Confederates Adopts The Scorched earth tactic
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Anaxagoras
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It would not have been possible in the early days of the war. Jefferson Davis was unwilling, for political reasons, even to make common sense troop deployment decisions (i.e. move troops from Arkansas to Mississippi in order to defend Vicksburg) out of fear that he would alienate powerful state politicians from the areas from which the troops would be moved. Had orders been given to, say, burn the crops in the fields, they would simply have been disobeyed.
As in Russian retreat to Moscow during Napoleon's invasion? Or Sherman's March to the Sea scorched earth tactics?
RamscoopRaider
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They alienate their population, and drive a few states back into the Union, large numbers of troops will refuse to carry this out and desert or defect
This happens, quickly and with the shedding of much southern blood (by other southerners).
Scorched earth tactics are when a retreating army destroys everything of any value to the enemy. Such as Manstein and Napoleon did in their retreats from Russia, and the Iraqis did in the Gulf War during their retreat from Kuwait. Often it involves literally burning everything to the ground, scorching the earth, hence the name "scorched earth tactics".
The most significant incursion into the South was Sherman's famous March to the Sea. In it, he famously destroyed Southern infrastructure, buildings, et cetera. However, Sherman's troops needed food, and they got it from the surrounding land. If the Southerners destroyed their food, Sherman's foragers would come back empty.
However, this is a very unlikely scenario. The American South was not Russia during the Napoleonic wars. The people thought that they were rebelling against tyranny, and they would not support a Southern government that forced them to destroy their farms and their food. The Southern leaders as well believed in more honorable, romanticized ideals of warfare, and to them, scorched earth tactics would be a sign of cowardice and defeat. Also, the South did not have a Tsar who wielded absolute power. Generals, militias, soldiers, and local leaders would likely disobey directives to destroy the crops that were essential to the livelihood of the Southern people and economy.
A more realistic situation would be the Southerners adopting a Fabian approach to Sherman's March. Fabian strategy, developed by the Romans to counter Hannibal's Carthaginian Army, advocates for the avoidance of pitched battles and the use of raids and skirmishes to deprive the enemy of supplies and food, and reduce their morale. I am not an expert in the American Civil War, so I can not say whether it would or would not have been successful in defeating Sherman's March. I do believe that it could have slowed down Sherman, however. The sheer amount of resources that the Union possessed leads me to believe that the North would still ultimately win the war, though. So why didn't the Confederates use Fabian strategy? Once again, it is seen as cowardly and unnecessary by many leaders until it is too late.
However, this is a very unlikely scenario. The American South was not Russia during the Napoleonic wars. The people thought that they were rebelling against tyranny, and they would not support a Southern government that forced them to destroy their farms and their food. The Southern leaders as well believed in more honorable, romanticized ideals of warfare, and to them, scorched earth tactics would be a sign of cowardice and defeat. Also, the South did not have a Tsar who wielded absolute power. Generals, militias, soldiers, and local leaders would likely disobey directives to destroy the crops that were essential to the livelihood of the Southern people and economy.
A more realistic situation would be the Southerners adopting a Fabian approach to Sherman's March. Fabian strategy, developed by the Romans to counter Hannibal's Carthaginian Army, advocates for the avoidance of pitched battles and the use of raids and skirmishes to deprive the enemy of supplies and food, and reduce their morale. I am not an expert in the American Civil War, so I can not say whether it would or would not have been successful in defeating Sherman's March. I do believe that it could have slowed down Sherman, however. The sheer amount of resources that the Union possessed leads me to believe that the North would still ultimately win the war, though. So why didn't the Confederates use Fabian strategy? Once again, it is seen as cowardly and unnecessary by many leaders until it is too late.
Honorable? Confederate leaders ordered the execution of black troops, their officers, and any officer serving under Benjamin Butler. If they weren't killed, black Union troops were enslaved. Confederate armies routinely enslaved Union free blacks. Confederate armies occasionally massacred POWs and pro-Union civilians, extorted money from Union towns and occasionally set them on fire.
