What if union lost civil war

Conclusion: Reasons for Union Victory. Learning Objectives Summarize the reasons the Union won, and identify crucial turning points in the Civil War. Key Takeaways Key Points Some historians believe that the Confederacy would have had a chance at victory had they attempted to outlast the Union by maintaining a defensive, rather than an offensive, overall strategy. General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9, It inflicted significant damage, particularly to industry and infrastructure per the doctrine of total war , and also to civilian property.

Licenses and Attributions. It will take the flower of the country —the young men. The Confederacy never had a chance. The Civil War was just the death throes of an outmoded way of life that was incompatible with American ideals and the nail in its coffin was manufactured by Northern factories and foundries.

When it comes to actually fighting, there are some essentials that an army needs to be backed by — chief among them is the weapons of war. Southern historian Shelby Foote noted that the Industrial Revolution in the United States was in full swing at the time of the Civil War and much of that growing industrial strength was firmly in the North.

Meanwhile, the South at the war's onset was still chiefly an agrarian society which relied on material imported from outside the 11 would-be Confederate states. It's not that the Southern economy was poorly planned overall, it was just poorly planned for fighting a war. Very closely related to industrial output is what the South could trade for those necessary war goods.

When all is well, the South's cotton-based economy was booming due to worldwide demand for the crop. The trouble was that the population density in the South was so low that much of the wealth of the United States and the banks that go along with that money were overwhelmingly located in the North. When it came time to raise the money needed to fight a war, it was especially difficult for the South. Levying taxes on a small population didn't raise the money necessary to fund the Confederate Army and, for other countries, investing in a country that may not exist in time for that investment to yield a return is a risky venture.

And tariffs on imported goods only work if those goods make it to market, which brings us to Although the Confederacy saw some success at sea, the Confederate Navy was largely outgunned by the Union Navy.

One of the first things the Union did was implement a naval blockade of Southern ports to keep supplies from getting to the Confederate Army while keeping that valuable Southern cotton from making it to foreign ports. The South's import-export capacity fell by as much as 80 percent during the war.

Earlier I noted the Southern economy was poorly planned for fighting any war. That situation becomes more and more dire when fighting the war on the South's home turf.

The North's industrialization required means of transport for manufactured goods and that meant a heavy investment in the fastest means of overland commercial transport available at the time: railroads. Northern states created significant rail networks to connect manufacturing centers in major cities while the South's cotton-based economy mainly relied on connecting plantations to major ports for export elsewhere.

Railroad development was minimal in the South and large shipments were primarily made from inland areas by river to ports like New Orleans and Charleston — rivers that would get patrolled by the Union Navy.

People who live in a country are good for more than just paying taxes to fund a functional government and its armies, they also fuel the strength, reach, and capabilities of those armies. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.

They may be correct. But at the time of its delivery, Southern leaders heard these words and thought one thing: Lincoln aims to abolish slavery at the federal level. Lincoln aims to destroy our way of life. So, as this preemptive secession commenced, Southern state governments issued declarations of secession that placed the preservation of slavery front and center. The declaration of secession for Texas is perhaps the most dogmatic.

On Feb. All, however, passionately pontificated on the necessity of preserving an institution of slavery; and that no such preservation could be maintained within the Union as it was then organized.

Ironically, secession, and the creation of a Confederacy was the only conceivable way of maintaining the status quo. In a last-ditch effort to deny the integrality of slavery to Southern secession, a contemporary Confederate sympathizer will inevitably raise the issue of the Corwin amendment. Seward of New York and in the House by Thomas Corwin of Ohio in , it was intended to lure seceded states back into the Union and convince border states to remain by promising to protect slaveholders from federal interference.

Its reference is meant to convey a fallacious argument: that the impetus for secession could not have been the preservation of slavery because a few Northern politicians were willing to forgo abolition to keep the Union intact. The Corwin amendment was never actually implemented. Only three states—Ohio, Illinois, and Maryland—ratified it. But its mere proposal indicates that the North, like the South, was no ideological monolith. There were men who fought for the Union that believed in the institution of slavery, who believed blacks to be inherently inferior to whites.

But while the Civil War was fought, on the ground, by these ordinary men of diverse opinions, it was not a conflict of their own engineering. Southern secession was not a guerrilla insurgency nor a populist rebellion as the neo-Confederate romantics prefer to believe. It was a conflict between two well-heeled establishments: one that depended—economically and spiritually—on the continued enslavement of black people, and another that did not.

Extant racism among Northerners does not extinguish this fact.