by Chris Allen

Created on: March 05, 2010

What if the South won the Civil War?

There has been much debate about what would have happened after the war had the South won the Civil War.  Many believe that after Washington was besieged and its leaders surrendered than everything would have ended right then and there and the United States would be two separate countries.

Most likely neither side would have stayed so open to two different countries, especially two so close together with so much open land in the West that both would wish to obtain for their own personal goals to beat the other.  An example of this can actually be found in Kansas leading up to the outset of the Civil War in 1861.  Kansas had been a new territory that was being considered for Statehood and many a Northerner and Southern men and their families raced to the state in order to vote just what it would enter the Union as, a free or slave state.  But hostilities broke out when the two sides began to clash head to head and it soon spread to a statewide conflict that didn’t end until after the Civil War.  Conflicting incidents such as this would create hostile tensions between the two nations.  After a time these tensions would undoubtedly bring war to their borders once again when the tensions exploded.  So no matter what at one point or another one of the two sides would have to force the other into submission to the other, one way or another.

Two Civil War generals understood what it would take to win the war.  William Tecumseh Sherman of the North and Thomas “Stonewall” Jonathan Jackson of the South.  Sherman spent the first half of the war in the Western Theater learning through his experiences in the region of just how hostile Southern citizens were to the Northern troops and by the time he reached command of the Western Army he had figured out that to beat them he had to show them that their cause was lost since their own government would not be able to protect them in the Southern heartland.  Jackson on their other hand believed pretty much from the get-go that in order for the South to truly win independence from the United States would mean total domination of the North.  In other words Jackson believed that every Northern city must be conquered and burned to the ground and its citizens made to realize that not allowing the South to live as it wished slaves or no, was an unforgivable wrong.

Roughly, if the South had indeed won the Civil War perhaps it might have ended with the surrendering of Washington D.C. but in all actuality it would more than likely have ended with many a major city in the North having been burned to the ground and its people subjugated much like it had in the South by the end of the war, or with two separate countries that would for decades continue to fight over the unoccupied, save for the Indians, lands of the West between both the Confederate States and United States of America and the state of California.  In a nutshell it would have been a much nastier outcome in loss of life than it actually had been.

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