I'm not saying that they acted honorably. I'm saying that they believed that they were honorable, that they were fighting for the freedom and lifestyle of the southern people - whites, that is. Blacks soldiers, Union troops, etc were the enemy. Southern farmers in Georgia were not the enemy.
Then the Union forces cheer them on. The Confederacy had little enough to begin with, the Union forces were actually known to use recognizably "scorched earth" tactics against them to accentuate the issue. Shenandoah Valley and Sherman's Campaign through Georgia and South Carolina come to mind.
Deliberate destruction of their own scarce resources by the Confederacy would only have shortened the war.
But if they had done so, there would have been no point to the famous march, since it served to disrupt a breadbasket area that would only have been a wasteland in this scenario. So porobably the march just doesn't happen or it happens more conventioally, (supplies by rail and so forth)
It is, though I suspect for more pragmatic reasons than you suggest.
Enslavement, not execution.
In their minds, such officers were leading a slave insurrection with the intent of exterminating white Southerners. They never did it anyway.
No - Davis ordered that Butler himself be executed as a war criminal - for the execution of a New Orleans civilian who had torn down a US flag.
(Butler, BTW, spent the entire 1860 Democratic convention trying to get Davis the nomination.)
But more to the point - the Confederates would have considered such actions discreditable to their own sense of honor.
The crimes of the Japanese Army in World War II are appalling - in some ways worse than the Nazi SS. But there is no question whatever that Japanese soldiers would obey suicidal orders and fight to the death rather than surrender - because in their code, surrender was dishonorable. It was failure to meet one's obligation to the Emperor.
For the Confederate army, refusal to meet the Yankees in battle, refusal to defend Southern homes and people from the invaders, when they had the power to do so, would have been dishonorable. (It was OK for scattered militia units to disperse and fight as guerrillas rather than be destroyed by overwhelming numbers of Yankees. It would not be OK for the 60,000 men of the Army of Northern Virginia to do so.)
The Confederacy had no Cossacks.
Though as a matter of fact, Confederate militia and cavalry operating against Sherman's army did a lot of foraging themselves.
Not a realistic option. The Confederates in Georgia couldn't mass enough troops to delay Sherman. If they had tried, the force would have been crushed.
The original Fabian campaign was directed at the army of Hannibal, who was stuck in Italy, cut off from reinforcements, and unable to take the city of Rome. The Roman navy controlled the seas between Italy and Africa. Sherman was 200 miles from the coast, which was controlled by the Union Navy.
The strategy of obstruction and delay was basically the strategy followed by Joe Johnston in the Atlanta Campaign. Shelby Foote described Johnston as "cunctative as Fabius Maximus". Johnston never tried to smash Sherman's larger army (except once, and then Hood refused to attack). Instead he maneuvered to block every advance by Sherman and let Sherman exhaust his army in frontal attacks.
Sherman responded by continually moving around Johnston's flanks. Such was his advantage in numbers that he could pin Johnston's main body and still reach around it. That's why Johnston was forced back to Atlanta. He'd cost Sherman a lot of troops on the way, but Davis only saw the repeated retreats. Davis gave the command to Hood, with a tacit mandate to counterattack. Hood did so, was beaten badly, and had to abandon Atlanta.
Once Atlanta fell, the Confederate position was wrecked. Davis gave a speech calling for the Confederate army and people to fall on Sherman's army "as the Cossacks did that of Napoleon", and chase him to the Ohio. U.S. Grant answered that "Mr. Davis has not explained who will provide the snow for this Moscow retreat."
Sherman soon got annoyed with Confederate threats to his supply line. He sent about half his men back to Tennessee to check any rebel move north, wrecked Atlanta and the railroad to it, and marched off to the sea. Nowhere in this period was there any opportunity for Confederate "Fabianizing".