From: Gautam Mukunda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
How could the South have won? How about no major offensive operations, force the North into a grinding war of attrition and denying it any major victories while either getting European intervention (which almost happened) or a Democratic victory in 1864
I had thought that most European sympathies lay with the North, given European distaste for slavery, and that the North did actually get some European aid? What nation(s) considered intervening on the South's side?
Why would a Democrat victory have ensured Southern victory? Were the Democrats that pro-secession that they would have ended the war and let the Confederacy go?
So, was Southern defeat inevitable? I would actually say, in retrospect, that it's actually fairly improbable. Why didn't Britain intervene? Mainly the extraordinary diplomatic adroitness of the Lincoln Administration. Why did the Republicans survive the 1862 midterm elections? Lincoln. Why did they win the 1864 election? Lincoln again. Why did they (finally) find the generals (Grant and Sherman) who understood the war (not just tactics, but the war itself) and what it took to win it? Lincoln. And what are the odds of that?
Was the public that indifferent to keeping the Union together?
Thinking about Dan's what-ifs, here's a different scenario: What if Lincoln *hadn't* been elected, but a *Democrat* had been? IIRC, it was Lincoln's election (and know anti-slavery stance) that brought the tensions to a head, rather than any explicit acts Lincoln did to provoke the secession. I guess also along those lines, would a different Republican with perhaps a less anti-slavery platform have triggered the war?
In other words, was the Civil War inevitable? Certainly, even without Lincoln, slavery would have had to end in the US at some point - Would it have been possible for this country to eventually outlaw slavery, without the war?
-bryon
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