Sydstaternas svaga länk

Sammanfattning: ”The prisoners taken here were better clothed than any we had seen before. All provided with overcoats and jackets or [sic] a much better material than our own. They were of English manufacture, much darker than the United States uniform, and this furnished conclusive evidence of successful blockade running”. These words were noted on Confederates from Hay´s Louisiana brigade by their Union captors after the battle of Kelly´s Ford in November 1863. A strange testimony it seems. Many would expect the Confederate Army to look according to myth of the ragged rebel by then. This work is a theory testing case study about Confederate logistics in the American Civil War. The method used is Critical Realism. Railroads, steam ships and wagon trains, operated in a transportation network over the Southern states. This study applies two theoretical perspectives of logistics to find out what was working and what failed the Confederate defensive war strategy. Despite the odds, the South managed to raise an army, adequate for fulfilling their strategic goal of defending their territory, utilize interior lines of communication and put pressure on Washington D.C until the North would consider it not worth the effort. However the Confederate cause was lost due to top-down micro management and a transportation network that utterly failed to get abundant supplies to where they were needed. States rights hampered the mobilization of much needed resources. The agricultural South, a nation of farmers, were successful in arming its troops but failed to feed them.