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 war wasn't worth fighting, but Fort Sumter and the march into Kentucky pushed the neutral states to the Union — it destroyed that theory itself.
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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 being 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 argues the rifled musket mattered less than most people say. Mechanically: a smoothbore's projectile leaves the barrel without spinning and is inaccurate; a rifled musket uses the rifling 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, versus only 100 yards for a smoothbore. But the counterargument is that early in the war many units 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 considerable portion of his troops' rifled muskets back to smoothbores.
— Wayne SiaThe Union Ordnance Bureau gets a bit of a bum 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 kind of 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 all their cavalry with the Spencer — a metallic-cartridge-fed repeating rifle, effectively a "super dragoon": 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 decide it wasn't worth it
Wayne argues 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 a decisive battle, 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 the cycle of anger and revenge starts it takes ever more to quell. 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, so why not wait six months? He also notes that Jefferson Davis and Lee actually knew the belief in a quick Southern victory 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: Confederate general Leonidas Polk marched troops into Kentucky without orders, when Kentucky had declared neutrality and Lincoln was happy to pretend to respect that neutrality. 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; in 19th-century Western armies promotion 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 hard to reach the top. So McClellan's cautious temperament was injected into the army, which still held large numbers of his loyalists, and even furious Republican senators could do nothing about him. When Grant went to the Eastern Theater, part of his friction with the local army was precisely that he was not 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 no such problem: Grant provided a "lid at the command level," Sherman just did his own job, and ultimate responsibility rested with Grant. That psychological cover let Sherman take enormous risks. The author says Grant's odd, dull personality actually made subordinates willing to take risks, which is an enormous 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 hit a human-sized target with confidence | 300 yards | 11:38 |
| Distance at which a smoothbore could hit a human-sized target with confidence | 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
- Dispersing forces along an entire border in an attempt to hold every key point.
- breech loader
- A firearm loaded from the rear of the barrel, allowing loading prone or kneeling rather than standing at the muzzle.
- Spencer
- A metallic-cartridge-fed repeating rifle, 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.