re: Did the South ever really have a chance (Civil War)?

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, we were the vastly superior woodsman and fighters, h

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This one always gets me. The Southern officer corps was better at the beginning of the war, but that advantage had evened out by the middle of the war through attrition and battlefield selection pressure.

But the individual Union soldiers were a lot more formidable and courageous than Southern sympathizers would have you believe - in that regard they were the equal of their Southern counterparts. How many times did backwoods and rural men from Michigan, Indiana Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Maine step up when it mattered?

There are towns in western Michigan that lost 50% of their male population in the war.