Why the Confederacy Failed to Recreate the American Revolution

J uly 4 offers us a day to reflect on the American Revolution. Because it coincides as well with the conclusion of the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863, it is also a time to look back on the American Civil War. The men who led the Confederate States of America fought for a much worse cause than did the Founding Fathers, yet they drew inspiration from the Founders’ battle for independence. Why did they fail?

Certainly, the Confederate leaders believed that it was at least possible to win their fight to leave the Union. Their rhetoric repeatedly invoked that struggle, and sought to claim the legacy of the Founders. Their theory was that the North would eventually tire of trying to subdue a people who were fighting for hearth and home and would never abandon their resistance. Eventually, they even found a brilliant, dignified, and inspirational Virginian to lead their army – the son of a Revolutionary War hero. At times, they had the upper hand on the battlefield, or appeared to. But their cause ended in disaster. The reasons why are a lesson in invoking historical parallels without attention to distinctions.

First, the geography was different. Britain had to conduct the entire Revolutionary War from across a vast ocean. Transportation of men and supplies was slow. Communications were slow. Canada provided a closer base of operations, but it was still a very long march down to Saratoga in the one major campaign the British tried to launch from Canada. The Americans had no better luck invading Quebec in 1775.

The Civil War was different. Washington sits a little more than a hundred miles overland from Richmond, not separated by 3,000 miles of water. Richmond was closer to Philadelphia than to Texas. Ulysses S. Grant’s western campaigns started with a march down the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers to Forts Henry and Donelson, and proceeded down the rivers to Shiloh, and down the Mississippi to Vicksburg. Robert E. Lee was tempted into failed invasions of Maryland and Pennsylvania; George Washington, by contrast, never tried to attack England, and gave up early in the war on invading Canada again. Distance was the ally of the Continental Army, but the enemy of the Confederates.

Second, technology was different. The practical distance of the Atlantic Ocean was widened by the fact that it could be crossed only by sail. The British were limited in their ability to sail their powerful navy up the Hudson, Mississippi, or James rivers. The Union could use steam-powered gunboats, which were crucial to the campaigns on the Mississippi. Gunboats enabled Grant to cut the Confederacy in half at Vicksburg, as Burgoyne could not do to the nascent United States at Saratoga. The Union could move huge numbers of men by railroads that did not exist in the 1770s. Washington might have fallen in 1861 without rapid relief by rail and telegraph in May 1861, an operation whose technical arm was headed by a young Andrew Carnegie. Chattanooga would have fallen in late 1863 without swift reinforcements by rail managed by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. The telegraph allowed the Union to coordinate armies at long distances from Washington, and enabled Abraham Lincoln to manage them effectively, whereas the British during the Revolution suffered from chronic failures of coordination among rival generals who were far beyond the reach of political supervision. The advent of ironclad ships favored the Union, which built many more of them than did the Confederacy.

Third, manpower was different. The Revolution was fought in the age before the French Revolution introduced the levee en masse, massively expanding the size of armies. A 1925 analysis found that “at the outbreak of the Revolution, the total land forces of Great Britain exclusive of militia numbered on paper 48,647 men,” with 8,580 men in America. And those forces were always stretched; according to Colonial & War Office figures, the British never had much more than 15,202 redcoats in the American theater (including the Floridas, where they fought Spain) and never exceeded 30,000 troops in total, counting “Hessians” (companies of professional soldiers hired from the Hesse-Hanau, Hesse-Kassel, Brunswick, and other German principalities) and American Loyalists (a/k/a “Tories”):

The absence of mass British manpower enabled the Americans to even the score by raising local militias. The Civil War was a different animal, in which the manpower advantage of the North — more than twice the population of the South, and closer to three-to-one when the South’s slave population is excluded — could be brought to bear far more effectively than the three-to-one advantage of Britain over its American colonies in the Revolution. Lincoln raised 75,000 volunteers in April 1861 alone, and eventually, over 2 million men served the Union cause. The manpower balance tipped considerably further once the Union began inducting black soldiers, many of them runaway slaves, while the South was bleeding civilian manpower as slaves melted away before the Union advance. No Confederate militia played a comparable auxiliary role in the Civil War; militias fought in border regions such as Missouri, but given the scale of the regular armies involved, they were never important to major campaigns.

Fourth, the economic terrain was different. Most of the American colonies in 1775 consisted of small farms. Cities were comparatively small and less important economically, and while slavery was important to the Atlantic lowlands of Virginia and the southern states, they were not the main theater of the first half of the war. Heavy industry was limited.

