WI Guerrilla warfare and insurgency tactics were taken up by the confederates, could that strategy have worked?

What if the Confederates recognized that a traditionally fought war against the larger and more industrialized North would be fruitless and that insurgency and guerrilla warfare tactics were the way to go?

If you look at the insurgencies of the Vietnamese about a century later, they similarly weren't necessarily looking to conquer any land from the Americans but to make conditions miserable enough that that military presence would withdraw.
 
No. Secession was seen as existential threat to the USA in a way that the Vietnam War was not. Now, if you're talking about use of guerilla warfare to reinstate/maintain racial oppression, that doesn't seem too different from the Ku Klux Klan in OTL, but if you're talking about getting the north to cry uncle on the issue of secession, no.
 
No. Secession was seen as existential threat to the USA

By many but not all. Weren't the Copperhead Democrats advocating learning to live with an independent south not long into the war?

Not to mention things like the New York draft riots had some analogies to the draft issues during Vietnam.
 
By many but not all. Weren't the Copperhead Democrats advocating learning to live with an independent south not long into the war?

Not to mention things like the New York draft riots had some analogies to the draft issues during Vietnam.
The Copperhead's were a tiny minority. McClellan did not run by promising peace with the Confederacy; it would have been political suicide for him to do so. Even if Lincoln had lost all of the states where his margin of victory was less than 5%, he'd still have had more than twice the electoral votes of McClellan.

Note that the Vietcong were not a guerilla force that drove out the Americans all by themselves. There was also the regular North Vietnamese military. Both were supplied by the Chinese and the Soviets. Who is going to supply the Confederacy? Doing so would mean war with the United States, not to mention there would be the issue of getting weapons to the guerillas. Guerillas can play a major role in war, but it generally requires some form of outside assistance. That's before we get into the issue that the planter class wouldn't benefit much if their plantations were torched as retaliation for guerilla warfare. If they're going with guerilla rather than conventional warfare, that also makes it easier to recruit slaves as soldiers since you can march down south more easily.
 
It depends how they are used, where are they used, and how they are utilized.

- The best type of "guerilla" for the South would be mounted cavalry or men with bases in the mountains/caves/swamps. They should be a mixture of militia, spies, and civilians with occasional support from Confederate cavalry. However using the actual Confederate Army for guerilla warfare is a waste of resources.

- The best places for guerilla activity during the Civil War would be border states and coastal areas near union occupied ports in the South. The Trans-Mississippi Theater would be a good place as well.

- The role of these "guerillas" should be the following:

a. Gather intelligence for the South on Union troop placements/movements.

b. Sabotage Union occupied railroads, bridges, and telegraph wires.

c. Raid supply depots in the border states and support snuggling operations on the coast.

d. Sneak snipers into Union encampants at nightime and take out officers.

e. Recruit Southern sympathizers in Union occupied territory and get them sent South for service.

f. Coordinate "fifth column" attacks when the Confederate Army goes on the offensive.

- Note: At no time should guerillas in the South assassinate civilian politicians, attack/steal from civilians.
 

Shadowwolf

Banned
No, Truth is by 1865 large areas of the South were ready for peace.... Large sections of Southern States had already begun re-joining the Union (Tennessee for example).

A successful Guerrilla war needs the support of the people, and by 1865 only a few diehards and Aristocrats still supported the war... As an example most sermons preached in the South in 1864-1865 called on God to bring a end to the terrible war.

It was later that the whole "Lost Cause" Mythology changed peoples minds in the South to idolizing the War, and it's leaders
 
Lee turned down the suggestion- knew it couldn't have succeeded.

Partisan warfare came up a fair bit in his Spring of 1865 letters to other generals and Davis.

A partisan war may be continued, and hostilities protracted, causing individual suffering and the devastation of the country, but I see no prospect by that means of achieving a separate independence.

It is for Your Excellency to decide, should you agree with me in opinion, what is proper to be done. To save useless effusion of blood, I would recommend measures be taken for suspension of hostilities and the restoration of peace.

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/robert-e-lee-jefferson-davis-april-20th-1865

His overall view was that the South could sustain a partisan war for some time, but argued it would lead to marauding against civilians by insurgents looking for food, more death and misery, and in time failure.
 
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a. Gather intelligence for the South on Union troop placements/movements.

b. Sabotage Union occupied railroads, bridges, and telegraph wires.

c. Raid supply depots in the border states and support snuggling operations on the coast.

d. Sneak snipers into Union encampants at nightime and take out officers.

e. Recruit Southern sympathizers in Union occupied territory and get them sent South for service.

f. Coordinate "fifth column" attacks when the Confederate Army goes on the offensive
A, B, C and F were carried out by various irregular outfits, without much success.
D is pretty useless; it would be immediately shut down (by, among other things, reprisals against the local civilians).
E- I think Southern sympathizers already knew which direction to head if they wanted to offer their services; very few of them wanted to.
 
