Muh prairie niggers day...
(media.scored.co)
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The difference was that the southerners were actually full of hatred and convictions and they had an ideology. Most union soldiers didn't even want to be there. A hypothetical Civil War would have been an industrial meat grinder that would've made the first world War look civil. Lee was more saving the yankee population from being ripped to shreds in an unwinnable insurgency than he was saving the south by surrendering. With the human wave tactics of the North, and with how atrociously bad the US has historically handled insurgencies, it would have been millions, or at the very least twice as much union dead easy.
Ain't that just typical.
Mechanization was on the horizon
Pro confederate militias in border or mixed opinion states were already more than willing to use actual terrorism and mass murder of pro union civilians to defeat union morale. Not that I condone that, but you'd basically be taking that and amplifying it to a massive scale. The southerners barely viewed the Yankees as human anymore as the war dragged on and as the union war crimes in the south got worse and worse. The difference is that the southerners actually *hated* their enemy. As I already said, the average union conscript barely even knew what was happening at all.
A war against people who *actually* want to put you in the ground is a different beast. Thats the same reason the eastern front and the pacific wars were so brutal.
Lee knew that, and knew that it would be a war of unbridled carnage. So he surrendered.