Longest plausible post-ACW guerrilla war

Yesterday I was at the library for a ACW sesquicentennial presentation. The actor who portrayed General Grant said that the South could have won, or the North could have been left with a long guerrilla war. Given a Northern Victory, what is the longest a Southern guerrilla war could last? In a world-next-door, is a guerrilla war still going on in the South in 2011?
 
I can't imagine it lasting into the 20th century. It would leave the South in a completely destitute state and in the long run, many young Southern men are going to move North because of the lack of a future in the South. What that will leave is a petered out anti-North movement that is going to resign to political action, which they'll never get after that guerrilla war they waged a few years back...
 
About 20 years at maximum, and this only if the South has a larger pocket of pro-Confederates in regions like the Ozarks and West Virginia then what existed IOTL. The kind of long guerrilla war that would result would be very geographically limited and would not have sufficient range to impair US military control of the entire South.

Guerrilla tactics don't work on more flat areas, and if guerrillas try to fight real armies they'll get their asses handed to them every time they do. *The* major long-term result may actually limit the Lost Cause's power in those parts of the South as people there will hardly remember with great fondness a regime that kept the region in turmoil and set it back several decades by so doing.

In the ATL Sherman, Sheridan, and Wilson will be seen by the North as even bigger heroes than IOTL.
 
About 20 years at maximum, and this only if the South has a larger pocket of pro-Confederates in regions like the Ozarks and West Virginia then what existed IOTL.

Great point. The places whose terrain would be most inviting for a guerrilla war were exactly those places who most supported the Union. I think any guerrilla fighting east of the Mississippi would be limited to a couple years, at absolute most.

Of course, the guerrillas could easily just merge into a stronger Ku Klux Klan...
 
Great point. The places whose terrain would be most inviting for a guerrilla war were exactly those places who most supported the Union. I think any guerrilla fighting east of the Mississippi would be limited to a couple years, at absolute most.

Of course, the guerrillas could easily just merge into a stronger Ku Klux Klan...

Which raises the possibility that the ATL-Northern President may decide "Oh no, we are not doing this over again" and you have what Grant did in North Carolina across the entire South, that is suspension of writ of habeas corpus and decisive crackdowns on the bigger-Klan. This raises the unfortunate possibility that Southern leaders would adopt more subtle tactics to secure control banking on Northern concern not to have another war, as opposed to concern for blacks.

IOTL they didn't, but IOTL there never was a big crackdown due to Johnson being President. Even Johnson's not going to tolerate *this* kind of thing.
 
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