But I Thought it was about the Tariff…

I’ll write more a bit later about Jeff Record’s latest on counter-insurgency, but I’d like to one of Matt’s comments. Wondering why the Confederacy didn’t engage in an insurgent campaign rather than a conventional military campaign that favored the strengths of the North:

The trouble is that insurgency couldn’t possibly have achieved some of the major political goals of the CSA leadership — namely maintaining slavery and the plantation economy. Insurgents could have made it impossible for the federal government to effectively govern the South, but wouldn’t have been able to maintain the apparatus of repression necessary to shore up the socio-economic system. You couldn’t fade away into the hills (or wherever) while simultaneously keeping control over the South’s black population, who would have run away, rallied to the Union cause, etc., etc., etc. just as they did wherever CSA territory came to be occupied by the Union. By contrast, surrender actually proved reasonably effective as a method of maintaining the plantation economy and, if not slavery, white supremacy.

The Confederacy did employ guerrilla tactics in some areas (Missouri, Northern Virginia), but Matt is largely correct in noting the conventional focus of the Confederate Army. He’s also right about the reason why; maintaining slavery (and, more generally, the institutions of white supremacy) was much more important to the Southern aristocracy than indepedence. Given the choice, they opted for a strategy less likely to succeed, but one that gave them the chance to maintain their property and social position. Propertied aristocrats, with some notable exceptions, just don’t make great revolutionaries. Now, in fairness, parts of the Confederate power structure (Davis, Lee) preferred independence to slavery by 1865, but they arrived at this position only after four years of brutal struggle and still weren’t able to convince the bulk of the Confederate political class that this was the right choice.