The South Only Needed Not to Lose, and Turned the War Into One It Had to Win
The Confederacy's correct theory of victory was to make the North decide the fight wasn't worth it, but Fort Sumter and the march into Kentucky pushed the neutral states to the Union — it destroyed that theory itself.
The video won't play here. Listen to the audio instead:
The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
The Civil War was a laboratory for organizational and technological change
The host read nearly 15 Civil War books on parental leave, on the grounds that this war has all of ChinaTalk's traditional themes at once: war, technological change and organizational design. Jeremy Neufeld's entry point is that the telegraph, railroads and steamships were used by military commanders for the first time, no one had done it before, and the learning process itself is extremely valuable. Wayne Sia adds the source-material angle: Civil War research is special because both sides spoke English, both had a culture of writing letters, diaries and memoirs, and the war ran long enough for the best people to float to the top of their respective organizations, so the correspondence from generals down to privates is extraordinarily rich.
The importance of the rifled musket is overrated
Wayne thinks the rifled musket matters less than most people say. Mechanically: a smoothbore's projectile doesn't spin as it leaves the barrel and is inaccurate; a rifled musket uses the grooves to impart spin, but black powder fouling clogs the grooves, making loading progressively harder and sacrificing rate of fire. In the mid-19th century the French officer Riven Manet solved this with a conical bullet with a hollow base — the cavity expands on firing and grips the rifling, giving both fast loading and spin. On accuracy, 300 yards could hit a human-sized target with reasonable confidence, where a smoothbore could only manage 100 yards. But the rebuttal is: plenty of units early in the war had no rifled muskets at all, the shot that killed Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville in 1863 came from a smoothbore, because those North Carolina troops had no rifled muskets; and when Vicksburg fell Grant was still swapping a substantial portion of his troops' rifled muskets back to smoothbores.
— Wayne SiaThe Union Ordnance Bureau gets a somewhat unfair rap
On whether the Union should have bet on breechloaders earlier, Wayne gives both sides: at the outbreak of war the U.S. Army had only 16,000 officers and men, roughly 30% of the officer corps went South, both armies had to expand at unprecedented speed, and the initial problem was simply getting enough of any gun. The Army had in fact tested breechloaders before the Civil War, including the Hall carbine, but many were rejected because they were unreliable and not durable on the frontier — the skepticism was justified. By the end of the war they had equipped the entire cavalry with the Spencer — a repeating, metal-cartridge-fed gun, effectively "super dragoons": ride to maneuver, dismount to fight as infantry. But once dismounted a quarter of the men had to hold horses, and the repeater exactly compensated for that lost firepower. It took time for Northern industrial capacity to catch up.
— Wayne SiaLee's correct theory was to make the North feel it wasn't worth it
Wayne thinks Robert E. Lee found the correct theory of victory: if the war became purely a war of maneuver, the North could eventually crush the South with its military resources and huge population, it was only a matter of time; what the South wanted was a political objective — to convince the North that continuing to fight wasn't worth it. So Lee's style was high-risk, possibly over-betting on decisive battles, but he knew the South would lose in the long run unless it was willing to take high-variance gambles to influence Northern elections: inflict defeats on Union armies and the Democrats could win, as they did in the 1862 midterms, and ultimately if Lincoln could be driven from office, a new government might negotiate peace. Jeremy adds that the South's only advantage was that it only needed not to lose — it was fighting a continental-scale defensive war and only had to persuade Northern public opinion.
— Wayne SiaFort Sumter: the South could have waited
Jeremy lays out two paths to make the North let go: one is too much pain, too many dead, similar to Ukraine's theory of victory against Russia; the other is blood for blood, where once a cycle of anger and revenge starts it takes ever more to satisfy. If the South could have completed secession without creating a Pearl Harbor-style moment of unity, Northern war enthusiasm in the opening phase would have been lower, and then a defeat in an early battle like Bull Run would have hit Northern willingness to hold the Union much harder. Wayne thinks firing on Fort Sumter was a mistake: even if Lincoln was playing games in the negotiations, the South should have let the fort be resupplied — it was just an uncomfortable but useless federal installation, why not wait six months? He also notes that Jefferson Davis and Lee actually knew the belief that the South would win quickly was false, but other Southerners believed the North would simply give up, that Northerners were cowardly and unwarlike, and that Britain would intervene immediately because Lancashire's textile industry depended on cotton — a severe overestimate of their own geopolitical position.
