Postscript — Not Far Enough

Abstract

Shelby Foote in his monumental work on the American Civil War (Foote 1958–1974) relates a conversation after Gettysburg between a British Army military observer to the Confederate States and some Confederate commanders. The observer remarked: ‘Cannot you see that your system feeds upon itself? Your men do wonders, but each time it is at a price that you cannot afford.’ By this he meant the attritional damage to Southern Confederate society not only from the loss of men and material, but particularly from the impact on the younger generation who provided many of its junior officers. It was this disparity in resources that President Abraham Lincoln called ‘the arithmetic’. The North, with its significantly more dynamic economy, and larger resources of raw materials and manpower, could absorb losses even on a more proportional scale than that of the Confederate South, and would still end up with more than enough to win the war in the long-term. And although history has tended to romanticise the significant military achievements and superiority of Confederate forces over their Union opponents, in truth the South was fighting for hopelessly bad cause. It was fighting to maintain the dominance of an economic system that was in decline; that was supported by a substantially hierarchical society that was at odds with the ‘American Dream’ of personal achievement and social mobility; that was sustained by the morally indefensible practice of slavery; and which, in the long-term, by deforestation and agricultural monoculture, was stripping the fragile physical environment and creating the conditions for subsequent ecological disasters.