Confederacy's Main Problem -- Shortage of Manpower

For the Confederacy, Nos. 6, 7 and 8 appear to have been the main priorities. Which means the US has the problem of finding the places that were not adequately supported. They found some of those places and did not find others.
 
I still don't understand why some of you members try to drag in morality as a crutch, like principals and lawlessness. Nobody can decode motives and can get a fix on the psyche on people who lived over 150 years ago. What principles are you referring to and what lawlessness did the Confederates not engage in? It's all subjective.
"I was talking principles, not equivalencies.

The South was not fighting as an insurrection, but as a modern state, with armies, artillery, railroads, a bureaucracy, a treasury, a foreign policy, a navy (not that they did them well, but they were organized and functioned reasonably well). They were defeated as a formal state and chose not to shift to lawlessness."

I was talking about the principles of war.

They chose not to shift to lawlessness in that they did not shift to guerilla warfare.
 
Was there any evidence that a guerilla war would have worked? There was an attempt at guerilla tactics in w. Missouri and in the Shenadoah Valley. The US demonstrated it was fully ready to escalate the war. If the Confederate advocates had resorted to partisan guerilla warfare, the US was prepared to treat them as terrorists on land and pirates at sea.
And it would not have made any difference.
The US was capable of fighting an anti-insurgency war, re-invigorating immigration, extending one or more railroads to California, all while expanding agricultural output.
 
The manpower shortage created many military problems for the Confederacy. But in a longer war, it meant the US could fight the war, expand manufacturing production, and up date its railroad system.
Since the railroad industry was a young industry under going dynamic change, 3 years of change in the north, 1862, 1863 and 1864, contrasted with three years of retrograde depreciation in the Confederacy, left the two systems so divergent in equipment and experience that the southern states did not catch up for the remainder of the century.
 
Was there any evidence that a guerilla war would have worked? There was an attempt at guerilla tactics in w. Missouri and in the Shenadoah Valley. The US demonstrated it was fully ready to escalate the war. If the Confederate advocates had resorted to partisan guerilla warfare, the US was prepared to treat them as terrorists on land and pirates at sea.
And it would not have made any difference.
The US was capable of fighting an anti-insurgency war, re-invigorating immigration, extending one or more railroads to California, all while expanding agricultural output.

Actually a guerrilla war, if sustained, would have led to the use of black troops and emancipated slaves as garrisons and response forces - talk about a horror show! Check out the end of the Boer War for an example of what MIGHT have occurred. Again, no analogy is perfect but - IMHO - the LAST thing that former CSA folks would have wanted was the actual results a guerrilla war would likely have produced. (recognizing this is OT and probably would be its own thread).
 
The manpower difference meant that by August of 1864, the US economy was expanding and the Confederate economy was collapsing.
 
Actually a guerrilla war, if sustained, would have led to the use of black troops and emancipated slaves as garrisons and response forces - talk about a horror show! Check out the end of the Boer War for an example of what MIGHT have occurred. Again, no analogy is perfect but - IMHO - the LAST thing that former CSA folks would have wanted was the actual results a guerrilla war would likely have produced. (recognizing this is OT and probably would be its own thread).
As I mentioned above, discipline was breaking down among US troops in 1864. And as you speculate, the expected response to guerilla warfare would have been black regiments commanded by hard core NE abolitionists who no longer viewed the Confederate insurgents as their countrymen.
While the Confederate guerillas fought, the US would have let the Confederacy starve and the only the lucky people would have been able to refugee to a northern or pacified area.
 
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This chart was published in 1864. But Lincoln used similar information to formulate his early strategy, he just did not name the plan after a snake. By the time Missouri was mostly Unionist, and Kentucky was mostly neutral and in the US, the ratio in the Midwest shifteyhfrom about 3:2 in favor of the US to about 3:1 in favor of the US, in the Midwest, and in the central part of the Confederacy. But it was actually worse, because some of the counties of western Virginia along the Ohio River remained loyal. The US broke into northern Tennessee in less than a year, and many of the white men in Louisiana lived in New Orleans and the US also occupied that city by May of 1863.
Even worse, California was able to send desert battalions eastward, and Colorado was able to send mountain battalions southward. Any substantial response to those battalions had to come from Texas, and once the US withdrew from Texas, the Comanches remained.
 
