The north had more arms, more men, better weapons and more international support.

But the south had better Generals. In feudal societies, only the oldest son can get the farm. Otherwise with each generation, the farm gets broken up smaller and smaller. So what does the second and 3rd son do? In our south, they went to West Point and they went into government. Indeed, our Supreme Court was mostly southern and West Point became a ghost town once the war started. Nearly everyone at West Point marched south to join the confederacy when the war started.

Also, Washington DC itself was in a slave state and across the river was another slave state. SC seceded from the Union right after the November election of Lincoln but 4 months before Lincoln became President. During that time, all federal forts in the South fell to the confederates and this included tons or arms. But because of the allegiance of so many Federal officers to the south, tons of materiale was being moved to the south during these months. And President Buchanan did nearly nothing to stop it. Also during this time, the south was making very significant war preparations. The north was making none and much of it’s materiale was moving south.

When Lincoln took over, he pledged a rescue mission to the final federal fort in the south. But before the US ships could reach it, Ft Sumter was attacked and taken and because of that incident, Virginia and the rest of the border states seceded. (That’s when Lincoln asked R.E Lee to take over the Union army. Lee said no, went home and took over the Army of Northern Va.)

Lincoln had to scramble to find leaders, scramble to find troops, scramble to find materiale, and even had to scramble to find a cause. Slavery could not be the cause because no way would America’s northerners die for the Negro. Union became the cause. I think it’s interesting to ponder how Lincoln could have gotten the war machine going if SC had not attacked Ft Sumter. That attack helped him foster that notion of Union. I doubt he would have been successful in even starting a war effort without that attack.

The north had more international support because it was hard for European powers to support the Confederacy because in Europe, it was obvious that the war started over slavery. I think it’s clear that both France and England would have wanted the south to win but they totally lost all chance to enter the conflict once the Emancipation Proclamation was released. Lincoln became a hero in Europe. France had designs on Mexico by then so keeping the North Americans busy could allow them to get away with quite a bit.

Both France and England did what they could to help the Confederacy, but they had to be quite covert or they would piss off their people. And after the Eman Proc, they had to be even more careful.
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I have found on this blog the notion that Lincoln fought a “total war” and that his leadership was particularly ugly in this regard. It seems to me that this was true of both sides in that war. Yes, Shermans march to the sea was gruesome, but was it atypical of others? Or was it simply that this march was more significant BECAUSE it was so large — and thus — so successful. Gettysburg has horrors on both sides and it was one of the few successful attacks on the North by the South. One can only wonder what a Jackson march to NYC might have looked like had it come to that. It never happened so we can never wonder. And Andersonville was another particularly gruesome horror story.

No, I think focusing on northern horror and suggesting that Lincoln fought too gruesome a war is more of that revisionism we keep seeing on the American Civil War. Revisionism that tells us about the inherent nobility of the southern cause and similar bunk. When that cause was in fact about treason and slavery.