Historically, the Confederate approach to the war was similar to the Japanese approach to WW II: seize your objectives and fight until the enemy gives up. In each case this was a hope and not a strategy. It offered no route to victory that could be secured directly. It's not that it couldn't have worked -- it's that it was dependent on factors outside the control of the Confederacy or Japan, and therefore left those two countries fortunes to fate.
To stand a chance of victory, the Confederacy needed to deal a crushing blow to the Union armies as quickly as possible. Fighting on home soil offered the following advantages:
1) Battle in accordance with military logic as opposed to political logic.
All battles would have been fought at moments of the southern generals' choosing. Battle in defense of geographical objectives of the Union's choosing would have been avoided.
2) Intelligence and Recconaissance
Population loyalty is an important factor in any campaign. At the pace of pre-mechanized warfare, news always travelled faster than any army. Confederate forces would have had preferential access to this information.
Also, many campaign areas were very poorly mapped at the time. You cannot plan an army's movements using a 1:500,000 scale map. Confederate forces would have greater familiarity with the terrain. A flexible military strategy would have granted them maximum opportunity to exploit this advantage.
3) Morale
Confederate troops would have been styled as freedom fighters, Union troops as conquerors. This would have affected morale on both sides to the advantage of the Confederacy in each case.
4) Concentration
Napoleon remarked that he who seeks to be strong everywhere is strong nowhere. The South might have employed only screening forces in subsidiary theatres with the limited objective of slowing the rate of Union advance in order to concentrate all possible forces at the point of main effort. This is probably the most important of the points cited.
5) Force
The Union force would have been whittled down as it advanced by the need to garrison the countryside and secure supply lines. Simultaneously, the Union armies would have been under immense political and popular pressure to continue the advance and put an end to the seemingly one-sided civil disturbance in the shortest possible time.
Given the disparity of forces, the Confederacy could only afford to give battle once every possible advantage had been secured. I don't think the advantages outlined above were ones it could afford to spurn.
Quite possibly this approach might have resulted in defeat in under a year -- you might as well lose in one year as in four in any case.
What it would have achieved without question is to create the best possible circumstances where an annihilating victory might be won, the kind of victory the South simply had to win if it was to win the war.
Mangudai wrote:It was considered a brilliant discovery that Grant's army was able to live off the land during the Vicksburg campaign. Union doctrine was to have river or rail supply lines for all major operations.
If the South used scorched earth tactics the Union would lose a few options, but basically persist with it's same strategy.
Grant sent eight steamers laden with Food and Forage past the Confederate guns to the landing site, so he was not without supply. Also, the confederate lines were extremely tenuous everywhere except Vicksburg itself. Even in the unlikely event of a decisive defeat, the worst that would have happened would have been that his army would have had to abandon its cannon in retreating to Federal lines.
Also, Grant authorised his forces to forage without restriction. This would not have happened in 1861.
Don't forget that this was after two years of hard campaigning and that the Union had grown in experience and confidence, had accepted that the fight was going to be long and hard, and had developed overwhelming force.
77NY wrote:From Krakow, Poland to Moscow: 835 miles/1300 km
From Krakow, Poland to Stalingrad(Volgograd): 1100 miles/1780 km
From there only another 3800 miles to Vladivostok.
Population of USSR in 1940: ~200 million
Population of Nazi Germany in 1940: ~70 million
Population of CSA in 1861: ~ 9 million
Population of Union in 1861: ~ 22 million
Those numbers just don't support the CSA adopting the overall strategy of the USSR in WWII. While Soviet armored strategy was brilliant in some ways, Soviet infantry tactics were not as sophisticated and often involved human wave attacks.
Time and space are factors dependent as much on technology, terrain and communications as on distance.
The USSR is only an example. I could as easily have cited the Teutoborg forest, the first Afghan war or any number of other cases.
Regards,
dduff
