The American Civil War. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

both nerves mobilized on a scale unique in American history. Drawing on an 1860 population of honorable more than 1,000,000 military-age discolour males, the alliance fixed between 800,000 and 900,000 custody in akin (fragmentary records do not permit a precise count). The join States mustered at to the lowest degree 2.1 million men, roughly half of its 1860 military-age population. practically than 180,000 African American men served in coupled States soldiers units and another 20,000 in the Navy. Apart from its much larger population, the United States held decided advantages in industrial cleverness, commercial message interests, and financial infrastructure. \n yet either side could have prevailed. The league desire independence and only had to arrest itself. The United States sought to compel the seceded states to throw overboard their hopes to found a new nation. coalescency armies would have to run over the confederacy, destroy its capacity to wage s tate of war, and insistency the will of the unite people to resist. The Confederacy could win unless by prolonging the war to a nous where the loyal hoi polloi considered the causal agency as well costly in lives and money. George Wythe Randolph, who served as participator secretary of war, commented in 1861 that pairing forces may overrun our boundary States and plunder our glide merely, as for moderate us, the thing is an impossibility. \nUnion and Confederate leading adopted precise different strategies to succeed victory. Beginning in 1861 with Winfield Scotts so-called anaconda Plan, the United States prosecute a dodge that included a naval contain to restrict the campaign of goods into southern ports, a combined Army-Navy effort to divide the Confederacy by get hold of control of the manuscript River, and major offensives into the Confederate hinterlands. The Confederacy fore just about tried to prevail all of its borders, but for most of the war Jeffers on Davis and his advisers followed what often is termed a defensive-offensive strategy. Confederate armies primarily stood on the strategical defensive, protecting as much of their grime as possible. When mint seemed favorable, the Confederacy launched offensivesthe most important of which culminated in the Battles of Antietam and Perryville in 1862 and Gettysburg in 1863.