Yeah, sometimes wars of attrition are the best way of going about something. I never thought of Lee as much of a general because I remember he was praised for “his unorthodox tatics” that frightened Mclellan away, but Lee still lost more men than Mclellan.
I had a quote where Grant claimed Nathan Bedford Forrest was the one true military genius of the war, but I can’t find it.
Forrest was a private when he first joined the confederacy. He had no formal military training at all and managed to still raise to general and be one of the most respected men in the war. He is usually dismissed because “he never fought in large scale battles”, but everything he did he did extremely well with no training. So I think that he would have done the same he did at everything else in the war.
Doesn’t that strike you as being a rather dumb approach to the war?
Lee continued to stubbornly fight on for Virginia long after it was obvious that Virginia could not be held at the cost of teh rest of the CSA. It strikes me as painfully obvious that Lee’s tactic of fighting on in Virginia whil the Union ran rampant to the south of him is not a war-winning strategy.
Lee’s fanatic protectiveness of his home state was admirable in terms of dedication and loyalty but it did the CSA no favors.
Tamerlane:
On the contrary, I believe abandoning Richmond was exactly what Lee should have done, and I think he should have done it early. Defending Richmond doomed his army and the Confederacy.
The one thing you can’t deny the South had in abundance was space. The Union army might have had more than enough firepower to overwhlem the rebels in a fight, but they certainly did not have many men when one considers the staggering size of the “country” they were out to conquer. A wiser general - or, perhaps more fairly, a wiser Jefferson Davis - would have traded space for time and tried to prevent the division of his forces. Lee chose to sit in Virginia, slowly bleeding to death, while Union armies tore through the heart of the country he was supposed to be defending.
I don’t mean to place the blame for the rebels’ defeat entirely at Lee’s door because it doesn’t all belong there, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that his chosen approach was a guaranteed loss. And I’m surprised Grant is regarded as being a mere author of attrition victories; it’s obvious from his record that he was tactically very capable.
I would argue that Grant was actually employing a very clever strategy during the 1864 campaign. What the Confederates derisively called “fight and turn right” was in actuality a series of attempted strategic turning movements.
At the Wilderness, Grant realized that he had the Confederates fixed and therefore moved off in the night to his left, heading for Spotsylvania Court House. Had he succeeded in gaining that position, he would have been astride Confederate communications with Richmond, leaving the ANV in the position of having to assault a prepared, superior Union position, finding a way around so they could get back between the AoP and Richmond, or, as often happens in such near-hopeless cases (Illerda, Ulm), giving up. The attempt to take Spotsylvania failed largely because the Wilderness was aflame. Dick Anderson’s Corps could find no place to bivouac during the night among the fires, so Anderson decided to march straight to Spotsylvania, where he met the first arriving Union troops.
Grant tried to pull of the strategic turning movement several times thereafter, but Spotsylvania was his first and best chance. The strategy is airtight.
It keeps the ANV “fixed,” retains the initiative and forces ANV to react to his movements.
By constantly moving to his left in a closing orbit around Richmond, Grant keeps his back safely to his supply lines coming from the Chesapeake Bay. Should the ANV attempt to cut that supply line, Grant can simply move on Richmond.
I suggest that the primary objective of the campaign failed. That objective was to place his forces between the ANV and Richmond, forcing the Confederates to attack the Union forces in exactly the same way that Grant was breaking upon the Confederates. However, the secondary objective, keeping the enemy constantly engaged and wearing him down, worked just as well in the long run.
Above all, it kept the ANV, the most mobile, dangerous Confederate force, under constant observation and attrition, leaving Sherman free hand to clean up the rest of the South. By forcing ANV into a seige at Petersburg, it denied Lee the advantage of using interior lines to link up with Johnston, who was being steadily pushed north.
Among the few comments Lee made about the campaign, one was that he was “powerless” to combat Grant’s strategy. There’s the genius in the plan. The Coalition defeated Napoleon by not fighting him when he was personally in command on the battlefield. Grant defeated Lee by forcing Lee to fight, constantly, instead of giving him time to plan and perform another strategic hat-trick.
While I agree that the holding of Richmond at all costs, (i.e., the cost of the war), was fatal, I am not sure that abandoning Richmond was a viable option.
Richmond was the site of several ironworks, foundries, and munitions plants. I am not sure that the South had the wherewithal to pick up and move that manufacturing the way that Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany actually did during WWII. Perhaps a relocation to Birmingham (or, perhaps, Athens) might have worked had it begun in 1861, but at that time, the South looked as though it would win on the field. By 1863, that sort of movement would have been much more difficult, and once Sherman reached Georgia, it was too late to mean anything.
>>>>At the Wilderness, Grant realized that he had the Confederates fixed <<<
That’s an interesting way to look at the brutal ass-whupping Grant took at Lee and Longstreet’s hands at the Wilderness! <g>
I wish I could have witnessed the mood in the ranks the next morning. The only thing that saved the Union Army from having its flank rolled up by Longstreet’s corps the way it was at 2nd Manassass, resulting in a route of the Union army, was darkness and fire.
And everyone knew it.
But the next day, the troops formed on the roads expecting to march back north after the drubbing, just like McClellan, just like Burnside, just like Pope, just like Hooker.
But the didn’t. the order came to march on Spotsylvania. And a huge cheer went up in the Union ranks. Months of brutal, tough slugging lay ahead, but for the first time, the men in the Army of the Potomac could see the end of the war.