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, to an extent. For the first half of the war, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were an almost unbeatable team. The Army of Northern Virginia let Lee have his pick of talent, so they put their vest best right between Richmond and DC. The further west, the worse the officers; Lee had a habit of dismissing men he considered inadequate very quickly. It can be very well argued that the Civil War was won in the West and that Lee was only defeated once the Confederacy became too economically depleted to even feed and arm even him. No Union army ever swept across the Potomac and seized Richmond during the war.

Curiously, Lee in his memoirs named Maclellan, yeah that one, as his toughest opponent. Cautiousness aside, he was a competent battle fighter and very difficult to play into traps and gambits that Lee needed to pull off in order to have any kind of victory, especially to avoid Pyrrhic victory.

Lincoln, on the other hand, fired his Union generals after almost every single engagement. Many of them were manifestly incompetent or cowardly, refusing to press advantages. Going for a total rout and kill wasn't the norm back then, but they would fight a bit, win a little, advance, then hit heavier resistance and retreat. Nevertheless, their tactics only slowed the inevitable, as the North had a much larger manpower pool and industrial capacity. It took Grant to properly press this advantage and stop giving a damn about the conventional wisdom that had been used before to wage the war. He wasn't a bad general, he just demanded results and most likely saved lives by pushing hard to win instead of protracting the war and letting more men die just over a longer period of time.

The South's procurement was a horrible mess. In short, if it shot, they'd take it in some way. They did not have meaningful industrial capacity and had to get guns from foreign trade a lot of the time — not a great situation when they were already poor to begin with and the Union Navy was blockading them the whole time. New York alone did field more soldiers over the course of the war than the South had, period. 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. Even if they had somehow taken DC, the Union had plans to get out the government and fight from further north. Even with the bottom half missing, the Union still had far more people and industry than the South did.

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.