Lost Freeway
Banned
Between the United States in the American Revolutionary War and the Confederacy in the American Civil War, who faced the longer odds?
Not necessarily. If, say, both of them could only win with foreign intervention, and the chance of foreign intervention in the ACW was one in ten while in the ARW it was one in twenty (numbers chosen for illustration) then the CSA rolling a five while the USA rolled a twenty doesn't mean that either the hit or the miss were more likely than the opposite.Uppss i read the question wrong...
But the first actually won and the other one lose. Shouldn't that be obvious .
Between the United States in the American Revolutionary War and the Confederacy in the American Civil War, who faced the longer odds?
But the Confederacy also starts with essentially no organised army, no navy, no money, and no equipment. However, AWI Britain is across the Atlantic and has significant strategic commitments elsewhere, whereas the Union is right up the road and has nothing else to think about.It depends on the timing of the question. If you look at it from the perspective of the start of the war or even the first 12-18 months of the war, I think you'd say ARW USA had longer odds. At that point, they had essentially no organized army, no navy, no money, and no equipment against (arguably) the toughest army on earth.
British army, required to defend a global empire and act as a police force in the UK: 45,000 men.unlike Britain of the 1770s the U.S. had a minuscule military, meaning the two started off on something approaching even footing (or at least much more even).
That the U.S. got aid is irrelevant, it was a factor which tipped the scales, but at the beginning of the war intervention was far from certain. The big advantage the U.S. had was that Britain was universally (and I do mean almost literally everyone in Europe hated them), while the U.S. of the 1860s were basically (those guys somewhere that way).
I'm sorry, when you're saying the French who funded and armed the Americans, and for their aid were rewarded by getting into huge amounts of money which played a significant role in resultant domestic instability and then by the Americans high-handedly cancelling their debts to France with the weak excuse that France had changed its political system (but in a way that no American republican ideologue could truly condemn without being a hypocrite), are supposedly "irrelevant", I really have to question that.
Without the intervention I contend that the rebels would probably have been defeated and would certainly have found it much, much harder to win.
The effects of aid on France's internal politics does not matter to the question at hand.
Yeah, never denied that.
My argument is that just because the U.S. ended up doesn't mean you can take it into account when figuring out who had the longer odds, since that would be like arguing Germany was screwed in 1914 on the grounds the U.S. would declare war in 1917. The beginning of the war is what matters for the question, not subsequent events.