidated into the United Confederate Veterans in Auxiliary organizations such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy formed for similar purposes.

The Confederate Veteran was founded in and became the official mouthpiece of the Lost Cause movement. This publication reached a mass audience until it was discontinued in Some in the North, especially Union veterans and African Americans, were angered by glorifying the Confederate cause and slavery.

However, general public opinion had shifted towards reconciliation with the defeated South, especially after they became disillusioned with Reconstruction.

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.

The only way the South could have won would have been for Lincoln to decide to lose. As long as Lincoln was determined to prosecute the war and as long as the North was behind him, inevitably superior manpower and resources just had to win out.

The miracle is that the South held out as long as it did. The South lost because it had inferior resources in every aspect of military personnel and equipment. Lots of people will be scornful of it. But a ratio of twenty-one million to seven million in population comes out the same any way you look at it.

The basic problem was numbers. Twenty-one to seven is a very different thing than seven to twenty-one. The South certainly did not lose for any lack of idealism, or dedication to its cause or beliefs, or bravery and skill on the battlefield. In time these things would tell on the battlefield, certainly on the broader level.

The North was able to bring its industry and its manpower to bear in such a way that eventually, through sheer numerical and material advantage, it gained and maintained the upper hand. Even while it was happening, men like Union officer Joshua Chamberlain—who did all that he could to defeat the Confederacy—could not help but admire the dedication of those soldiers. One main reason why the South lost and this may seem offbeat because it flies in the face of the common wisdom is that the South lacked the moral center that the North had in this conflict.

The North had a fairly simple message that was binding it together, and that message was that the Union, the idea of Union, was important, and probably after you could add the crusade against slavery to that. And what you increasingly find as the war continued is that the dialogue got more and more confused. And you actually had state governors such as Joe Brown in Georgia identifying the needs of Georgia as being paramount and starting to withhold resources from the Confederacy and just protecting the basic infrastructure of the Georgia state government over the Confederacy.

In the North you certainly had dialogue and debate on the war aims, but losing the Union was never really a part of that discussion. Preserving the Union was always the constant. Therefore the main reason the South lost the war was not a lack of men, firepower, or resources, rather it was the lack of southern commitment to the cause. The authors claim that the fragile sense of Confederate nationalism was the main cause for the Southern defeat during the Civil War.

They argue that many Southern citizens were not fully committed to the Confederate cause. Instead many supported the cause for fear of being castigated by their neighbors and community. Therefore once the tide of the Civil War turned in Northern favor, many Southerners did not have the resolve to withstand the North. By pointing to high Southern desertion rates, particularly those by soldiers who deserted once their homes were occupied by Northern soldiers, the authors illustrate this point effectively.

For many men of the South, they fought the war to protect their homes and families, and once those were in the hands of the North, there was no longer a reason to fight.

Basically, the amount of men that were true Confederates at heart and willing to fight to the last man were not seen in high numbers. The religion of many Southerners bolstered their war efforts and desire to fight the war, yet by this desire began to fade. Civil War culture in America—both North and South—was greatly distinct from life in the antebellum years.

The Civil War was a time of great social and political upheaval. It was also a time of great technological change. Inventors and military men devised new types of weapons, such as the repeating rifle and the submarine, that forever changed the way that wars were fought.

In many ways, the coming of the Civil War challenged the ideology of Victorian domesticity that had defined the lives of men and women in the antebellum era. In the North and in the South, the war forced women into public life in ways they could scarcely have imagined a Notable outcomes of the wars included the When Southern rebels bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina in April , it was the start of a war between the Union and the secessionist Confederate States of America that would stretch on for four bloody years.

The war took a brutal toll. According to statistics compiled by One-third of the soldiers who fought for the Union Army were immigrants, and nearly one in 10 was African American. The Union Army was a multicultural force—even a multinational one. We often hear about Irish soldiers 7. Live TV. This Day In History.