In the PBS documentary The Civil War, I really like it when Shelby Foote states that "any understanding of this nation has to be based, I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War." But, later in the program, he makes another statement that, I believe, contradicts his own claim:
“The South never had a chance to win that war.”
I always thought he made this comment just to **** off some of his Southern neighbors. As I recall, this statement was prefaced by him saying that the North fought with one hand tied behind its back and , if things got really difficult, all the North would have done is bring the other hand out to crush the South. But I think the South had several chances to win the war. It had chances to gain foreign recognition and it had chances to win the war on the battlefield. And I don’t just mean winning at Gettysburg. The South had to convince the Northern civilian population that the war wasn’t worth fighting anymore. As far as the North fighting “one-handed,” I think there is some truth to that but the North eventually had to draft soldiers. I think the North also had to use Black soldiers: if not for the need of military manpower, I think certainly for the need to keep them out of the hands of the Confederacy.
The Confederacy had to hold on to what it had- the territory it claimed and its slave population. In the end, it lost both. But the South had a serious chance to win the war.