The Forlorn Hope of The Lost Cause
The Southern Confederacy’s Capacity To Win The Civil War
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“Winning” the American Civil War meant something completely different for the Confederacy than it did for the Union. For the Confederate South, it meant freedom to continue to treat human beings as chattel property, for the Southern states to pursue their own foreign and trade policy, and to impose their own tariffs and duties on exported and imported goods. In short, winning the war would enable them to act as independent economic and political entities, with only a weak central system to mediate interstate differences and disputes, and little if any provision for meeting foreign threats.
For the Northern and Western states of the Union, it meant the maintenance of the political and economic alignment as framed by the Constitution of 1786, a structure that treated the several states only as quasi-independent bodies that looked first to the central government for foreign and trade policy and for the settlement of disputes between the states.
It was these significant differences, and more, that signaled why the Confederacy could not win.
The Traditions of “What If”
Study and debate about the American Civil War has been a cottage industry since 1865. And research is relatively easy, since veterans and other survivors of the conflict were very forthcoming about their experiences, almost all of which are in English and within these shores. The Federal government’s timely consolidation of that material into its Official Records, available to everyone, aids this effort.
The framework of Civil War scholarship has, for many years, been pre-written for the historian to marvel at, emulate and follow, filling in the blanks with fresh evidence and interpretations…as long as they still reach the same conclusions about the inevitability of the Lost Cause. Jubal Early, his compatriots, other Confederate veterans, and the Southern Historical Society created an entire history based on a series of assumptions and images that have become unassailable when reinforced by the romantic and misted memories of the chivalric and noble Southern veterans. These assumptions and images first appeared primarily in Southern veteran and consumer publications, eventually finding their way into school textbooks. This last infiltration began the de facto ideological control of all textbooks in America. This framework and these assumptions have become collectively known as the Lost Cause tradition, and have been the fundamental outline for Civil War study and publication in the United States ever since the late 19th Century.
The Lost Cause fits easily into the “what if” parlor game history buffs and aficionados love to play, and that a few claim is a useful tool for historical investigation. The Lost Cause tradition contends that had certain things happened differently, the Southern Confederacy would have succeeded. Since they did not, the calamitous end was inevitable. This apparently does not deter discussion, but only adds a more poignant tone to the nobility of the hopeless cause for which the South fought. The inevitable end of the war, from which Lost Cause proponents will not deviate, is also a template for why the Confederacy stood no chance.
Appomattox, the Great Junction, and the Petite Guerre
In the spring of 1865, the last two Confederate field armies east of the Alleghenies were within 200 miles of each other. George Meade’s Army of the Potomac pinned Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia against Richmond since the summer of 1864. In January 1865, the Confederacy’s last sea port served by rails, Wilmington, North Carolina, fell to Union forces, and with it, Lee’s last chance for complete replenishment. Union troops scorched the Shenandoah Valley, Lee’s best source of subsistence the previous winter, and all communications cut off. Only a single rail line, the South Side Railway, connected Lee and his 60,000 men to the rest of the Confederacy.
In North Carolina, Joseph E. Johnston had cobbled together bits and pieces of the Army of Tennessee destroyed during John B. Hood’s 1864 winter campaign and started marching north to Virginia, perhaps hoping to join Lee, though this is unclear. While dogged by three Federal armies, he picked up more scraps of units on the way. In March, he turned and fought a hopeless action at Bentonville, then continued his trek north.
When Meade cut the South Side Railway after fighting at Five Forks, there was no way that Lee could supply his army. Decamping quickly, he rushed headlong west with no plan other than to escape the wrath of the oncoming Federal armies and getting to a supply train he had been told was en route. Nine days later, Ulysses S. Grant seized Lee’s ration train and captured a third of his army, forcing Lee to surrender. Before surrendering, Confederate officers had implored Lee to break up the army so that a guerrilla campaign could bedevil the Union until they could join with Johnston. Lee firmly spoke against it.
