Brilliantlight
Banned
I think it was Houston who was very much opposed to Texas leaving the Union. What if his advice was heeded and Texas remained in the Union?
david3565 said:What's their motivation for staying?
Fearless Leader said:And Without Texas there would be no campaign into New Mexico not quite sure how this would affect things. IIRC the confederate campaign there speeded up that region's statehood. Although I could be wrong.
Brilliantlight said:Houston pretty much warned them if a war broke out their tails would be kicked and anyone who said otherwise was crazy. What if they took that fact seriously?
david3565 said:But why did they take it seriously? Is there another influencial person who could have weighed in and reinforced his words, tipping the balance and causing things to snowball? Or would that have even worked?
Dave Howery said:actually, TX is one state that overwhelmingly voted for secession... in the rest of the south, the vote was a LOT closer... sometimes just a few hundred votes difference.
Brilliantlight said:Maybe, but if you have almost every prominent newspaper against it that will change things.
david3565 said:Except the newspapers are businesses, having to respond to public opinion in their reporting. And this is a time when they were famous for pandering to public tastes with sensationalism and the like. That, and I think that any journalist might avoid writing negative things, for fear of getting shot or lynched. That would have been a very realy concern. To top that off, how does he convince these newspapers? I am sure 90% or greater of them are as ardently pro-secession as the general public. The chances of conviicing any mainstream paper of wiritng against it are between slim and none. Texas transformed from a Mexican territory precisely because the Americans who immigrated there did so because of thge issues surrouding secession
And you have to realize that secession didn't look that hopless at the outset. It was entirely possible to win it. The South started out winning. They nearly took Washington DC. The idea that the South was fated to loose is a misconception.
There is just no likely way to pry them out of the CSA, unless you walk in to ASB territory.
Brilliantlight said:In the long run it was hopeless like Houston said. The North was simply too industrialized and had too many people to for the South to handle.
david3565 said:Hindsight is great, but they didn't have it.
Granted, the probability of victory remained with the North (though entering the war, that disparity in industrialization was not as dramatic as toward its end), but it is all about what it looked like to them, espceically since the goal was not to conquer the North, but to ensure secession.
And there are analogs in modern times. Israel shared many parallels with the Southern States: Under-supplied, outnumbered, out-gunned, surrounded, but posessing the upper hand in military prowess. They won twice under those same conditions. And then you can go to an example pre-ACW: Gustav Adolf of Sweden, who turned is poor and rural nation in to a world power during the Thirty Years War. It only lasted for all of fifteen minutes, though.
Brilliantlight said:You don't need much hindsight to realize going to war with a power that has twice your population and 5 times your economy is NOT smart.
david3565 said:You're thinking in a purely attritional framework. War is about specific objectives. Those objectives can be met by out-smating and out-manuevering an enemy on any number of fronts, with out directly facing their forces. Again: Israel, Sweden, Macedonia (Alexander the Great). History shows that vastly outnumbered forces survive by waging smarter warfare than their opponents, maximzing what they have and not relying on over-powering their opponents.
The South had a number commanders who understood this and it is reflected in their style of wafare, particularly the use of guerilla warfare, in which they had a number of decisive victories. When you consider what is reasonably possible, "smart" becomes a more relative term.
Edit to Add: And smart or not, plenty of of nations have gone to war for stupider reasons and with far less chance of victory. The secession movement was marked by its passion, not its intellectual strengths. The States seceeded over relatively conservative statements of a moderate candidate, with the Federal gov't having not done one unconstitutional thing to warrant the reaction the CSA gave.
Brilliantlight said:Odds are pretty hefty against the weaker power though. They can win on occasion but it is rare. Particularly if the stronger power thinks its existance is on the line.
david3565 said:Granted, but the South was also desparate for precisely the same reason. And at the outset of the war, it was a toss-up. The North was not nearly as industrialized in '61 as it was in '63, and both had forces of fairly equal numbers and equipment. The disparity would only become more dramatic in later stages, where the North began to build on its potential to better supply larger numbers of men. If the South had dealt devastating blows earlier on, like taking New York, which was a fear when Lee began his second campaign in the North, then the odds would have tilted in their favor. In essence, the South was fighting a battle against the clock.
Brilliantlight said:The South had ZERO chance at taking New York or any other major Northern city.
david3565 said:Actuall, no. Lee had free reign in the North until Gettysburg. Before that, he had smashed and out-manuevered Northern forces and a number of major cities remained undefended. The North basically went "oh, sh*t!" and the clash at Gettysburg was largely an accidental meeting.