Edrei A. answered • 12/15/20
English and History Tutor, below average hourly rate !
The simple truth about the confederate government was that it was barely functional at all . This was a major part of why they lost (and perhaps were destined to lose since the inception of the rebellion). Sure, during the start of the war they had many military successes and even came close to taking the Capitol many times, but military actions and battlefield decisions are rarely the matters of elected officials anyway. The Confederates had very apt generals, men trained in warfare at places like West Point, and this served them well up until people realized that rifled muskets plus Napoleonic warfare tactics equals massive slaughter and bloodshed. Jefferson Davis led a somewhat inept government from Richmond. Dissension was rampant - some wanted a ‘federal’ tax to fund the army, others opposed this wholeheartedly, saying they were becoming too much like the government they’d just broken away from. And increasingly, especially once the war dragged on and the Confederate army became smaller and smaller, unable to resupply more men to the front, issues in government became extremely erratic . By the end of the war, the state governments even started offering emancipation to slaves as a condition to fight for the South. Moreover, legally, the Confederacy was not a government, but an organized rebellion. It was never a nation, Davis held no real legal office; the entire reason why southerners fought the war was to establish a new nation as they saw it , one were slavery would be enshrined forever. It was the fact that the North had Abraham Lincoln to lead it, and Ulysses S. Grant to fight for it, that it triumphed. Once Lincoln found Grant and got itself organized, the Confederacy was on a path to defeat .
