I’m copying and pasting this from Quora:
The Confederacy as we know it didn’t even survive the Civil War. Several counties and areas controlled by deserters and Unionists in Southern states voted to rejoin the Union and break off from the Confederacy at least a year or more before 1865 because the Confederate government was both incompetent and corrupt. West Virginia actually did. As David Williams notes in his excellent work, Bitterly Divided, “Most southerners eventually came to feel they would be better off with the war over and the Union restored. To many, the Confederacy was the real enemy. It conscripted their men, impressed their supplies, and starved them out. It made war on those who dared withhold their support and made life miserable for the rest.” Williams quotes a South Carolina farmer who had had his livestock “impressed” – taken without compensation for the “war effort” – as saying “The sooner this damned Government fell to pieces the better it would be for us.”
The Confederacy and the South are not the same. Most Southerners had opposed secession. The so called secessionist conventions were held because secessionists knew simply having public votes would result in the defeat of the secessionist movement. While less than a third of Southerners owned slaves, the conventions were dominated by slave-holding planters, just like the Confederate Congress.
The Confederacy could never have survived anyway because it couldn’t even feed itself, let alone prosper. Even before the War, the South had had to import most of its food from the Northern states because its incredibly greedy planters only planted cash crops – tobacco and cotton. During the war, despite pleas from many quarters to the planters to plant corn or beans, they continued to plant cash crops. There was too much money to be made and they controlled they legislature. Speculation added to the misery. Salt went from 50 cents a sack before the War to $80. That’s 16,000% inflation. No society on earth can endure that.
Anti-Confederate Virginians in Montgomery and Floyd Counties formed the State of Southwest Virginia and elected a governor and a “brigadier general of deserters.” Colonies of anti-Confederates in Marion County Mississippi and Washington Parish Louisiana did the same. Irwin County Georgia voted to call for the Confederacy to surrender. Hart and Lumpkin County residents asked the Governor to arrange a “speedy peace.”
Jefferson Davis himself admitted that two-thirds of Confederate soldiers had deserted by the fall of 1864. The soldiers had little real choice. Because of the greed of the planters, their families back home were starving. That they could get shot for desertion if they were caught meant little if their wives and children were dead or dying. And they mostly weren’t caught. There were simply too many. Lee sent out a 50 man detachment to round deserters up and every one of them deserted themselves.
In Richmond and other cities starving women broke into stores and government commissaries and took whatever food or dry goods they could. At least one commissary officer, aware of their plight, simply opened his doors and let them take what they wanted. It was the only decent thing to do, but most others never did it.
Also, unlike in the North, Secessionists often simply murdered their neighbors if they were pro-Union. The largest lynching in U.S. history took place in Gainesville Texas where secessionists rounded up over forty men and simply hanged them without trial or evidence. In Arkansas three people were hanged for having read an anti slavery book. A Methodist minister was held in jail for a year for doing the same thing. An Episcopal minister in Texas who had been born in the South was hanged simply because his sect, Northern Episcopalians, was anti-slavery, though he himself had never advocated abolition. As the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes eventually found, that’s not a recipe for national longevity. The irony was not lost on most Southerners. This was no way to win freedom.
Long before the War started, Southern tradesmen knew slavery impoverished them. They weren’t idiots. You can’t compete with free labor. That’s also why so many actually fought for the Union and not the Confederacy. They wanted the Confederacy to lose. Williams estimates a quarter of Union troops were made up of Southerners.
Confederate enlisted men also knew it was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” as they called it. They were fighting, they said, “for the rich man’s negro,” for the planters’ right to keep slaves, not for themselves. Planters with more than 20 slaves were exempt from the draft. Few if any volunteered.
The Confederacy, like Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, lied and murdered its way into existence. All three were based in racism. The problem with racism isn’t simply that it’s “wrong.” The problem is it makes you stupid. The Confederacy didn’t murder 6 million Jews but it did try to keep enslaved 3 million people in the name of “freedom” and it savaged and impoverished its own citizens. Not a winning strategy in any century.
Sources:
Williams, David. 2008. Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War. New Press, New York.
Pickering, David and Falls, Judith. 2000. Brush Men and Vigilantes: Civil War Dissent in Texas. Texas A&M University Press, College Station.
Marten, James. 1990. Texas Divided: Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State 1856-1874. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington.