Enlistments in the US armed forces (over 2,700,000) approximately equaled the free male population of all ages, all races, and all conditions of health in the eleven Confederate States. Another poster, especially, but you too continue to deduct the numbers of men available to the Confederate forces without giving sources where they got, which started the war with an army of 16,00 all the men to replace those who supposedly joined the enemy. Y'all need to come with some logical reason why the Confederates held out for four years with so few against so many.
Abraham Lincoln once asked General (Winfield) Scott this question: "Why is it that you were once able to take Mexico City in three months with five thousand men, and we have been unable to take Richmond with one hundred thousand men?" "I will tell you," said General Scott. "The men who took us into Mexico City are the same men who are keeping us out of Richmond."
The only logical reason I need to come up with why the Confederates held out for four years is Appomattox.
You tout dead men as superior to other dead men, that for some four years they continued to fight as though this is some sort of 'gotcha' point in 2020.
It took the Union army 4 years to conquer a portion of the country the size of Europe. It took four years for the United States to create large armies from a small, standing army of 16,000, scattered across the nation to those 2,700,000 you mention. The Union army also fought mostly on the offensive while the Confederacy remained mainly on the defensive. Digging a trench requires no "super human" strength. Just the ability to listen while being told where and when to dig.
And while those men General Scott mentioned may have held the Union army out of Richmond for a while, I note that in spite of being endowed, by yourself, with "super" ability, were finally driven out of Richmond with the city then being occupied by USCTs. How "super" did that come across to retreating Confederates?
You want to give the Confederate soldier some mystical, magical, ability, while reducing the Union soldier as "inferior." Yet these men, labeled by you, lost their cause, not because of their lack of courage or their ability to be stubborn in the defense of their cause.
They lost because Union soldiers were not inferior, but because they were just as brave, just as stubborn in the offense that reunited their nation, a cause they never lost sight of, a cause they could not abandon, even during four long years of bitter sectional conflict.
You cannot besmirch their sacrifice by applying the term inferior to them, not for any jaded, Monday night quarte-backing or silly point of regional pride that advances one side over another. All of those men are dead and the only thing that matters is what their deaths bought.
I see no Confederate nation, I see no Confederate flag flying above the Capitol in Washington, I only see the United States, one nation, as a direct result of the sacrifice of those you would call "inferior."
In applying this term, you insult, in my opinion, both Union AND Confederate soldiers, by lowering their ability to stand and fight, you make it appear the Confederates should have won the Civil War if their opponents were so far beneath them in fighting ability, if that were truly the case.
The fact is, they are all dead, Confederate and Union alike, and as much as you would like it otherwise, the cause that brought them to fight one another, has been long resolved.
If you wish to believe in the fighting spirit of the average Confederate soldier as something special, so be it. I'll acknowledge that fact too.
But at no time will I ever accept the fact that the average Union soldier, who gave his life to preserve his nation, deserves no title other than the won he received in life during those desperate times.
SOLDIER.
Unionblue