Rebels With Repeaters

Once it became clear that war between the abolitionist North and the slave-holding South was inevitable, the Confederate States quickly passed a motion to get an army together for what would eventually prove to be a futile war.

Compared to the North, the South had a relatively easy strategy: a defensive war. They knew the land and only had to bleed out the Union, whereas the North had a grand strategy to cutoff the southern states from European trade and split it in two with the capture of the Mississippi. However, the South was pretty much doomed to failure. The only training many Confederates had was through hunting, and in addition, there were almost no factories to provide munitions.

Nevertheless, the South did have a strong advantage in leadership. For the first half of the war, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were an almost unbeatable team. Lincoln, on the other hand, fired his Union generals after almost every single engagement. Nevertheless, their tactics only slowed the inevitable, as the North had a much larger manpower pool and industrial capacity. Many historians agree that even if the South won engagements such as Gettysburg or Antietam, they still would have been overwhelmed in the long run.

As for their navy, the South did have two claims to fame: the ironclad Virginia (née Merrimack), one of the first iron-plated vessels; and the submarine Hunley, the first to sink an enemy ship. Still, they were never able to break the Union blockade.