Traditionally, this “guerilla campaign” idea contains two “what if” propositions: That a low-level conflict could achieve what a high-level one could not, and that a junction of Lee and Johnston could keep the Confederacy going. The first problem with this idea is that guerrilla warfare requires a kind of discipline in the ranks that the Confederacy never enjoyed. Over the past six months, whatever discipline remained in the Army of Northern Virginia had crumbled, with large parts of it simply going home. This force might have made even worse guerrillas because guerrillas have to know when to stop fighting for their own preservation. Southerners, repeatedly, showed that they did not.
Any joining of Lee and Johnston would have created the largest army the Confederacy had ever seen, and with it, the perpetuation of its biggest continual problem—supply—which would have been impossible. At most, Lee might have had 40,000 effectives. Combined with Johnston’s 80,000 and the inevitable camp followers, they would have needed a million rations every three days, and somewhere near ten tons of other supplies daily, without fighting. With all the Confederate arms centers captured or destroyed, the ports in Federal hands, the government on the run and the rails cut in all directions, one has to wonder how this force would have been able to subsist, let alone do anything to keep the Confederacy alive.
Virginia, Atlanta and the Elections of 1864
In the summer of 1864, the elections in the North were the topic of almost as much conversation as much as William Sherman’s campaign against Atlanta. George B. McClellan, a popular Union general who Lincoln sacked in 1862, was running against the man who sacked him. McClellan’s platform was “peace and union,” in that he would hold out the olive branch to the Confederacy and end the conflict. The proposal seemed to have a popular appeal because this “short” war seemed to have no end. Grant and two Federal armies were incurring thousands of casualties against Lee while seeming to get no closer to Richmond. Sherman was marching with three armies deep into the Confederacy, a campaign that was moving in fits and starts. While Grant seemed to flounder, Sherman finally reached Atlanta in September 1864. The soldier vote boosted Lincoln, and the Union's fortunes shifted suddenly, leading to his easy re-election that November. Atlanta and the soldier vote thus ensured Confederate defeat.
There are three themes at work in this idea:
Atlanta made all the difference in Lincoln’s reelection;
Lincoln's reelection was because of his popularity among the soldiers and the fall of Atlanta;
McClellan’s election would have meant peace and a perpetual Confederacy.
This idea fuses Lincoln to military successes, and military success to political power. It implies the North's bullying of the South, which the Lost Cause disciples claim started the war. Until the election itself, there was no way of knowing if Lincoln would have won if Atlanta had not fallen to Sherman. Aside from that, by late 1864, Atlanta’s military importance was more symbolic than real. It was valuable as a transportation hub, but after the Meridian campaign destroyed much of the Confederate arms industry in early 1864, there wasn’t much left in the Confederacy to transport. While taking Atlanta was important, it wasn’t vital.
Without the opinion polling mechanisms that were developed in the early 20th Century, Lincoln then—as have historians since then—relied on newspaper editorials to determine the feelings of the voters that fall. But this is a fickle and most unreliable yardstick, given the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline in 1948 and the “everyone knows he can’t win” Trump successes in 2016 and 2024, and even more contemporary examples of the pollsters getting it wrong. Further, the plurality of votes for Lincoln was great, but according to most studies, the furloughed soldier’s influence was small. Less than 10,000 soldier votes were cast. Even if they had all voted for Lincoln (improbable), there simply were not enough soldier votes to have decided the issue.
This theme also implies that peace would have been more or less immediate, an implausibility at best. Before 1936, March was the month for presidential inaugurations, not earlier. Before then McClellan could have made a great deal of noise, but no peace and no directives to Federal armies to stop offensive operations. By 20 March 1865, Grant had positioned his troops to cut off Lee, Sherman had moved into North Carolina and was marching north, and the South no longer had an open, working port. Olive branches by then would have become just trash among the laurels.
