Thread:72.67.13.17/@comment-21519-20120922071952

Hello,

The questions you've asked about the Confederacy have no place in the article where you've written them, but they're interesting, so I'll give you my two cents, anyway:

what lead to the Confederate States?

The secession crisis of the winter of 1860-61, of course. What led to that? The election of Lincoln. Why did his election touch off such a strong negative reaction? He was perceived as a radical who would abolish slavery in the South, thus upturning the plantation agriculture upon which the region's economy depended. It was a pretty baseless fear; he did hate slavery, and believed it had no place in the United States, but he respected the rule of law, and Southern politicians could have tied any attempts at abolition up in knots by continuing to take part in the political system. The closest thing Lincoln had made to a commitment to abolition in his 1860 platform was a promise to check the expansion of slavery into the western territories. That would have been a hell of a political fight.

How was their government set up?

Fairly closely modeled on the Federal government they were rebelling against: a presidential system, a bicameral Congress, an unelected judiciary, separation of powers among three branches of government, federalism. The secessionist state governments often worked at cross purposes with the central government, however, which in retrospect seems about as obvious as the fact that, if a man leaves his wife and marries his mistress, he's extremely unlikely to stay faithful to his new wife if another attractive woman comes along.

Their civil liberties were quite weak. For one thing, they required internal passports to travel within the Confederacy, something more closely associated with twentieth-century totalitarianism. As for freedom of speech, or the press--if you were a Unionist, God help you.

What were impotant laws passed by the Confederacy?

Their legislative history is pretty undistinguished. A lot of in-fighting over the prosecution of the war, mainly. The most famous piece of legislation they could have passed was dead on arrival: Patrick Cleburne's proposal of enlisting slaves as soldiers in exchange for emancipation of all who served once the war was over.

What was the costs of the Civil War to the South?

Oh God, where to begin. Economic ruin, social upheaval, the decimation of the flower of the Southern population, the evisceration of the region's political influence for decades to come. Far, far worse than even their most paranoid fantasies about the malign intentions of the Republicans would have been, had they not rebelled.

What were some important battle results?

I guess you could say the big three were Antietam, which gave Lincoln the opening to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and shift the Union's war aims to include abolitionist goals, thus claiming a new moral high ground; Vicksburg, which spelled the end of the Rebs' ability to employ continental supply- and communication lines quickly and easily; and Atlanta, a major victory which bolstered Northern and Western political will to stay in the fight six short weeks before the all-important 1864 election.

What were some advantages the South had over the North?

The main one was that they were able to fight on the defensive. They didn't need to conquer Union territory, though they did make a few halfhearted attempts; the Union had to conquer them. That advantage is the only way the Confederacy was able to stay afloat for anywhere close to the length of time it did. They also had interior lines of communication, at least in the beginning; the Federals broke those lines up and gradually eliminated that advantage as the war went on. I've also read that Federal intelligence had trouble keeping track of what the Rebs were up to nationally because their chain of command was such a chaotic mess.

Really, though, the odds were heavily, heavily stacked against them from the beginning. Between them, the North and West (and it is important to remember that the North was not the only region of the country from which the Union could draw) had almost every advantage, except for the fact that they needed to go on the offensive and the Rebs didn't.

What new ways of transporting supplies and recruits were invented or improved?

By the Confederates? Not much. They were pretty good at moving men and materiel along the Mississippi Valley's river network, as long as the army was able to keep enough river towns open. I may be wrong, but I don't think they employed any new methods at river travel that hadn't been in practice for twenty years or more.

One famous example of their not improving infrastructure was the fact that railroads all across the South each used different gagues. So rolling stock of one railroad company could not be used on track laid by another; whenever they reached the end of one line, they had to offload the trains they'd been on and transfer to another train to keep going. The delays this caused were interminable, and it became a negative example the rest of the industrialized world took notice of. One standard gague has been the rule ever since. The only government that didn't adopt this was Imperial Russia, and they refused to use the standard European gague deliberately, because they feared it was more likely to help a western invader than anything else.

Hope this helps! Turtle Fan (talk) 07:19, September 22, 2012 (UTC) 