What was the final moment that the CSA could've won the Civil War?

"I don't think the Union wins without Lincoln and Grant"

No war without Lincoln.

Lincoln was the Hitler of the American Civil War!

That is stretching things. It might have well happened with Douglas, but then what happens when he drops dead as it gets started? Seward was really interested in avoiding it and would have come up with something creative. And there is the chance that the fire-eaters would have engineered something.

But in 1861 the most likely scenarios is that the Lower South leaves, and the rest of the US, after some panic/ grieving, gets on with it and comes to an agreement with the Lower South over navigation down the Mississippi and the remaining federal forts in their harbors, likely swapping one for the other.
 
I also agree with dandan_noodles. It would have been hard for the IOTL early 1860s federal government to come up with an army commander that would do what Grant did 1862-3. Of their aggressive commanders, Sherman was sidelined, Fremont was sildelined, Pope had terrible luck and got sacked, same with Hooker, and Kearney got killed. And these guys were aggressive, they weren't necessarily good and except for maybe Sherman certainly not as good as Grant. However, I don't think the incompetence of the 1861-2 US army is given its due and that itself was almost ASB. The CSA needed that to have any chance at all.
 
Speaking from a military perspective? Never. On their own the CSA was outgunned and outmanned. The numbers against them were simply too great.

If you want to speak from a military perspective the last shot the CSA had at winning the war died when the Trent affair failed to produce foreign intervention, without outside help of some kind the South was doomed.

From a political perspective, well that's a different kettle of fish. Politically speaking there exists a small chance that had the Union campaigns of 1864 gone horribly wrong and engineered a stalemate for the winter of 1864-65 the nation might have turned on Lincoln and a Peace Democrat might have gotten into office. It's a very small chance, but it isn't completely outside the realms of probability.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
In IOTL the CSA simply had much better officers leading its armies, corps, and divisions.

I would agree with this on a divisional and brigade level. The North had a harder time finding division commanders of the caliber to match, say, Robert Rodes, to which one can attribute the more militaristic culture of the antebellum South and the existence of many more private military colleges in the South. Northerners and Southerners graduated from West Point, but the South also had the Virginia Military Institute, the Citadel, and other such schools, which the North did not. (IIRC, the South had seven such academies, while the North only had one.)

On the army level, though, I would disagree. Yes, they had Robert E. Lee, the best general of the war, but they also had walking disasters like Pemberton, Bragg, and Hood placed in command of their armies.
 
I don't think an-until-last-year 16,000 man army being bad at trying to conquer a country the size of continental Europe is exactly ASB; really, it's absurd that the Confederacy found a general good enough to go toe to toe with their best army with half/two thirds the men for three years, and failing only after the other two main Confederate armies were destroyed. The Confederacy was on the brink in 1862; if Richmond fell, the Confederacy is dead before winter.
 
"On the army level, though, I would disagree. Yes, they had Robert E. Lee, the best general of the war, but they also had walking disasters like Pemberton, Bragg, and Hood placed in command of their armies."

One thing I should have pointed out was that since the Confederate Army was smaller, they had fewer senior positions to fill and there was less of a chance for duds to sneak in.

I also agree that the Confederate advantage in leadership was more at the brigade/ division level than at the army level, and more in the early than the later years.

However, look at the army commanders on both sides (Pemberton by the way was never more than a corps commander):

1862

USA: McClellan, Burnside (replaced McClellan), Grant, Buell, Halleck (department, later CinC), Butler (department,but one corps), Pope

CSA: JE Johnston, Lee (replaced JE Johnston), AS Johnston, Beauregard (replaced AS Johnston), Bragg (replaced Beauregard), Holmes (departmental, not many troops)


1863

USA: Halleck (CinC), Hooker, Meade (replaced Hooker), Grant, Rosecrans, Thomas (replaced Rosecrans), Banks, Sherman

CSA: Lee, Bragg, Kirby Smith (departmental)


1864-5:

USA: Grant (Cinc), Halleck (deputy to Grant), Sherman (deputy to Grant), Meade, Thomas, McPherson, Howard (replaced McPherson), Banks, Hurlbut (replaced Banks), Butler, Ord (replaced Butler), Slocum

CSA: Lee, JE Johnston, Hood, Kirby Smith (departmental), Beauregard

What jumps out is the greater number of USA army commanders compared to the CSA ones.

This represents the much larger size of the USA army, there were simply more armies to command. But it is also due to greater churn. They had to go through alot of generals before they got heir successful 1864-5 team in place.

Dandan Noodles makes another excellent point, the USA army as it existed in 1861 was simply not designed to fight a continental war against an large army. But then the CSA army didn't exist at all. I really think the Confederates just were able to ramp up more quickly, but as long as the Union kept at it they were going to catch up.
 
When Lincoln was re-elected.

