Why the South Could Not Win the Civil War

The American antebellum South, though rich in pride and raised in military tradition, was to be no match for the promising superiority of the rapidly developing North in the coming Civil War. Their lack of readily trained men, in conjunction with social and economical issues, made the Civil War a joke for the North, and a disaster for the South.

The paramount reason the South fell well short of a victory was the obvious difference in population between the South and the North. The North at the time had 22,000,000 men while the South had a meager 9,500,000, of whom 3,500,000 million were slaves. While the slaves could be used to support the war effort through work on the plantations, in industries and as teamsters and pioneers with the army, they were not used as a combat arm in the war to any extent.

This cuts the South's manpower by a third, leaving a 15,500,000 difference in the population of the two areas. In the 1850's the North was more populous and urban, due to the Irish and German immigrants that traveled to the states. By1860, 9 out of the 10 biggest cities were in the North. The Union also had large amounts of land available for growing food crops, which served the dual purpose of providing food for its hungry soldiers and money for its ever-growing industries. The South, on the other hand, devoted most of what arable land it had exclusively to its main cash crop: cotton

Industrially the South couldn't keep up in output of weapons, ammunition and other supplies. The North had more industry, with 10,000 factories that brought in $1.5 billion dollars in goods compared to the South's 20,000 that brought in $155 million Raw materials were almost entirely concentrated in Northern mines and refining industries.

The North also had 70% of the railroads, and telegraph lines, the absolute lifelines of any army, traced paths all across the Northern countryside but left the South isolated, outdated, and starving. The confederacy had only one-ninth the industrial capacity of the Union; for Northern states had manufactured 97% of the country's firearms in 1860, 94% of its cloth, 93% of its pig iron, and more then 90% of its boots and shoes. By the beginning of war in 1860, the Union, from an economical standpoint, stood like a towering giant over the stagnant Southern agrarian society.

Of the over 128,000 industrial firms in the nation at this time, the Confederacy held