Advantages of North and South in Civil War
The North had advantages in terms of population, industry, and transportation, which allowed them to produce more resources and sustain a longer war effort. The South, on the other hand, had advantages in terms of military leadership and familiarity with the terrain, which initially gave them an edge in battle. These advantages played a significant role in shaping the outcome of the Civil War.
6 Key excerpts on "Advantages of North and South in Civil War"
- Andrew Frank(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...By June 8, 1861, a total of eleven states united under the banner of the Confederate States of America. They moved their capital to Richmond, Virginia, wrote a permanent constitution, and formally elected President Davis. The division between North and South was not simply caused by slavery, however this seemed the most visibly divisive problem. Although all Confederate States contained slaves. other slaveholding states— Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri—remained loyal to the Union. With the geographical lines between North and South rewritten, the bloodiest war in American history began. An Unequal Divide If nations won wars only as a result of material resources and size of armies, then the Civil War would have ended as a quick rout for the Union. When the war began, the North had substantial advantages in both men and machinery. The United States contained over three times as many white men as did the Confederate States of America. Adding to the Union's advantage, close to ninety percent of the nation's industrial capacity existed north of the MasonDixon line. The North had eleven times more ships and boats and contained twenty-four times more locomotives than did the Confederacy. The North had twice as many horses and mules, and produced fifteen times more iron, seventeen times more textile goods, and thirty-two times more firearms than the Southern states. Perhaps most important, the North contained about two thirds of the nation's railroad mileage. With less railroad mileage and factories than the Union, the South could easily lose its rail transportation. This was exacerbated by the South's inability to replace broken rails. On the human front, Confederate soldiers often went shoeless and had less-than-sufficient daily rations that consisted of little more than bacon, cornmeal, and an occasional handful of rice or black-eyed peas. Despite these Confederate shortcomings, the war lasted for four long years...
eBook - ePubThe American Home Front
Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War I and World War II
- James L. Abrahamson(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Barakaldo Books(Publisher)
...In both the Union and the Confederacy, Americans continually strengthened their central governments as a means to mobilize both resources and the citizenry in pursuit of common purposes. Although the South acted first (and in some respects more extensively), both governments assumed the right to draft their citizens for military service. Through ownership, subsidies, controls on profits, and threats of retaliation, the Confederacy also sought directly to control its war industries. Placing relatively smaller demands on its far stronger economy, the Union, in contrast, relied on the market to mobilize its section’s resources. The Federal Government nevertheless achieved an indirect but lasting influence over economic development through such war measures as the National Banking Act and the introduction of protectionism. The Union was also more successful in both the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the use of its vigorous party system to control the war’s opponents and rally the nation for the long struggle toward victory. If almost a half century would elapse before Americans again politically exploited their Federal powerhouse, they more quickly grasped the war’s economic implications. Despite the fate of the merchant marine and the cotton textiles industry, the inflationary reductions in both the real wages of laborers and the resources of those on fixed incomes (especially soldiers’ families), and the decline in the growth rate of heavy industry, the Northern economy successfully met the challenge of war. From sustaining an immense army engaged on widely scattered fronts, wartime businessmen gained an appreciation of the requirements for supplying a national market: large-scale production in highly mechanized factories making standardized products out of resources drawn from widely scattered areas and sold to customers throughout large regions, even the entire nation...
eBook - ePub- David Herbert Donald(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Golden Springs Publishing(Publisher)
...God and the Strongest Battalions — by Richard N. Current WHEN WAR BEGAN in 1861, the statistics from the latest federal census decidedly favored the twenty-three states remaining in the Union as against the eleven that had withdrawn from it. In population the North had an advantage of almost five to two, and this advantage appears even greater if the slaves (more than one-third of the Southern people) are counted as somewhat less than the same number of freemen. In wealth and capacity to produce, the North held a still greater edge: in value of real and personal property, more than three to one (even with the inclusion of $2 billion for the slave property of the South); in capital of incorporated banks, more than four to one; in value of products annually manufactured, more than ten to one. The seceded states probably had a much less than proportional share of the national income. Besides, they contained only about a third of the total railroad mileage and practically none of the registered shipping. Though these comparisons are incomplete and inexact, they will serve to illustrate the point that the Union went to war with an overwhelming preponderance in most sources of economic power. If wars are won by riches, there can be no question why the North eventually prevailed. The only question will be: How did the South manage to stave off defeat so long? Or perhaps the question ought to be: Why did the South even risk a war in which she was all but beaten before the first shot was fired? Indeed, this last question occurred to at least a few Southerners during the secession winter...