Disagree. McClellan's platform was not to give in to the south. He ran in opposition to how Lincoln was running the war, but even if Lincoln had lost in November of 1864 by March of 1865 (when McClellan would be sworn in) the war is just a little over a month from being basically over. The CSA is already finished, and no sane person is going to throw the war away.

For me, I will also put forward Antietam. Gettysburg doesn't matter, the Atlanta Campaign doesn't matter, even Grant doesn't matter (despite my view of the man).

What matters for the CSA is foreign recognition. By winning Antietam the Union (in the form of Lincoln) had the ability to recast the war into being against slavery, and that ensured Britain would NEVER intervene on the side of the CSA. They weren't likely to before that, but afterward it becomes political suicide to do so. The Union can eventually grind the CSA down, as they did anyway. The South will ultimately run out of soldiers to fight back, and given Lee's penchant for spending his men's lives like they were pennies to a millionaire that was going to happen vastly sooner than the Union would run into the same issue. The Union might have been able to lose the war afterward, but it would be due to their own mistakes rather than the south winning.
 
"On the army level, though, I would disagree. Yes, they had Robert E. Lee, the best general of the war, but they also had walking disasters like Pemberton, Bragg, and Hood placed in command of their armies."

One thing I should have pointed out was that since the Confederate Army was smaller, they had fewer senior positions to fill and there was less of a chance for duds to sneak in.

Really, either side only really needed three, four army commanders. There are three main lines of operation; the Mississippi-Tennessee river axis that points at Vicksburg and New Orleans, the Nashville-Chattanooga-Atlanta line, and the Washington-Richmond line. You could have detached wings operating in the Shenandoah (if you're Confederate; it's not super useful if you're advancing on Richmond) and on the Peninsula, but their operations aren't independent of the main army.

In terms of filling command slots, the South needs three not-terrible army commanders and nine good corps commanders. If I had to draw up a team to do it, assuming none of them get killed, you can have Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston, and I guess Beauregard, with ASJ exercising overall Western Theatre command. Could also have Lee as General-in-Chief, with Braxton Bragg doing most of the work as chief of staff while Lee runs the Army of Northern Virginia. In terms of corps commanders, you have Longstreet, Jackson, Early, Hardee, Breckinridge, JEB Stuart (he did alright at Chancellorsville), Smith, and then Ewell and Hill. Can shuffle them around between theatres depending on who performs best and where's most important. Getting 27 good division commanders would be an ordeal, but an army of lions led by sheep is to be feared less than an army of sheep led by lions.
 
Well, the Colonists only won the American revolution with massive help and intervention from France, and the British were fighting with the logistical handicap of being an Ocean away.

As for the Greeks vs the Persians, the Persians were at the end of a long logistical tether and had a shit-ton of bad luck.

The thesis of an 1864 victory is more or less ASB. It posits that when the Union has finally geared up for all out war, found its generals, etc., that suddenly, they'll lose the will to fight and go home. Sorry, there is absolutely no way that the Confederacy is going to win a war of attrition.

The notion that a 'hail mary' 'saving throw' tactical but mostly symbolic victory will somehow crush the morale of the Union seems ASB. It's not disingenuous to suggest that the likely outcome is the opposite result. Look at the Alamo. There's a long history of meaningless symbolic victories galvanizing opinion and support for the war.

I don't suggest that the Confederacy winning the civil war is out of the question. It's definitely not ASB. But the window of victory is probably between 1861 and 1863 at the latest. Chances are 5% to 10%, or less. By 1864, chances are less than fractions of one per cent. ;)
 
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AS Johnston,

Albert Sidney Johnston, .

Really? Its really hard to fathom how Johnson could really have been considering that he died in his first battle of his first campaign. He is an intriguing what if, the man who served "three separate republics" (USA, Texas and CSA) but last I checked I have not actually seen anything really worthwhile to say about his military career other than he was a good soldier who loved the army. Yes, Davis thought he was the best soldier ever, but frankly Davis also thought highly of Bragg in comparison.

Freom most of the works I have read, and even the opinion of some other members of the board, he is just a capable officer who is there....

I don't suggest that the Confederacy winning the civil war is out of the question. It's definitely not ASB. But the window of victory is probably between 1861 and 1863 at the latest. Chances are 5% to 10%, or less. By 1864, chances are less than fractions of one per cent. ;)

About this though, on January 1 1863 for the most part sidelines any chance of foreign intervention because the war them absolutely became about the internal strugghle to destroy slavery, and the UK and France were not going to hop on board when that was released. That said though, if say Chancellorsville and even Gettysburg were greater confederate victories than in OTL, and also somehow butterflying away Vickburg, they may actually offer to mediate an armistice at best.
 
