by Jerry Curtis

Created on: March 31, 2007   Last Updated: July 26, 2008

Actually, the South could have won the Civil War. By 1862 General Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had inflicted several embarrassing defeats on a succession of incompetent Union Generals. Had it not been for Lincoln's patience, Lee's bad luck at Antietam and Grant's victories in the West, it is possible that the northern public would have grown weary of fighting for a cause they had no stomach for. Also, had Lee won at Gettysburg in 1863 and turned his army towards Washington, D.C., the North also would have been forced to sue for peace. Again, Lincoln could have been defeated for a second term in 1864, but his luck held as Sherman captured Atlanta and reinvigorated a war-weary northern electorate. Had Lincoln's Democrat opponent George McClellan carried the election, it is likely that the South could have negotiated a deal that would have ended in breakup of the Union.

So what if the South had won or otherwise negotiated for its independence? One interesting scenario is in short work published back in the 1950's entitled "If the South Had Won the Civil War." This article, in the form of an alternative history, appeared in serial form in LIFE Magazine. The alternative sequence of events plays out as follows: General Grant dies in a fall from his horse (Grant actually did fall from his horse after he drank too much at a party in New Orleans, but he survived the accident). Without Grant's leadership, the North loses the war. Lincoln flees Washington, D.C., and the Confederate Army marches in and declares martial law in the capital. The North, defeated, moves its capital to Columbus, Ohio, (renaming the city "Columbia") and the South takes over Washington, D.C. as the new capital of the Confederacy. Lee becomes the second president of the Confederacy, and General Pete Longstreet the third. Lincoln lives to a ripe old age becoming a sad footnote of history, a pariah blamed for the breakup of his country.

The alternative history ends with the South developing side by side with the north. During both world wars, the Confederacy sides with the Allied Powers against Germany. The slaves are free by 1890. There is no Spanish-American war, because Cuba has been annexed by the Confederacy. The Panama Canal is dug as a joint Union-Confederacy venture. Finally, both the North and South decide during the 1950's that it may be time to reunite, so they schedule a new constitutional convention with the goal of rejoining the United States with the Confederate States. Also, the

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