I think the best option would be to fortify the cities along main invasion routes as much as possible, and then try and bog down Union forces attacking these, and meanwhile send cavalry round behind enemy lines to cut their supply lines, ambush detachments of soldiers, and so on. So not true guerrilla warfare, but not entirely conventional, either.
 
A, B, C and F were carried out by various irregular outfits, without much success.
D is pretty useless; it would be immediately shut down (by, among other things, reprisals against the local civilians).
E- I think Southern sympathizers already knew which direction to head if they wanted to offer their services; very few of them wanted to.

1. That doesn't mean there isn't any chance of A, B,C, and F being more successful. With a bit more planning and foresight, these options do have a lot of potential.
2. Your'e probably right on this one. Of course, it could come in handy at key moments during the war.
3. During Sterling Price's raid into Mississippi in 1864 and the Confederate invasion of Kentucky in 1862/63, the South was able to get some additional recruits so I don't think this is entirely true.
 
I think the best option would be to fortify the cities along main invasion routes as much as possible, and then try and bog down Union forces attacking these, and meanwhile send cavalry round behind enemy lines to cut their supply lines, ambush detachments of soldiers, and so on. So not true guerrilla warfare, but not entirely conventional, either.

You are talking about an early version of hybrid warfare.

There are other aspects of hybrid warfare as well 'political warfare', 'media disinformation', etc. That kind of warfare seeks to influence the news coverage. One of America's strengths is its free press, but that can be made a lability in war if the opponent has a solid plan to aggressively influence the headlines as many insurgencies the US has fought have tried to do.
 
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RousseauX

Donor
I think the best option would be to fortify the cities along main invasion routes as much as possible, and then try and bog down Union forces attacking these, and meanwhile send cavalry round behind enemy lines to cut their supply lines, ambush detachments of soldiers, and so on. So not true guerrilla warfare, but not entirely conventional, either.
that's not too different from actual cs strategy during the war
 
I don't think it's a viable strategy for the CSA. From the start the Confederates wanted to set up a legitimate nation, that would be accepted by the family of nations. If you mean starting out with a Peoples War Strategy, that would be an acknowledgement of the failure of independence. As Union Forces captured cities the heart would go out of the rebellion. The experience of Border States supports this thesis. Delaware, and Maryland had almost no guerilla warfare, and Missouri, and Kentucky never had enough to seriously threaten Union Control of those States. It was conventional invasions of Kentucky that posed a problem. Pro-Confederate Kentuckians mostly joined regular army units.

The base of Southern support was never that strong, nearly half the population of the South didn't believe in succession. The hill, and mountain regions, that were best suited for irregular warfare was were support for succession was weakest. How many of the Southern Officers who resigned from the U.S. Army would head south to led guerilla bands? Their training, and inclinations were deeply rooted in the doctrine of conventional warfare.

Lincoln's policy was that the Union was never dissolved, life would just go on as normal for most people, even slavery would still continue, so what are the planters fighting for? That's just what happened in the Border States that stayed in the Union. Raiders disturbing the economy, and causing loss of life would turn the population against them. A sabotage campaign would only serve to hurt their own people. The ACW would be reduced to a bandit war, like the raiders, and bank robbers of the postwar years.

Finally with the Union effectively running the Southern Economy cotton would still be exported to Europe, taking away the King Cotton Weapon, (If it ever existed) from the CSA. The reaction of the socially conservative British, and French to a fratricidal war wouldn't be positive for the Southern Cause. In fact they would be appalled, at the breakdown of law & order that would endanger their interests in the Cotton Trade. Just what would they be recognizing? Bandit leaders?

If you mean a hybrid war like the War of the American Revolution they did that. The Confederate Cavalry operated quite successfully against Union lines of communications, even raiding into Union States. Lack of resources, and the need to maintain conventional armies to defend strategic areas limited the extent of these kind of operations. Unlike the British in the ARW the Union was able to garrison Southern Population Centers, effectively controlling militia activities. Spying was rife on both sides, and helped both conduct operations.

So I don't see an insurgency strategy working for the CSA. The psychology of the South simply wouldn't support the kind of terrorist tactics of modern insurgencies, or even a kind of Spanish National Guerilla War of the Napoleonic Invasion. Jefferson Davis was no Mao, and Robert E Lee was no Lin Biao.
 
Plus Union forces would likely get some information from African Americans

An typical insurgency sows terror and dissention in the ranks of its opponents. That would mean operations like staging attacks on loyalist southerners and making it look like slaves and having slaves personally loyal to them win over northern troops and then stage attacks on them. That gets to Belisarius's point you would need a critical mass of leadership willing to also conduct operations against civilians as the Vietcong did which isn't easy under the traditional regional conception of honor.
 
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The Union Berdan's sharpshooters actally had been official Guerillias in green uniforms for tactical reasons. There had been many units in rhe Civil war commited to partisanship and Guerilia warfare with armed non combatants also had been in many terrtitories during the ACW and ow level insurgency also persisted after that for a while. The Jesse James Gang for example basically had been leftovers of former pro Confederate Guerillia fighters turning regular outlaws with the years passing byJesse James himself being a Guerrilia veteran .
 
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