eBook - ePubAbraham Lincoln
A Biography
- Lord Charnwood(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Samaira Book Publishers(Publisher)
...The Southern forces during most of the war were, in the language of military writers, operating on interior lines; that is, the different portions of them lay nearer to one another than did the different portions of the Northern forces, and could be more quickly brought to converge on the same point. The country abounded in strong positions for defence which could be held by a relatively small force, while in every invading movement the invaders had to advance long distances from the base, thus exposing their lines of communication to attack. The advantage of this situation, if competent use were made of it, was bound to go very far towards compensating for inferiority of numbers; the North could not make its superior numbers on land tell in any rapidly decisive fashion without exposing itself to dangerous counter-strokes. In naval strength its superiority was asserted almost from the first, and by cutting off foreign supplies caused the Southern armies to suffer severe privations before the war was half through, but its full effect could only be produced very slowly. Thus, if its people were brave and its leaders capable, the South was by no means in so hopeless a case as might at first have appeared; with good fortune it might hope to strike its powerful antagonist some deadly blow before that antagonist could bring its strength to bear; and even if this hope failed, a sufficiently tenacious defence might well wear down the patience of the North. As soldiers the Southerners started with a superiority which the Northerners could only overtake slowly. If each people were taken in the mass, the proportion of Southerners bred to an outdoor life was higher. Generally speaking, if not exactly more frugal, they were far less used to living comfortably...
eBook - ePubUnderstanding Civil Wars
Continuity and change in intrastate conflict
- Edward Newman(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...There was some northern resentment at the political and economic power exerted in Washington by southern elites on the back of economic interests fed by slavery, or even that ‘a slaveholding oligarchy ran the country’. 42 Indeed, a range of executive offices had been disproportionately controlled by slave-owning interests in the first half of the 19th century. In addition, there was competition between northern and southern economic actors regarding the opportunities emerging with the opening up of the western territories; clearly northern economic elites, without the ‘advantage’ of slave labour, were against the idea of slave-owning farmers controlling those regions and exploiting them with slave labour. Military strategy and social patterns The major battles of the civil war involved huge numbers of combatants in set-piece formations. 43 The Union victory at the battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, for example, pitted some 95,000 Union soldiers against Confederate forces of around 70,000. 44 The scale of these battles and the numbers involved and killed were more akin to conventional (interstate) war. According to McPherson, the casualties at Antietam – a ‘horror beyond imagining’ – numbered four times the total suffered by America at the Normandy beaches on 6 June 1944. 45 Indeed, many historical narratives describe how the strategy of the conflict reflected the thinking of Napoleon, Clausewitz and Antoine-Henri Jomni, learned directly from European theatres. 46 The numbers of casualties were very high, partly because of the duration of the conflict, but also because of the use of cavalry and infantry charges against firearms and cannon. Many therefore can be classified as conventional battle casualties...
eBook - ePubConfederate Cities
The Urban South during the Civil War Era
- Andrew L. Slap, Frank Towers(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...For black southerners, who were even more likely to live in rural places than whites in 1860, cities and towns nonetheless played an outsized role in the struggle for freedom. Cities did so because they provided critical infrastructure, be it schools, jobs, or public gathering places for contesting the meaning of freedom. In one of the greater ironies of southern history, the ideological movement to save what its advocates claimed was a traditional rural society from the onslaught of urban modernity was carried out by city dwellers. And, of course, the beginnings of an urban industrial “New South” began in southern cities, however fitfully. This new wave of scholarship also brings out the peculiar character of the urban South and in doing so sheds light on the distinctiveness of southern society as a whole. No matter how much more dynamic than previously thought, the slave states had fewer cities and factories than did the North, and that material difference caught the notice of almost every observer of the Civil War. Southern cities were different than northern ones both in size and because of slavery. But they were also notably different from the rural South. Slave-state cities were whiter, had more foreign-born immigrants, more non-enslaved African Americans, more industry, wage labor, printing presses, markets, and cosmopolitan culture than the rural South. These features made southern cities glaring outliers to the social ideal of the plantation and provided some secessionists with fodder for crafting a pastoral ideal of southern society. The Civil War brought destruction to this late antebellum incarnation of the urban South. For cities, as well as the nation at large, emancipation was the most important change wrought by Confederate defeat. With freedom, black southerners began moving to cities during the war and never stopped...
