I know this is further derailing the thread - but your post I found highly thought-provoking (as generally all of your posts) - and I thought it worth to take a closer look on the matter....
I did now some dilettant research in the US census of 1860 - there the leading manufacturers, their workforce and the invested capital is listed.
If I am adding the figures the numbers are:
Virginia:
- invested capital: about 7.000.000 / workforce: about 14.000
Tennessee and Georgia (combined):
- invested capital about 3.000.000 / workforce: about 3.000
I also read that Richmond and Atlanta both were growing outproportionately during the war - with Richmond outperforming Atlanta regarding absolute numbers.
Might it be correctly concluded that during the war Virginia was (regarding industrial production and manufacture) still more important to the Confederacy than Tennessee and Georgia combined - or did I overlook or oversimplify some things?
The war in Virginia was important to Virginia. Trains leaving the Dalton GA depot for Virginia deadheaded, I.e., returned empty. All that increase in Atlanta’s population was in response to the flow of supplies to Virginia, not literally of course, but floors enough.
You might be surprised that North Carolina lost almost as many men in Virginia as that state did. The wartime journals of young women in Clarksville TN reflect the the fighting in Virginia. Their cohort of available husbands was buried there. Apart from Longstreet’s brief appearance, Virginia contributed nothing to the defense of its lifeline in the CSA Heartland. It was strictly a one way street.
Any rational strategy involving a weaker power vs a much stronger one demands a very cold eyed evaluation of what is absolutely essential & what is not. There were certain irreplaceable assets in what was left of Virginia after Lee lost the western half of the state. The salt works were one of very few operating in the entire CSA, for example. Of course, the real reason for holding onto what was left of Virginia had nothing to do with economic choke points.
The fact was that when the CSA lost control of a territory, de facto emancipation took place. Incalculable dollar value & productivity simply got up & walked away. Davis had to hold everything everywhere or else. The whole point of secession was to guarantee the right of white men to hold other human beings as property as God intended forever.
In effect, every one of the robust men in the prime of life in the 25th Corps that took Richmond was $40 to $50,000.00 that the CSA had contributed to its own defeat. All the blah-blah about how vital Virginia was never includes the one essential thing that Virginia actually contributed to the rest of the South.
It was the steady flow of “extras” from Virginia that made Nathan Bedford Forrest’s fortune. Absent the steady flow of replacements, the Deep South faced a labor shortage. Absent the high valued export of human beings, the Virginia planters went broke.
As the 25th Corps exemplified, Lee’s campaigns did little or nothing to maintain the absolutely essential flow of extras to the Deep South. In Richmond CO North Carolina virtually every man & boy my relatives & their neighbors owned ran off. At great, unsupportable cost of blood & treasure, Lee’s army could not protect the very asset that the whole war was meant to guarantee.