Acacia Towers
Bowers
May 3, 2014
Civil War At the start of the Civil War, the Union and the Confederacy were both unprepared. The Union had a much stronger military. They also were stronger in the areas of politics and economy. The North was industrialized before the South and most of the industry for the Confederates was in Northern, Southern states. The South lacked industries that the North had which gave them a lack of cannons, guns, and other militia necessities. They did have some factories however, but most of them were located in the Northern, Southern states which would become an issue when those states joined the Union. The Confederacy also had trouble raising money for war through things like bonds, printing currency, and taxes. The South did have a good militia. They had less people, but better generals for the most part. The Confederates basically had to create an army and government from scratch and the North already had both of these. The Confederates had a plan. Their plan was called the “King Cotton Diplomacy”. They believed that they could get the United Kingdom and France to side with them by trading them cotton. These countries relied strongly on the South for their cotton production and they believed that threatening to restrict cotton flow, the two countries would support them in the Civil War. They also believed that the North depended on their cotton. The South came up with a strategy that would allow them to stay where they were, invade, avoid battles that could kill them all, and outlast the northern militia. They tried to make new factories so they would have more supplies for war, but because of the location of most of their factories that supplied their militia equipment, they had a lack of weapons. The Lincoln administration eventually stopped the sale of cotton from the South to the North. The European countries didn’t want to go against the Union and they could get cotton from other places, so the Cotton Diplomacy didn’t really work out in the South’s favor. Throughout the war, the south suffered tremendously.
