"On Christmas Eve 1860 — months before Fort Sumter — Sherman told a Southern friend exactly how the war would end, down to the blockade and the industrial gap. His friend wrote it down.
Sherman was superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary (later LSU) when South Carolina seceded. Four days later, on Christmas Eve 1860, he was talking with a professor there named David French Boyd, who spoke of the coming war lightly.
Boyd recorded Sherman's reply:
"You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing!
You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too...
The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail.
Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail."
What strikes me is how much of it proved accurate: the blockade, the industrial disparity, the early Confederate successes followed by attrition.
Two details worth knowing:
Boyd remembered that Sherman was almost in tears as he spoke. Sherman later described the seminary as the pleasantest home he had known.
Three weeks later, Louisiana state forces seized the U.S. Arsenal at Baton Rouge. Sherman resigned, and his letter to Governor Thomas Overton Moore opens by quoting the motto carved above the seminary's door: "By the liberality of the General Government of the United States. The Union — esto perpetua."
Postscript: Boyd later served in the Confederate army and was captured. Sherman arranged his exchange. After the war Boyd returned to the seminary, rebuilt it into Louisiana State University, and the two men corresponded until Sherman's death in 1891."
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