What that meant in practice was that it was much easier for the new United States to lose lots of territory without losing the war. At one point or another in the war, the then-principal cities of most of the colonies — Massachusetts (Boston), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), New York (New York), Virginia (Richmond and Charlottesville), Rhode Island (Newport), South Carolina (Charleston), Georgia (Savannah), Delaware (Wilmington), and New Jersey (Trenton, Princeton, Perth Amboy, New Brunswick) were besieged or captured and occupied by the British. Yet, the Continental Army could afford to keep retreating.

The South in 1861 was quite different. Richmond was chosen as the capital, despite being one of the closest Confederate cities to the front lines, in part due to the political necessity of securing the loyalty of Virginia, but also in part because its Tredegar Iron Works and other industrial facilities were indispensable to the Confederate war effort. That meant that the capital had to be held at all costs, resulting in a war of constant attrition in Northern Virginia. Also, because so much of the driving force of the war was the defense of plantations, the Confederacy politically and economically could not afford a Fabian strategy of ceding territory, retreating to the mountains, and wearing out the invader. Moreover, a plantation was not like a farm, which could be lost and then recaptured; slaves were a major part of every planter’s wealth, and if the Union Army came through, the slaves would go with it and never return. So the South had to contest every advance over a front larger than any European nation. As historian Frank Vandiver quipped, “wedded irrevocably to ground, they buried themselves in it.”

Fifth, the cause and the opposing leadership were different. The South was trying to leave a democratic republic of which it was a constituent part, and to do so mainly in defense of slavery. George III and Lord North were no Lincoln, Stanton, or William Seward. The British government of the era was dominated by royal patronage that prioritized personal loyalty to a fickle monarch. On the one hand, a superior cause and democratic leadership helped shore up the Union’s morale and political cohesion, tested as it was throughout the war. On the other hand, while the Revolution also had its share of internal dissension — Loyalist sentiment and Loyalist militias were a major factor — the fact that the Confederacy went to war in order to keep nearly 40 percent of its population enslaved was a military liability that the Union exploited as the war went on, drawing on escaped or liberated slaves for labor, soldiers, and spies.

Sixth, the diplomatic setting was different. The Revolution erupted in 1775 in a world at relative peace, with France — Britain’s bitter rival since the 1680s — thirsting for revenge for its loss in the Seven Years War concluded a decade earlier. France’s desire to weaken Britain gave the colonists a natural ally, and a powerful one. Spain joined that effort, and the Netherlands, Russia, and the Indian kingdom of Mysore created their own troubles for Britain before the war was over, while Britain was unable to generate similar headaches from third parties to distract France and Spain.

No major power had a similar motivation to settle scores with the United States in 1861. The government of Mexico, the loser of a war with the U.S. in 1847, was in transition from a civil war of its own to a second one driven by a French-led invasion, the pursuit of which would remain France’s consuming interest. Britain and France each were unwilling to intervene in the Civil War without the other, and yet they were mistrustful allies drained by their own naval-ironclad-arms race and a war scare that led Britain to commission a series of coastal forts in 1860. Britain was also in a mood to husband its military budget after the twin traumas of the Crimean War in 1853–56 and the Sepoy Mutiny in India in 1857–58. Besides the invasion of Mexico, France was engaged in a war to subdue Vietnam in 1861, and sent troops to Syria in 1860 that were still there a year later. Britain went to war with both the Ashanti in West Africa and the Māori in New Zealand in 1863.

Britain was also afraid to antagonize the Union for fear of an invasion of Canada, the defenses of which were exposed by the Trent war scare in late 1861 as pitifully unready. France, in 1778, had no similar fear of losing its possessions in North America, having lost them in 1763.

Every time Britain and France began to focus on the American Civil War, a new crisis in Europe drew their attention closer to home: the fall of the British-installed monarchy in Greece in late 1862, the Polish rebellion that almost led to a general war on the continent in 1863, the Schleswig-Holstein crisis in late 1863 that led Prussia and Austria to war with Denmark in 1864. The Polish crisis led Russia (which saw the United States as a natural ally after its isolation during the Crimean War) to dispatch nearly its entire ocean-going navy to New York, Washington, and San Francisco, a step that underlined the risk that supporting the Confederacy could end up plunging Britain and France back into a general war against Russia.

Then there was Asia, a trifling factor in the 1770s but a major one in the 1860s. A Franco-British force marched on Beijing in 1860, and the British Cabinet in 1862–63 made a conscious choice to prioritize intervention in the colossal civil war in China over the American theater. In 1864, the European powers launched a joint punitive naval expedition with the United States against the Japanese shogun at Shimonoseki, a step that would have been impossible in a climate of hostility with the Union.

The Founding Fathers were inclined to credit a fair share of their success to divine providence. The Revolution was a near-run thing, and a lot of the stars had to align in their favor. In the Civil War, as closely fought as it was, many of those same factors were aligned against the Confederacy from the start. Providence favored the survival of the nation that the Founders had made.