I did read. Neither of you seem to be aware that Lee discarded the idea because it was inevitably lethal to his war. That’s exactly what happened when Grant took over the Army of the Potomac: even with every advantage he could muster and subordinate Union commanders making every possible mistake, Lee was boxed into a corner.
Lee knew he could not win with defensive tactics. He knew he could not win with defensive strategy. Johnson might have done so in Georgia, but not Lee in Virginia.
Lee took over command of the eastern front on June 1, 1862. And he launched his first major offensive into United States territory on September 4, 1862. For all practical purposes, Lee never tried a defensive strategy.
And Grant never directly commanded the Army of the Potomac. Grant was appointed to command all of the American armies (including the Army of the Potomac, which remained under the direct command of George Meade) on March 9, 1864.
A lot of the blame for that falls on Davis. He insisted on acting as overall commander of the Confederate military. Lee was wearing two hats in 1863: he was the principal military adviser (a de facto Chief of Staff) to Davis and he was the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia.
As an adviser, Lee may have seen some merit in transferring troops from Virginia to Mississippi. But as an Army commander, he saw his main responsibility as the Eastern Theatre and felt that the defense of Vicksburg was the responsibility of John Pemberton, who commanded the Army of Mississippi. It was Davis, who had no direct command, who should have been weighing the needs of the various theatres.
Problems like this would eventually result in the Confederate Congress taking the matter out of Davis’ hands and naming Lee as commander of all Confederate forces in January 1865. But by then it was too late. And even then Lee retained direct command of the Army of Northern Virginia (unlike Grant, who had Meade commanding the Army of the Potomac).
Hell no. That would have made Lincoln into a martyr and would have made the Union fight harder.
Both attempts to “invade” the North were defensive tactics in support of a defensive strategy. Neither attempt was made with the purpose of grabbing and holding Union territory, nor was either attempt made with the serious belief that it would result in capture of Washington, D.C. Both attempts were made in large measure to draw significant Union forces away from Richmond and its approaches, prolonging the time that that city could prevent its fall. A less important, though still important reason for the 1863 invasion was to provision the army off Union land, allowing Confederate farmers to recover from the demands of the war.
I perceive that the OP is not actually asking whether or not Lee should have tried a defensive strategy, but rather whether or not Lee should have avoided any invasive tactics, and simply dug in around Richmond, meeting the thrusts of the Union armies when and how he could. This set of tactics would have been equally disastrous for the Confederacy; all the same losses in the West and in Tennessee would have occurred, splitting the CSA and resulting in the eventual capture of Atlanta and march across Georgia. Indeed, absent some significantly different outcome on the Western front, or some reason for the blockade to have become ineffective, the South was never going to win the war.
The much more interesting question one could hypothesize is: suppose that the army of the CSA had managed to motivate itself to attack across the Potomac in 1861, with the goal of “liberating” Maryland and Delaware, and threatening Philadelphia and New York City, not to mention capturing the District of Columbia. Did they have an opportunity to do so, especially in that murky period after the original 90-day recruits disbanded and went home?
If we are just talking about the Eastern Theater, the Lee v. McClellan, Pope, McClellan again, Burnside, Hooker, Meade and Meade&Grant, aspect of the war, it may be helpful to regard the Maryland Campaign of 1862 and the Gettysburg Campaign as raids, not invasions. In neither case was the Army of Northern Virginia in a position to stage a long tern occupation of big hunks of Western Maryland and Southern Pennsylvania. Rather they seem to be attempts to throw a pending Union offensive off stride and to draw Union forces away from Virginia (which was getting pretty chewed up by the end of the summer of 1862) and to blunt Union offenses in the West.
Neither Antietam or Gettysburg, or even Shiloh and Perryville, Chickamauga and Atlanta and Nashville, convert an essentially defensive strategy into an offensive war. Each of those campaigns can be fairly argued to be nothing more that attempts to pre-empt Union offensives, spoiling attacks necessary to preserve a viable defensive posture and Southern territorial integrety.
With regard to Gettysburg in particular, having stumbled into a meeting engagement on the first day with his army scattered across Southern Pennsylvania and with his grand offensive thwarted on the second day and with no viable source of re-supply and unable to subsist his army of some 75,000 for more than two or three days in a fixed position, Lee’s options were pretty limited. He could either try to withdraw back into Virginia in the face of a strong and relatively undamaged enemy or he could gather his strength and attack again. That he chose to attack – precisely what any competent commander would have done in like circumstances – does not change the raid into an invasion and certainly does not create an offensive war plan.
While we are at it, while Grand was the commander in chief of all the Union armies, he recognized that containing the Army of Northern Virginia was the key to the war and he made his headquarters with the principle armies confronting the ANV. Meade may have been the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac but Grant was at his elbow from March of 1864 until the Spring of 1865, and Meade was for all practical purposes Grant’s executive officer.
I think I disagree with your premise. The Americans only fought defensively because they had to; they tried to invade Canada, but the vast majority of the rebels fought for their state, not for their country, and had little interest in traveling far. A defensive Revolution wasn’t a strategy but a necessity.
