"In Dixie's land we take our stand, and live or die for Dixie!"
"To arms! To arms! And conquer peace for Dixie!"
"To arms! To arms! And conquer peace for Dixie"
In the US, once it became clear that war between the loyal Union states and the slave-holding rebellious states 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 USA, the Confederacy had a key advantage in win condition: fighting a defensive war. Whereas the United States had to compel the 11 wayward states back into the Union through projection of military power, the CSA only had to "hold on" and convince the loyal US population that the war wasn't worth fighting. Put it another way, the Confederacy didn't need to capture Chicago or Boston to win the war, whereas the Union had to (and eventually did) capture and hold virtually all rebellious cities and population centers to force a Confederate surrender. Thus, despite the disadvantages in manpower and material resources, the Confederacy had a viable win condition in exhausting the United States' willingness to conduct the war and concede independence. Sound familiar? By the by, the Rebels didn't actually have repeaters: they couldn't make them, afford to buy them or even produce ammunition for those they captured. The hope that England would be forced to intervene on their side by the power of "king cotton" proved unfounded because England had other sources for cotton (most notably British India) and had already stockpiled much more cotton than the South realized. And England was even more dependent upon Northern wheat. Even if English industry had been as reliant on Southern cotton as the believers in "king cotton" believed, English survival relied on the North's food exports. And, of course, there was that whole slavery thing...note
Nevertheless, the Confederates did have a strong advantage in leadership (at least in the Eastern Theater, which was more important). For the first half of the war, at least by July 1863 or so, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were an almost unbeatable team. Lincoln, on the other hand, had tremendous difficulty in securing competent leadership in the aforementioned Eastern Theater. It's worth pointing out, however, that the Western theater was a very different story. The principle Confederate army here, the Army of Tennessee, faced an almost unbroken string of defeats and setbacks; the only major victory was Chickamauga, the fruits of which were almost immediately thrown away at the botched siege of Chattanooga. There was thus an interesting phenomenon in which both sides' respective leadership tended to cluster best in opposite theaters: Lee, Jackson, Stuart, and Longstreet cluster in the East, and Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Thomas clustered (initially) in the West. This initial mismatch eventually ran out of steam, however. When Grant was made General in Chief of all United States armies, and personally accompanied the Army of the Potomac, Lee suddenly faced a Union opponent who was a skilled big picture strategist with the will to use his superior forces to grind Lee down relentlessly. This was in tandem with his trusted subordinate, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who had the determined pragmatic ruthlessness to destroy the Confederacy's morale and viability by cutting a destructive swath through it. By 1864, the only hope the South had to win was to hold out in sieges from the Union army until the North, sick of war with no end in sight, would vote for a government more open to a peace agreement. But then Atlanta fell and Lincoln was reelected, showing everyone that the Confederacy had lost.
The average southern soldier came from a rural, agrarian background and were generally used to privation and hardship and familiar with firearms and horses. The first allowed a great deal of strategic and tactical mobility (especially in the case of Jackson's famous "foot cavalry") and the last gave the South an inherent advantage in cavalry that they would maintain until the last year of the war. If Johnny Reb had one disadvantage against the more citified Billy Yank (other than a general lack of resources) it was disease resistance, as surviving city life in the 19th century required a powerful immune system.
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 (which proved to be a Mutual Kill, as the Hunley sank with all hands soon after). Still, they were never able to break the Union blockade. A number of foreign-built high seas raiders, such as CSS Alabama, are also well-known among history buffs, notable for causing a decade-long diplomatic dispute between US and Britain (who built and sold the ship) and the fact that these ships never actually came anywhere near the waters of Confederacy, as they operated from overseas bases with mostly mercenary crews except for their officers. Some, such as French-built ironclad raider CSS Stonewall were taken over by US government after the war and sold to foreign countries where they were occasionally involved in other historical events (The Stonewall, for example, became the Japanese Kōtetsu and later the Azuma and was involved in the wars of the Meiji Restoration).
