July 3 - Gettysburg. 144 years ago today.

SaintJ said

I'll defer to your far superior scholarship on this issue in the particulars, but constantly trying to take the war to a far larger and industrially superior enemy just 80 years after a guerilla warfare of attrition had won the nation independence....too much honor and not enough judgment.

It's just my opinion, Cav.

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The political structure that the South was thrust into by the very nature of secession as well as the foreign policy objectives it was trying to accomplish forced the South into that position. And that position largely dictated the military strategy that followed.

It wasn't a straightforward proposition of "We can bleed the US dry for 10 years or we can all gather in one place and let them wipe the floor with us"

Personnally I think the emphasis on "world opinion" is incredibly underrated in it's influence on the Civil War. We were a meeting between Earl Russell and Lord Palmerston in 1862 away from living in the CSA.