1863: The Year of Decision
The North and South shaped the outcome of the conflict in several pivotal events in the Year of Battles—1863. In September, James Longstreet and Braxton Bragg bested William S. Rosecrans at Chickamauga Creek, driving Rosecrans all the way back to Chattanooga, effectively stopping an early Union drive on Atlanta and discrediting one of the North’s most successful commanders. Just the previous July, Grant had captured Vicksburg while Nathaniel Banks captured Port Hudson, opening the Mississippi River to commerce and cutting off three states from the Confederacy. The day before Vicksburg fell, Lee lost his last gambit in Pennsylvania at Gettysburg, the surging gray tide reaching its High Water Mark near Meade’s center. Less than two months before Gettysburg, the Army of the Potomac, then commanded by Joe Hooker, came near rout and destruction after a risky maneuver by Thomas J. Jackson caught an unprepared corps in the flank. During the fighting, Jackson suffered a fatal injury and died eight days later. The Army of the Potomac, however, survived to fight another day.
Out of these momentous events, two of them—Gettysburg and the death of Jackson—are most often cited in Lost Cause mythos (with apologies to H. P. Lovecraft), which holds that Gettysburg was the pivotal battle of the war. This premise claims that Lee, one of the South’s most beloved commanders, lost to a relatively unknown Union general—Meade—because Jackson’s death distracted him. It is further suggested that with Lee being ill, key subordinates, including James E. B. Stuart and James Longstreet, failed to support him correctly or adequately. This “what if” contention concludes that, had Jackson been at Gettysburg, the Confederacy would not only have won the battle, but would also have gained European recognition, assuring both peace and a perpetual Southern Confederacy.
But the other battles, regardless of result, are more telling. Chickamauga Creek is in northwest Georgia, and Chattanooga is just across the border in southeastern Tennessee. An army that had had nothing to do with either Vicksburg or Gettysburg conducted Rosecrans’s campaign. The Confederacy had to strip and move a third of its premier army (Longstreet’s corps) west to protect its arms industry around Meridian, Mississippi, a week’s march away from Rosecrans.
Before that, Vicksburg resulted from a months-long campaign that, after months of Federal frustration, saw defeat after Confederate defeat. The fall of Vicksburg opened the mills and grain bins of the Midwest once again to international trade, conducted by armies that had little to do with the Tullahoma/Chattanooga campaign and nothing to do with Pennsylvania. There were more Union armies in West Virginia, Missouri, and the Arizona Territory. In short, the Union forces outnumbered, defeated, and outmaneuvered the Confederacy in three different locations within two months.
European recognition was a far cry from European involvement, which by 1863 was not only improbable but increasingly dangerous for world stability. Civil wars in Spain and Italy, another partition of Poland, Prussian expansionism, roiling unrest in Latin America, Japan and India, civil war in China threatening the colonies in Hong Kong, and Russian Tsar Alexander II’s infatuation with Afghanistan, Tibet and Abraham Lincoln preoccupied Europe (especially Britain). Taking on another problem was unlikely.
Britain had but one infantry brigade in Canada and risked losing the whole of the country to any of several Union armies that were severely thrashing the best the Confederacy could offer. France was barely holding on in Mexico with the Legionnaires it sent to put an extra Austrian prince, Maximilian I, on a make-believe throne. Further, Europe had seen demonstrations of the Union’s successful shell-firing naval artillery that outranged and outclassed European pieces, and was aware that the North could make more of them in a month than Europe could make of their inferior guns in three. Union land power impressed postwar European analysts, even if they thought little of it during the conflict. Cooler heads in Europe wanted nothing to do with the American Civil War, instead preferring to pick up the pieces after the shooting was over. Ultimately, not only would European recognition or participation have been unlikely, it would have been pointless.
The prospect of European intervention was but a dream the Confederacy clung to for three years, basing much of their strategy on retaining as much territory as possible, hoping British and French troops would soon arrive to secure their borders again.
Bull Run, to Embargo, to Stones’ River
1863 began with ambiguous holdovers from 1862. In Middle Tennessee, Bragg had attacked Rosecrans outside Murfreesboro at the end of the year, but the Federals fought the Confederates to a bloody standstill, resuming the offensive two days later and driving Bragg all the way to Chattanooga. Earlier in December, Ambrose Burnside had assailed Lee and Jackson outside Fredericksburg for hours with practically no result. Scholarly opinions of the importance of the Confederate fall 1862 campaign have gained increasing impetus in recent years, led by some of the Civil War industry’s leading lights.
