A South Divided

Almost 150 years after the Civil War, historians are still assessing why the North won and why the South lost. Many point to the battlefields and exclaim that the war was won and lost there. But how many battles might have gone differently had the South been able to draw more on its human and material resources? (Or if the North had not begun drawing more and more heavily on Southern resources?) What if Lee's outnumbered armies at Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville had not just been able to drive the Federal armies back but able to annihilate them? What if western commanders had one or two extra corps available at the battles of Shiloh or Stones River, battles in which Southern armies were strong enough to drive their enemies to the edge of destruction, but not strong enough to force them over that edge? Could Grant have sustained the staggering losses of his eleven-month overland campaign without the constant influx of replacement soldiers, more than one hundred thousand of them black Southerners?