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Strengths and weaknesses of the north and south during civil war
Northern disadvantages in the civil war
The south's advantages in the civil war
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The Civil War
On paper the North was far stronger than the South. It had two and a half times as many people, and it possessed far more ships, miles of railroad, and manufacturing enterprises. Southerners, however, had the advantage of fighting on home ground with better military leadership. But
Union superiority in manpower was not so great as the gross figures suggest.
Half a million people scattered from Dakota to California, could make no substantial contribution to Union strength. And every year Union regiments were sent to the West to fight Indians. Hundreds of thousands of Americans in loyal border states and in southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois worked or fought for southern independence. Though, every state furnished men for the other side, there was little doubt that more Federals than Confederates
"crossed over."
The South had superior officer personnel. For twenty years before
Lincoln's inauguration, southern officers had dominated the U.S. Army.
Another source of southern confidence was cotton. Secession leaders expected to exchange that staple for the foreign manufactured goods they needed. The South's most important advantage was that it had only to defend relatively short interior lines against invaders who had to deal with long lines of communication and to attack a broad front. The Confederacy also had no need to divert fighting men to tasks such as garrisoning captured cities and holding conquered territory.
In a short war, numerical superiority would not have made much of a difference. As the war continued, however, numerical strength became a psychological as well as a physical weapon. During the closing years of the conflict, Union armies, massed at last against critical strongholds, suffered terrible casualties but seemed to grow stronger with every defeat.
The North and South benefited in many different ways, and both sides would use dissimilar approaches. The Southerners were fighting for a way of life they believed in. Comparing the two, the North had an extensive amount of people which made it easier to establish armies. In the beginning, the Union army only consisted of 16,000 soldiers or less. Southerners deserted the army because they didn’t have the things they needed for fig...
Another reason the South well fell short of a victory was the obvious difference in population between the South and the North. The North at the time had twenty-two million men while the South had a meager nine-and-a-half million, of whom three-and-a-half million were slaves. While the slaves could be used to support the war effort through work on the plantations, in industries and as teamsters and pioneers with the army, they were not used as a combat arm in the war to any extent. This cuts the South's manpower by a third, leaving a fifteen-and-a-half million difference in the population of the two areas. Give the South fifteen-and-a-half million more possible soldiers, and the outcome would have been different.
The North entered the Civil War with many distinct assets that rendered them more competent than the Southern states. Those assets consisted of having more men, more financial stability, economic strength, and far reaching transportation systems. According to the book: Why the North Won the Civil War by Donald, David Herbert, and Richard Nelson the primary cause to the North’s success was given by, “the vast superiority of the North in men and materials, in instruments of production, in communication facilities, in business organization and skill – and assuming for the sake of the argument no more than rough quality in statecraft and generalship – the final outcome seems all but inevitable.” In many ways the north, during the Civil, was more economically dominant than the South
The North had about 2,129,000 soldiers while the South only has about 1,082,000 soldiers in their army. This means that in almost every battle in the civil war the South was being overpowered by the Norths numbers alone. The North's economy was much stronger than the Souths. The North's economy got so powerful because of their large amount of small farms and large factories. The North's production value was about $1.5 billion meanwhile the Souths was only about $155 million.
Why the North Won the Civil War, edited by David Herbert Donald, is a short collection of six essays. Each essay argues from a different perspective as to why the Confederate States of America could not defeat the Union in the American Civil War. The factors considered for Confederate defeat include: economics, military strategy, diplomacy, ideology, and politics. In the end, the most convincing argument is given by Richard N. Current regarding economics.
"If wars are won by riches, there can be no question why the North eventually prevailed." The North was better equipped than the South, with the resources necessary to be successful in a long term war like the Civil War was, which was fought from 1861 1865. Prior, and during the Civil war, the North's economy was always stronger than the South's, boasting of resources that the Confederacy had no means of attaining. Compared to the South, The North had more factories available for production of war supplies and larger amounts of land for growing crops. Its population was several times of the South's, which was a potential source for military enlistees. Although the South had better naval leadership and commanders, such as Robert E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson, they lacked the number of factories and industries to produce needed war materials. Therefore, the North won the American Civil War due to the strength of their industrialized economy, rather than their commanders and strategies.
...iled to gain the recognition of the European nations, North's superior resources made the outcome inevitable, and moral of the South towards the end of the war. The Civil War was a trying time for both the North and the South alike, but the question of its outcome was obvious from the start. The North was guaranteed a decisive victory over the ill-equipped South. Northerners, prepared to endure the deficit of war, were startled to find that they were experiencing an enormous industrial boom even after the first year of war. To the South, however, the war was a draining and debilitating leech, sucking the land dry of any appearance of economical formidability. The debate continues whether or not the South could have won the Civil war. It’s always going to be a bunch of “what ifs?”
The South was at a disadvantage to the North throughout the war. The South was at a lack for manpower during the war, since most of the seamen in the US Navy were from the North and therefore stayed with the Union when the southern states seceded. The South was also found disadvantaged for iron plates for ship armor, since there was only one establishment in the South capable of producing them.
Albert Gallatin Brown, U.S. Senator from Mississippi, speaking with regard to the several filibuster expeditions to Central America: "I want Cuba . . . I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason -- for the planting and spreading of slavery." [Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 106.]
The Civil War was a war between the North and the South after several states in the south seceded after Lincoln's Presidency. The war first started off as states rights but as the war went on and progressed the war was fighting to end slavery. African Americans had an important impact on the Civil War.
The Civil War was the worst war in American history. More Americans died in this war than World War 1 and 2. The events that lead up to the Civil War show that it was a conflict that was going to arise no matter what happened.
The Civil War has been viewed as the unavoidable eruption of a conflict that had been simmering for decades between the industrial North and the agricultural South. Roark et al. (p. 507) speak of the two regions’ respective “labor systems,” which in the eyes of both contemporaries were the most salient evidence of two irreconcilable worldviews. Yet the economies of the two regions were complementary to some extent, in terms of the exchange of goods and capital; the Civil War did not arise because of economic competition between the North and South over markets, for instance. The collision course that led to the Civil War did not have its basis in pure economics as much as in the perceptions of Northerners and Southerners of the economies of the respective regions in political and social terms. The first lens for this was what I call the nation’s ‘charter’—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the documents spelling out the nation’s core ideology. Despite their inconsistencies, they provided a standard against which the treatment and experience of any or all groups of people residing within the United States could be evaluated (Native Americans, however, did not count). Secondly, these documents had installed a form of government that to a significant degree promised representation of each individual citizen. It was understood that this only possible through aggregation, and so population would be a major source of political power in the United States. This is where economics intersected with politics: the economic system of the North encouraged (albeit for the purposes of exploitation) immigration, whereas that of the South did not. Another layer of the influence of economics in politics was that the prosperity of ...
...f wearing down the north's patience. The south's idea of northerns as "city slickers" who did not know how to ride or shoot was wrong. Many of the men who formed the Union forces came from rural backgrounds and were just as familiar with riding and shooting as their southern enemies. Finally, the south's confidence in its ability to fund through sales of export crops such as cotton did not take into consideration the northern blockade. France and Britain were not willing to become involved in a military conflict for the sake of something they had already stockpiled. The help the south had received from France and Britain turned out to be a lot less than they expected. In conclusion, while all the south's reasons for confidence were based on reality, they were too hopeful. The south's commitment to a cause was probably what caused their blindness to reality.
"Why Did the North Win the Civil War." SOCIAL STUDIES HELP. Retrieved on 18 May 2005,