The theory goes that Confederate offensives in August and September, notably Bragg’s invasion of Kentucky and Lee’s invasion of Maryland, were the first coordinated offensive efforts in American military history, and might have been decisive had they been successful. Bragg’s invasion came to grief at Perryville, Kentucky in October, where Don C. Buell caught and fought his scattered army to a confused and still-debated tactical draw. But no matter the outcome, Bragg could not stay that far north and had to withdraw south again. At Antietam, and just before at South Mountain, Lee’s offensive came up against a fully alerted and prepared Federal army under George B. McClellan, and gained another bloody draw. This series of events traditionally resulted in Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which, among other things, possibly ended any hope of European involvement in the war.
The Lost Cause has pointed to this period as one of decisive energy by the Confederacy, where they imposed multiple threats on Union incursions on their territory. The Emancipation, the Lost Cause holds, made Europe think again about helping the Confederacy to supply them with cotton. New Orleans and all the Western cities fell, the story goes, because the North had better communications and uncontested control of the waterways, which would have turned around once Europe got into the war.
However, the evidence for this contention is so thin as to be transparent. In the early summer of 1862, the Confederacy also ended its own embargo of cotton to Europe. This self-imposed blockade meant to raise the price—and thus, the demand—for their precious commodity. This embargo ended after McClellan finished his ambitious but ultimately failed Peninsula campaign. The Confederate embargo not only failed to have its intended effect, but it made matters worse: India and Egypt became Europe’s cotton suppliers.
Even if one were to concede Confederate military successes in the fall of 1862, so what? Except in the war's cockpit, Virginia (where Lee was), only one Confederate victory—Chickamauga—turned Federal armies back where they came from, and the strategic value of the ninety miles between Washington and Richmond that was contested for four years is questionable. Even when the Confederates won, their victory produced very little strategic gain. Antietam and South Mountain were defensive battles for the Confederacy while they were on the strategic offensive, and in both cases, the Federals surprised them. Fredericksburg, in January 1862, had no Confederate strategic result save a long Federal casualty list. The huge butcher’s bill at Shiloh in April was proof that there was to be no quick reconciliation, and that Johnston blundered into battle blindly, unable to control his army. His death may have saved him from being relieved. Losing New Orleans in May 1862, the largest city in the Confederacy, was not just catastrophic, it was irreversible. The Confederacy recaptured no significant territory lost during the war, a fact that the Lost Cause tries to both revel in (because it’s also emblematic of the inevitability and nobility of its struggle) and ignore (because it also signifies a lack of Confederate military capacity).
Their entire plan seems to have been to wait for Europe to bail them out. This is also an attempt to couple the slavery issue to European involvement, which contradicts the Southern contention that the war had little or nothing to do with slavery. Lost Cause advocates prefer to view the conflict solely as a states' rights issue, claiming that one can break a voluntary agreement at will. However, by Bull Run, the issue had become a matter for soldiers to decide, not for lawyers.
Fort Sumter and the Legality of Secession
Fort Sumter, a Federal fortress in Charleston Harbor manned by less than a hundred soldiers, surrendered after a day and a half of bombardment in April 1861 by South Carolina batteries. Days before, batteries fired on a relief ship, trying to bring food and water to the garrison. South Carolina and indeed the entire South had been demanding the surrender and evacuation of the fort since the troops under Robert Anderson occupied it.
The fort, the Lost Cause claims, was the property of South Carolina after the state lawfully seceded in December 1860. This “reversion” theory holds that when South Carolina left the Union, everything within the traditional “long cannon shot” belonged to it. The garrison had no right or claim to their occupation, and Southern honor demanded that the Northerners vacate forthwith.
