Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

But it may be said here generally that against the vast superiority of the North in material resources and in the apparatus of war, the South had a set-off in certain advantages, not appreciable perhaps by superficial observers, but which constitute a most important element in a true historical estimate of the match between the two belligerents. The coarse popular opinion in the North was that the superiority of numbers would give it an overwhelming preponderance of strength. But something more than numbers makes armies; and war is not a duel, a single contest despatched according to an established routine. The South had a superiour animation in the war. She stood on the defensive; and should thus have been able to put against the invading force two enemies: the opposing army and the people. She had, also, on her side one single advantage which should have been decisive of the contest — an advantage which no numbers could really surmount, or skill effectively circumvent. That advantage was space. It had been the victor in many former wars When Napoleon invaded Russia, he won battles, he obtained the very object of his march; but space defeated him — the length of the march front Warsaw to Moscow ruined him. When Great Britain attempted to subdue only that part of America that borders the Atlantic, space defeated her; her armies took the principal cities, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, Richmond; but victories were barren of result, the Continental troops, dispersed in the country, were easily re-assembled, the lines of military occupation existed only on paper, and the process of conquest became one of hopeless repetition, and was at last abandoned in despair.

In an intelligent view of the precedents of history it might safely be predicted that the South, fighting on its own soil, and for it, and occupying a territory of more than 728,000 square miles in extent, and in which the natural features of the country, in mountain, river, and swamp, were equivalent to successive lines of fortification, would be victor in the contest, however unequally matched in men and the material of war, unless the management of her affairs should become insane, or her people lose the virtue of endurance.