Conflict is inevitable. Nature enters into conflict as a part of its natural design. The fundamental elements of chemistry conflict. The weather is a product of competing forces. The flora and fauna conflict, more often than not, violently, and there are winners and losers. The world as we know it is the outcome of conflicts from the past, and the future is made by the conflicts of today.
The potential for conflict is infinite, but the responses to conflict are not. There can be a war, with a winner or loser. There can be a negotiation, with the competitors deciding the negotiated outcome is better than the cost and risk of a war. There can be appeasement, where one side gives in to avoid a war. And there can be deterrence, where one or both sides see the conflict, but decline to move forward to open war because the cost is too great.
In this short series, we shall look at examples of each of the outcomes of human conflict.
Defeat
Gen. Robert E. Lee
In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee thought he could swing the war for the Confederacy by invading the north and threatening the capital city, Washington DC. While this effort was not likely to result in a successful sacking of the capital, it was likely, as Lee reasoned, to influence the upcoming 1864 election and work against Abraham Lincoln who was seeking reelection. This plan may have worked, but instead of discouraging the Union forces, it brought Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia into close combat with a large Union force at the Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg. The loss here for Lee and his army was catastrophic, and from that summer onward, time was running out for the Confederacy. In the spring of 1865, less than two years later, Lee surrendered his army, and at the same time, the dream of a separate nation formed from the Southern states.
As far as surrenders go, the terms offered to Lee, and the condition under which they were offered, were more than generous. Lee’s exhausted army was surrounded, and the Confederate capital city of Richard was about to be sacked. General Ulysses Grant sent one of his youngest generals, George Custer, to deliver a message to Lee saying that further fighting was pointless, and that terms would be generous if Lee would surrender soon. Knowing that his time had run out, Lee met Grant nearby, and the terms were signed.
While those terms were generous for Lee and the rest of the Southern leadership, in that they prevented thousands of men from swinging at the end of a rope, the consequence for the South was dire. Defeat is bad for a country. Nearly one out of every four fighting age men in the South was dead. Hundreds of thousands of others were horribly injured. The state of Southern agriculture was poor. The primary labor force of the South, black slaves, were no longer available, and no plans for their replacement had been made. The South had been under a naval blockade for four years.
The Southern states were formally occupied by the US Army for most of the next 20 years as the states were slowly granted sovereign rights again and their elected officials allowed to return to office. The leadership of the Confederacy was barred from office, however, and so a whole new generation of leaders had to be discovered. The economic structure of the South, from its banks to its land ownership patterns, was disrupted and the South lagged the North for the next 150 years. In some ways, it still does. The psychology of defeat, the very idea of a lost cause, persisted for many generations after the war ended. Southern governments blended their old battle flag into state emblems and seals as a form of protest. Monuments to the leaders of the South, including Robert E. Lee, were everywhere. Only recently have those emblems finally begun to formally disappear.
When Federal occupation ended, the South began to segregate the black and white populations again, thus setting up another legal confrontation 100 years later. If the goal was to establish a society of perfect racial harmony, and guarantee equal rights under law, and further, change the hearts of men, the Civil War failed, and the next 100 years of legal isolation of the black population demonstrates the limits of victory and defeat if the defeat does not include destruction. The war ended slavery, and it kept the Untied States intact, but war is embittering, and the negotiated ending, while a total defeat for the South, was not like the utter and complete destruction of the German or Japanese governments a few decades later. Southern occupation was not nearly as comprehensive as what the Japanese endured, and racial antagonisms were clearly present in the North was well. Lee spared the South an even worse fate by surrendering when he did. And, critically, neither he nor any of the rest of the leadership of the Confederacy began a guerilla war against the North post-surrender.
War should be started with a battle plan and an exit plan fully formed, and all contingencies gamed out. Sadly, few wars start with complete plans in place. The planning may reveal the true total cost of war, and that stops many war planners in their tracks. It might take a certain willful blindness to start a war in the first place, and the world is littered with battle sites like Gettysburg and New Market and Antietam, where belligerents met their fate.
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