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In the summer of 1861, Davis must have looked at a map and wondered where to put his troops. I propose that he needed to put troops as listed below. He did not have enough men and did not have enough weapons for the ones he did have, but this is the deployment he needed to make to protect against the thrusts listed:

Thrust 1. South on the Mississippi River -- targets: Memphis, Vicksburg -- CS need a field army of 75,000
Thrust 2. North on the Mississippi River -- targets: New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Vicksburg -- CS need a field army of 30,000
Thrust 3. South on the Tennessee/Cumberland Rivers -- targets: Corinth, Nashville, Chattanooga, Atlanta -- CS needed a field army of 75,000
Thrust 4. North out of Mobile/Pensacola -- targets: Montgomery, Atlanta -- CS needed a field army of 30,000
Thrust 5. West out of of Charleston/Savannah/Port Royal -- targets: Macon, Augusta, Atlanta, Columbia -- CS needed a field army of 40,000
Thrust 6. West out of the NC Sound -- target: Raleigh and the main supply line to Virginia -- CS need a field army of 30,000
Thrust 7. South from DC -- target: Richmond -- CS needed a field army of 80,000
Thrust 8. North up the Peninsula -- target: Richmond -- CS needed a field army of 30,000
Thrust 9, South through the Valley of Virginia -- targets: Charlottsville, Lynchburg, Richmond -- CS needed a field army of 30,000
Thrust 10. South from Cincinnati -- target: Knoxville and the supply line to Virginia -- CS needed a field army of 30,000

So, Davis needed to PLAN for about 450,000 men in field armies, plus another 50,000 in garrisons, the Navy, Florida and the Trans-Mississippi --- 500,000 men. (The CS army never reached 400,000)

Thanks to Lee, Jackson, McClellan, Lincoln, etc. some of these lines of advance were not used and others required fewer men than should have been anticipated. Advances by forces of 30,000 Union troops from Pensacola, Port Royal and the NC sound would have proven unstoppable by Confederate forces that were too thin for the lines of attack the Union actually did use.

I wonder how Davis stood up to the demands for troops everywhere when he had so few. I also wonder why Lincoln missed such obvious high-payoff, low risk possibilities.

How could Davis have met his perceived needs? He needs men and weapons far beyond what he has.
It doesn't help when one is trying to create a new nation and automatically exclude forty percent of the male population from serving in the military due to race. It doesn't help to at the very last minute have a major change in that policy when it was far to late to matter.
Leftyhunter
 
The arithmetic was not difficult. Once Missouri and Kentucky were excluded from the Confederate conscription area, the Confederacy was going to have problems with military manpower. Ohio peeled off a number of counties of western Virginia, which was probably a loss of about 300,000 people, about 3% of the total Confederate population. Little incursions as at Port Royal removed some of the slave population and small towns like Alexandria, VA, pop 14,000 were captured by the US.
Then there was breakthrough in Tennessee, which probably removed another 200,000 people, at a minimum.
The US captured the city of New Orleans, pop 169,000, about another 1.5%, and a high % of white people.
By the time the US had captured Memphis, Norfolk and Pensacola, the manpower pinch was growing.
 
The census procedures of 1860 were inadequate to count the population of the fast growing Midwest states. Voting also did not count then northern population, because voting did not count free blacks, non naturalized immigrants, and men age 16-21, who were a large part of the youthful population in the all the western states, north and south.
The census had no chance to measure the building trades or small business in the north. Anecdotal descriptions of the difference between the north and the south were probably more accurate than the census in observing the acceleration of growth in the north and Midwest.
 
Combat losses seemed to dramatic. That was what the journalists wrote about.
By 1870, here are the populations and growth rates of the Midwestern states:
IL: 2.5M, 48.36%
IA: 1.1M, 76.91%
MO: 1.7M, 45.62%
KS: .36M, 239.9%
MN: .43M, 155.61%
WI: 1.0M 35.93 %
And Nebraska was admitted with a population of .12M.
The Confederacy was trying to turn back a historic population migration that all the way back into Britain and Germany.
That same population migration allowed free blacks and southerners to join, too.
 
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