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AbwehrX -> RE: Why the Confederacy Lost (9/14/2014 8:00:49 PM)
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quote:
In addition, the areas that would have been abandoned had the South pursued a Fabian strategy were precisely the areas the Confederacy needed most if it were to have a realistic chance for independence — Virginia and Tennessee. As Joseph Harsh has observed, “for a nation successfully to pursue a strategy of defense it needed a large, rich heartland into which it could withdraw. Unfortunately for the South, its heart was located on its frontier.” And without Virginia, there was no viable Confederacy.
There were also political and social reasons that the Confederacy could not have pursued a Fabian or guerrilla strategy. First, the citizens of the Confederacy would never have tolerated a strategy based on a policy of ceding large swaths of territory to the hated invader. Second, a Fabian approach would have involved a social revolution, because it would have required the abandonment of the slave-based plantation system, which of course was the cause for which the South was willing to break up the Union and fight a war.
It seems to me that there was no better strategy for the South to follow than the one it did — organizing its forces into field armies to confront the armies of the Union, and giving priority to the best of these armies: Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Had Lee achieved the sort of victory he sought — the destruction of a Union army, especially on northern soil — the South might well have achieved its independence. And the fact is that Lee came extraordinarily close on more than one occasion.
There was another option that was readily available that nobody considered that involved Imperial Europe and wouldve thrown half the continent into chaos. Returning the Carolinas, Georgia and part of Virginia to England, the Louisiana Purchase including Yankee territory to France, Florida to Spain and California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, the Dakotas and Montana to Mexico. In other words threaten the North most by inviting half the world into North America to force them to negotiate or else. The North wasnt anywhere near capable of fighting all of Europe and the South simultaneously and European fleets were more than a match for the North. I'd like to see that as an option in several CW games.
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