Why Was The Confederacy Defeated Essay

The Civil War, also known by those who fought in it as the “great war” (Ford, Ford, & University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999, p.7, para.1), was a tumultuous time in American history: pitting the Union Army in the North against the Confederate Army of the South; waging brother against brother; even causing neighbors to take up arms against one another. With the first-hand accounts writings of soldiers (on both sides of the war), such as A.P. Ford (1999), a soldier fighting for the side of the Confederacy, letters sent by family members left behind on the home front such as those from Ford’s wife, Marion (1999), and even from diaries and personal writings of civilians such as Mrs. Collis (1997), wife of Union Army General Collis, who traveled alongside her husband’s unit for a period of the war, …show more content…
According to Professor of History, Alan Farmer, in his article titled “Why Was the Confederacy Defeated,” despite being led by the famed General Lee, the Southern army suffered from a clear lack of strong leadership within its ranks (2005). Despite advantages in the South’s sheer land mass alone, many Southern generals failed to capitalize, with one even going so far as to surrender Southern lands to the Union without so much as a struggle (Farmer, 2005)! The South also failed to capitalize on several opportunities to draft slaves into service (Farmer, 2005), which would have greatly padded the numbers of armed soldiers fighting for the Confederacy, aiding in battle. Even following Southern victories like the one at the first battle of Manassas, Confederate leadership further stalled (Farmer, 2005), by not aggressing the Union further, again damaging morale, and with it, the Southern cause. Each of these lost opportunities at the hands of a weak leadership only served to further pushed the Confederate Army toward defeat by the