— Wayne SiaPolk's march into Kentucky was self-destruction
The other worst decision alongside Fort Sumter: the Confederate general Leonidas Polk marched troops into Kentucky without orders, when Kentucky had declared neutrality and Lincoln was happy to pretend to respect it. The result was that Kentucky swung to the Union and requested federal troops enter, giving the Union a huge platform to project power into the South. Letting Kentucky serve as a buffer would have been better for the South in the long run. The Ohio River was a natural defensive line, and it is precisely Kentucky's border — without Kentucky there is no convenient terrain barrier.
— WayneMcClellan personally picked the entire army
Civil War generals are hard to analogize to today because the army was built from scratch, and the early organizers of field armies had an outsized influence on the institution's character. McClellan was brought in to build the Army of the Potomac, and he picked the brigade commanders; promotion in 19th-century Western armies weighed seniority heavily, and those brigade commanders were the pool for future division commanders and higher ranks — if you didn't make brigade commander in '61 it was very hard to reach the top. So McClellan's cautious temperament was injected into the army, which was also full of his loyalists, and even furious Republican senators couldn't touch him. When Grant went to the Eastern theater, part of the friction with the local army was precisely that he wasn't the man who had built that system.
— WayneGrant's dull personality let subordinates take risks
The first time Sherman was sent to command in Kentucky he nearly had a breakdown, crushed by the pressure of being responsible for losing a state and a critical theater. He later said that serving with Grant had none of that problem: Grant provided "a cover at the command level," he just did his job, and the ultimate responsibility rested on Grant. That psychological cover let Sherman take enormous risks. The authors say Grant's odd, dull personality actually made subordinates willing to take risks, which is a tremendous empowerment. The counterexample is the Confederate Army of Tennessee: Bragg was difficult to work with, Leonidas Polk had a direct channel to his old friend Jefferson Davis, senior commanders and the army commander feuded for a long time, Davis went West in person and made no decisions at all, and the problem festered.
In their own words · checked verbatim
The short answer is not as important as most people have argued.
Wayne Sia9:31
technology is great. You can have a weapon system that's theoretically more excellent and more capable, but do you actually have trained, you know, troops to actually be able to utilize that
Wayne Sia13:39
it just needs to not lose. Right? It's fighting a defensive war.
Wayne Sia28:10
I still I would I would argue, though, that even without Sumter, even without Lincoln's call to volunteers in the long term, Virginia is going to go with the rest of the south.
Wayne42:51
a confederate general um marches into the state um if i remember correctly it's without without orders to do so um and gets kentucky to declare for the union
Wayne45:00
I think that the significance is really more for your likelihood of the 14th and 15th amendments, I think, drops precipitously into maybe nothingness, right? If the war ends earlier.
Wayne50:10
Sherman later talks about how he doesn't have that problem with Grant because he knows that Grant kind of provides some sort of a command top cover.
Grant's kind of weird, stolid personality allows in many ways his subordinates to take risks
Figures
| Size of the U.S. Army at the outbreak of war | 16000 | 16:45 |
| Share of the officer corps that went South | about 30% | 16:45 |
| Distance at which a rifled musket could reliably hit a human-sized target | 300 yards | 11:38 |
| Distance at which a smoothbore could reliably hit a human-sized target | 100 yards | 11:38 |
| Share of the Union army that was immigrants | about 20% | 1:25:13 |
| Share of military-age white men conscripted in the Confederacy | about 80% | 1:27:16 |
Glossary
- Fabian strategy
- Wearing down an opponent through delay and avoiding decisive battle rather than fighting head-on.
- cordon defense
- Spreading forces thinly along an entire border in an attempt to hold every point.
- breech loader
- A gun loaded from the rear of the barrel, so you can load lying down or kneeling instead of standing to load from the muzzle.
- Spencer
- A repeating, metal-cartridge-fed gun, issued in large numbers to Union cavalry late in the Civil War.
How to listen
Founders and engineers interested in organizational design, technology adoption and leadership; especially suited to anyone managing a team, for the back half on how a corps culture is shaped by its commander's personality.
The first 10 minutes of throat-clearing about how rich the source material is can be fast-forwarded; jump straight to the rifled musket discussion.