if you mean "total war" in the clausewitz sense, i'm not sure the south had the kind of industrialization to qualify. the taiping rebellion preceded the civil war by like a decade and they killed like 30 million people using the same tactics with considerably greater civilian involvement and targeting non-combatants and just going around and fucking shit up.

ancient cultures burned fields, laid siege, and killed every male and enslaved the women. hey they were democratic and shit.

while i agree it was damn close to the tradional clausewitz definition, but crippling an agrarian society(average family) that way had been done before in pretty similar fashion. while there was artillery and even some early submarines and whatnot----the civil war was still pretty much:if you want to stop them from continuing to make war you had to kill the other guy or starve him and do it up-close and personal, half-a-century later it was all about factories and arms races and gasoline and making military-industrial complexes. the civil war was closer to rome and carthage than britain and germany, imho.