Why the South Lost the Civil War

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Seeing as though the Confederacy initially had an advantage over the Union as far as better generals and espiritu morale, the South seemed highly likely to win the war. In the book, Why the Confederacy Lost, the idea that the South had any chance of winning is combatted, while also proving why the North won. Although the North did not possess the knowledge of the land on which they fought, their ability to win was based purely on slaves, the South's demoralization and lack of ideology, their uniforms, and their odds against the South altogether; if the North had not have won, the end of slavery and even a civil war would have been inevitable with time. In the beginning, Grant wanted to mobilize every available man and apply pressure on all fronts. What was a better way to utilize every available man than to utilize slaves? In order for Grant's plan to increase manpower to succeed, he required states to have quotas. The North, including Grant, was patient in their efforts. Eventually, they had approximately 100,000 black men serving in their army and navy. Slaves would grow cotton and food and aid in construction for the North. In the South, the slaves who could not escape to the North, sabotaged the South by not obeying their masters or helping the soldiers who had escaped from Confederate prison camps. President Lincoln made the remark, "Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it," referring to the use of Black men in the Union army. He indirectly says that without those men, the Union has no chance of survival. Opposed to slaves or black men fighting in the army, Jefferson Davis would not allow slaves to fight because he thought it was a contradiction to the war effort as he makes clear when he says, "Whenever we establish the fact that they are a military race, we destroy our whole theory that they are truly unfit to be free."
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