This position is, legally and logically, precarious at best. The fort, and the artificial island on which it sat, had never been a part of South Carolina. Neither existed before construction began under Federal contract in 1829. It bears mentioning that the state had already officially ceded all rights to the site in December 1836. While reversion and the states’ rights issues may have been suitable fodder for the courts, the South never gave the matter a chance to get there. The voluntary compact argument may have been legally valid if only by mutual consent (in which case, it was not), but Sumter negated any legal arguments by simply firing on the flag. South Carolina and the Confederacy tried a shortcut and failed. Somehow, that the Northern and Western states also had a “right” to preserve the Union doesn’t occur to the Lost Cause.
The Lost Cause likes to cite the fact that the North had peacefully given up other arsenals and facilities all over the South, and thus, Federal recalcitrance at Sumter was simply provocation. But, no legal theory accepts the compliance others as a defense or justification for a violent act. A mugger cannot name his other, more cooperative victims as proof that the one who shot him was in the wrong.
The Forlorn Hope and the Lost Cause
The South conducted the war in the belief that the Southern Confederacy could gain a military victory that would lead to its lasting and meaningful political and economic independence from the Northern and Western United States. At no time did the Confederacy’s performance show that this was possible, and few have shown convincing hard evidence that a military end to the struggle would have put an end to the disputes. The very nature of civil wars and wars for independence is such that half-measures, partial victories and uneasy peaces are never the last word of the bitter acrimony that engenders such conflicts.
In civil conflicts, there can really and truly be only one victor, with the vanquished often left fuming and smoldering with many recriminations, refusing to admit true defeat, but defeated nonetheless. As long as the North was a haven for fugitive slaves—allowing the Confederacy’s most valuable assets to vanish across a hostile border—no Southern republic was going to last very long, regardless of its constitution or alliances or treaties. Without an enforceable Fugitive Slave Act, tensions would have remained.
Civil wars such as those in Spain and Russia, China and Mexico, Japan and the whole of Africa, have burst into violence off and on for decades, even centuries. Any successes of the minority faction in such conflicts are temporary at best, and almost never end well for smaller-population belligerents. When there is no overt fighting, there is the constant pressure of commercial and demographic energies applied to markets and resources. If the minority faction isn’t out-fought, they can be out-spent, or out-bred. Population pressure, ultimately, defeated the Welsh, Cornish, Irish, and Scots, and as much as the Catholics pressed the Huguenots out of France by sheer numbers, and the Franks and Germans finally overcame the Western Roman Empire. The Confederacy, with a fraction of the Union’s population, could not hope to compete long term in sheer numbers alone. Civil War studies rarely explore or discuss this issue, likely because it's the one thing that no hypothetical scenario the Lost Cause can create can alter.
In 19th Century military parlance, a “forlorn hope” was the first group of volunteers to charge through a breach in fortress walls, an action that almost always assured death. That the Lost Cause was a forlorn hope is almost certain. Believers in the Lost Cause mythology revel in the "if only" fantasy model of what did not happen but could have happened, or, to their way of thinking, should have happened. That catalog of unfulfilled expectations is also an outline of why the South could not win.
The Devil’s Own Day: Shiloh and the American Civil War
There have been many “if only” scenarios proposed for the 1862 slugfest called Shiloh, but the most prevalent has been the survival of Albert S. Johnston, who bled to death on the afternoon of the first day.
Some people hold that Johnston would have been a superior general to Grant or any others, besting the Union in the west like Lee did in the east. Like all “if only” fantasies, there has been no evidence to support the idea.
And Finally...
On 7 June:
1692: Beginning at ten minutes to noon, three earthquakes destroy the city of Port Royal, Jamaica. The shocks, each stronger than the first, created a tidal wave that submerged 2/3rds of the city.
1942: The Kido Butai retreats from the Midway Archipelago. After losing all its aircraft carriers, the Japanese plan to invade and occupy the islands failed. Historians often cite this as the pivotal day in the Pacific War.
And today is NATIONAL VCR DAY, the day to celebrate or remember how the video cassette recorder changed how we viewed movies and television, enabling time-shifting and having lives that are NOT centered on broadcast times.