Inevitability

All the events of the past shape our experience of the present, yet some past events are so significant – such as the Civil War in America – that we cannot conceive of subsequent history or our present experience would not have been materially different if the past had been different.  As a result, we tend to look at the at the significant events in the past the necessary precedent of subsequent history and our present experience.  This is quite logical, and it conforms to our understanding of causation and the flow of time.  Sometimes psychological experience is so intense that we come to believe that the events of the past that continue to exert a significant influence on the course of present events – such as the outcome of the Civil War in America – were themselves inevitable.  This is a fallacy that runs counter to our understanding of causation and the flow of time.

World War I and World War II are the signature events of the first half of the twentieth century, and the entry of the United States into those wars had a significant impact upon their outcomes.  How might the course of history have changed if the Confederates had been successful in defending their assertion of independence in the 1860s and, instead of a single nation, the United States had become two – or more – separate countries?

The notion that developed after the Civil War that the cause of Confederate independence was inherently hopeless and that the Federal victory was inevitable as a result of the greater population and industrial resources of the northern states.  The notion, while romantic and perhaps comforting to the defeated ex-Confederates, was contrary to fact.  To be more precise: the premise was correct in that the northern states had more people and larger manufacturing capabilities than those in the south; the error lay in the assertion that these advantages would inevitably lead to a Federal victory.

The respective conditions for a military victory were “asymmetrical” to use the term of contemporary military analysis.  The Confederates had asserted their political independence, from the union formed under the 1789 Constitution: victory for them in the war meant preserving their army as a force sufficiently strong to sustain the political assertion.  In short, they needed to have a credible army in place when the fighting stopped.  The Federal war aim was to preserve the legal authority of the 1789 Constitution and the and geographic integrity of the nation formed under it.  To achieve this goal, the Federals needed to destroy the Confederate army, capture it or weaken it so thoroughly that it was no longer capable of sustaining the claim of Confederate independence.  In short, they needed a total military victory.

The fire eaters kept the secession spark alive, but the general electorate of the states of the deep south selected delegates to state conventions that determined to withdraw from the national union.  Although emotions brought to a boil in the national election remained elevated in the secession elections the followed immediately after, the majority permitted themselves to be persuaded by the fire eaters.  Surely reasonable men must have considered that war could result, but apparently that possibility did not deter them.   When those states rejoined into the Confederacy, they formed a substantial nation with a substantial population and resources.  Reasonable men might have come to the reasonable conclusion that the subjugation of the Confederacy was nigh impossible.

If the Federals could not conquer the Confederates, they would grow weary of the fight and overwhelmed by its cost.  If the Confederate government, and the army on which the assertion of independence depended, remained in existence at that time, the Confederates would have won.

The foremost military professional in the country hedged his bets.  Immediately before President Lincoln’s inauguration General Winfield Scott, general in chief of the Army, presented four alternative courses of action for the incoming government to consider: political compromise to limit the damage already incurred; a naval blockade to effect an economic cordon sanitaire of the seceded south; military conquest; and the notorious “wayward sisters, depart in peace!”  General Scott did not speculate on the possible success of any alternative.  He dwelled on the option of military conquest, possibly the option he expected the new government to pursue, and asked for whose benefit a military conquest might be since it would be expensive in life and resources and would result in “fifteen devastated provinces … held, by heavy garrisons, for generations … followed by a Protector or Emperor.”  In asserting that conquest would destroy American liberty and elected government, he apparently did not see the need to express an opinion whether conquest was possible.

Shortly after the war began, General Scott expressed a somewhat more comprehensive strategic vision of how to wage the war: a tight naval blockade of the Confederate coast combined with a push down the Mississippi River.  This sketch of a plan – lampooned in the press at the time and in histories ever since as the “Anaconda Plan” – was an elaboration of the cordon sanitaire option proposed earlier.  Although General Scott’s sketch avoided a “piece-meal” conquest of the seceded states by encircling them, it did not articulate a next step – how the anaconda would crush its prey.  Without an invasion of Confederate territory and an attack upon the Confederate armies, the Confederate government and independence would have remained intact  Confined within its borders, and not challenged from without, the Confederate nation might well have persisted.

The problem remained through much of the war that the combatants were relatively evenly matched.  Federal forces continued to grow larger, but not until the third year of the war did they become sufficiently large to make a material difference.  The need to increase the army brought about conscription, and conscription brought opposition, the best known and most violent being the draft riots in New York City in July 1863.  Even with the Federal larger army, the challenge remained to use it to capture or destroy the Confederate forces.

The difficulty was not only military but also political.  Although the Republican radicals in Congress were often critical of the president and the course of the war, President Lincoln, as commander-in-chief, directed the Federal war effort with little interference from Congress.  Thus, while regular national elections in 1862 could have changed the political complexion of Congress to make it more hostile to the president, it might not have interfered with the power of the president to direct the war.  If the events of 1864 had not indicated that an eventual Federal military victory might be possible, the national elections of that autumn might have removed President Lincoln from office, altered the make-up of Congress and changed the Federal policy on the prosecution of the war.

With President Lincoln re-elected, the Federal strategy for fighting the war remained unchanged, and the defeat of the Confederacy became more likely, but it did not become inevitable until later.