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ASJ doesn't actually have to be very good, just having a singular commander for the Western theatre would be an improvement on OTL. That said, I think the concept of operations for the Shiloh campaign was quite promising. He was able to concentrate his army and achieve near complete surprise, and the plan of cutting grant off from the Tennessee, wheeling left to force him against the Owl Creek swamp, and defeating his army and Buell's separately makes sense, but at least as I understand it, Beauregard screwed up the deployment, either attacking in waves and getting the men mixed up between corps or putting too much weight on the left wing instead of the one actually doing the wheeling motion. He doesn't have to be Napoleon, he just has to get the South to lose slower in the west.
 
Really? Its really hard to fathom how Johnson could really have been considering that he died in his first battle of his first campaign. He is an intriguing what if, the man who served "three separate republics" (USA, Texas and CSA) but last I checked I have not actually seen anything really worthwhile to say about his military career other than he was a good soldier who loved the army. Yes, Davis thought he was the best soldier ever, but frankly Davis also thought highly of Bragg in comparison.

He's an intriguing "what if" for sure, if mostly because the bar is set so low in the West with the leadership of Braxton Bragg...
 

Saphroneth

Banned
The thing about this question is that it's hard to judge when the last moment was - as, to be poetic, the later you get the fewer paths the Confederacy has to victory.

For example, by the time of the 1864 election you *could* have a Confederate survival if the election went the other way - which would be tricky, but possible. And after that you're down to "The Union does something monumentally stupid, pisses off France and Napoleon III decides to pick up another client state in the Americas".

On the other hand, it's quite possible to say that the Confederacy's chances of winning the war were low from the start.. and that they often did quite well, thus prolonging their chances of survival and victory past what you'd expect given the kick off. Certainly there's missed chances - a victory at Gettysburg could wreck the Army of the Potomac (hence meaning a transfer of troops east and prolonging the Confederacy, hence tying into the 1864 election), while if the Union screwed up badly enough that the British declared war over Trent then that turns the war into a Union defeat with remarkable speed.

One thing, however, is fairly clear. The Union did not have one hand behind its back - or if it did, that hand had nothing in it. it's not until 1863 the Union can arm everyone in the Army of the Potomac with rifles instead of muskets, and almost all their rifles in the first two years of the war were imported... so the idea that the Union could raise extra troops is contraindicated by that detail.
 
At which point did it become impossible for the Confederacy to win the ACW? Maybe the taking of Mobile? Earlier? Somehow later? The Confederacy never had a great chance of victory, but there has to have been a specific point in the ACW when it became impossible for them.

A Win- being defined as the Federals going away and leaving the South alone was a possibility until the very end when Lee ordered the forces to lay their weapons down. Even defeated as a regular army the troops of the Confederacy could have put up a guerilla war of ambush, sniping and terrorism that the folks of the North would have quickly tired of and withdrawn from the South to make it stop.
 
A Win- being defined as the Federals going away and leaving the South alone was a possibility until the very end when Lee ordered the forces to lay their weapons down. Even defeated as a regular army the troops of the Confederacy could have put up a guerilla war of ambush, sniping and terrorism that the folks of the North would have quickly tired of and withdrawn from the South to make it stop.
I doubt that after 4 years trying to take the south and the Emancipation Proclamation they would just say "this is too hard, let´s go home!", in any case how many people would even support this and with what resources(the CSA was broken by the end of the war).
 
How realistic is it that instead of secession, the Southern states claim that the Presidential election was fraudelant. They dont set up the CSA and a new Constitution, instead keep the Constitution, have no new elections and keep the duly elected congressmen and senators. They claim to be an alternative true legitimate Federal govt over all the USA. Does Fort Sumner still happen? Can this give the British and French wiggle room to acknowledge the Southern "govt in exile" as legit? This makes the Civil War a real civil war, in reality the Civil War in OTL was an independence movement that failed and not a civil war.
 
One thing, however, is fairly clear. The Union did not have one hand behind its back - or if it did, that hand had nothing in it. it's not until 1863 the Union can arm everyone in the Army of the Potomac with rifles instead of muskets, and almost all their rifles in the first two years of the war were imported... so the idea that the Union could raise extra troops is contraindicated by that detail.

IIRC the "hand behind it's back" comment was an observation Foote made in the context of the annual Harvard-Yale boat race taking place for the first time during the war in July of 1864, a week after the battle of Atlanta - the point being that if the Union could afford to allow several dozen fit young men to mess about in boats without worrying about conscription then it wasn't anywhere close to maxing out its manpower resources and yet was overwhelming the Confederacy even in its heartland.

It's easy to talk about something happening differently producing a slightly different outcome and maybe the Confederacy lasting longer as a result, but the Confederacy really had no chance after it failed to get foreign intervention, it was always going to be ground into the sand one way or the other. The ACW really was one of those wars were God was on the side of the big battalions.
 
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