And Vietnam? The Tet Offensive was the worst moment for America in the entire war. The North Vietnamese had the superior army because they were superior in the only attribute that really mattered in the jungle: mobility.
I am sure Washington would happily have taken such strategic mobility as he could have.
But the Americans during the Revolutionary War had no physical means of moving troops on a large scale. The Thirteen Colonies had effectively no inter-colonial road network of any sort. All rivers in the Colonies flow, more or less, eastwards into the Atlantic. There were no railroads. The Royal Navy commanded the seas and could have stopped a large scale troop movement.
Moving troops around in 1776 wasn’t undesirable; it was usually impossible. As Bill Bryson once wryly noted, prior to the Continental Congress, more of the delegates had been to London than to Philadelphia, and that at a time when Philadelphia was at that time the second largest city in the English-speaking world. To get from a major city to another - say, to travel from New York City to Philadelphia - people hired guides. Moving around in the colonies was HARD.
The Communists were horribly massacred in the Tet Offensive, and indeed were consistently beaten by the Americans at every turn. They lost almost every single pitched battle they fought against the United States - maybe all of them, actually. They were not more mobile; they were LESS mobile. They won the war for the simple reason that they were willing to continue fighting it, not because they were more skilled warriors… a fact they were quite aware of.
It was an invasion not an “invasion” - you don’t take 75,000 soldiers into a foreign country and call it a recon patrol. And invading a country is kind of a strange definition of a defensive strategy (it wasn’t a tactic at all).
A “tactic” is any move taken to support an underlying “strategy”. The tactic of entering Union territory cannot truly be called an invasion unless the purpose was to grab and hold Union territory. As someone between our posts has noted, the two crossings of the Potomac can more properly be thoght of as raids, not invasions.
Exactly so. Lee knew he couldn’t make a permanent advance. All he could hope to do was buy time, gather resources, and maybe defeat the Union troops before they could call up enough force to crush him.
And of course, historically raids quite often were carried out with considerable forces.
“large parts of the armed forces of one geopolitical entity aggressively entering territory controlled by another such entity” - check.
“generally with the objective of either…forcing the partition of a country, altering the established government or gaining concessions from said government” - check.
“An invasion can be…part of a larger strategy to end a war” - check.
While I think it’s conceptually useful to think of the ANV campaigns that culminated at Antietam and Gettysburg as exceedingly large-scale, well-organized raids, they were invasions per Wikipedia’s definition and by the standards of colloquial use.
Now that the semantic issue is resolved, back to the debate!
A conquest is a type of invasion which is intended to take and keep territory.
When the United States invaded Germany in WWII, we didn’t have any intent of keeping it. But while it wasn’t a conquest, it was still an invasion.
And an argument over the semantics is avoiding the main issue being discussed here. Even if you call the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns raids rather than invasions, they were still offensive campaigns not defensive ones.
It’s a sad commentary on the lack of respect Johnston gets even today that people forget the “t” in his name. 
Yes, Jefferson Davis explicitly committed the South to a standing defensive strategy at the start of the war (possibly for political reasons – so as not to appear to be the aggressor while hoping for foreign assistance). Lee did think offensively, and was able to persuade Davis to permit the two great invasions in the East (Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns), but they were generally the exceptions to the South’s defensive stance.
Speaking of Lee’s aggression, he almost immediately began to attack as soon as he was given command after Johnston was wounded. Most of the battles of the Seven Days cost the Confederates more men than their enemy – Lee’s approach was costly. Historians have written that the magnificent charge of Hood’s Texans at Boatswain Swamp indeed broke Porter’s line, but the men who fell in droves making the attempt would be missed down the years. Gettysburg was not where the losses started; it was just where the cumulative effect became inescapable.
Lee’s aggression might have been the only way to turn disadvantage into victory (which is what Lee himself thought), but from the very beginning it was expensive in lives, and thus not suited to a long war. Lee didn’t just have to win against the odds, he had to win big, and soon.
If I recall McPherson’s The Battle of Cry of Freedom correctly, RTFirefly, Davis did ask Lee to go out west, but Lee preferred to stay in dear ol’ Virginny. One of the reasons for invading Pennsylvania was to take pressure off Vicksburg and maybe get Grant to move northeast, but that didn’t work. I have read the theory that after Chancellorsville, Lee became convinced his army was invincible which was why he decided to go north.
[quote=“Sailboat, post:54, topic:595074”]
It’s a sad commentary on the lack of respect Johnston gets even today that people forget the “t” in his name.
Drat. I always get his anme wrong. Poor guy.
And of course, the South simply wasn’t able to sustain an attack past its own soil. The logisics of the situation were not in their favor, so to speak.
True all around, but what I consider important is that Lee had no choice. He could either let McClellan slowly squeeze him, or attack. So he attacked. Then he could either wait for Pope to slam the door shut on him or attack. So he attacked. Then he coudl either let Hooker smash him, or attack. So he attacked. Then he could either sit and starve, or sttack. So he attacked. In short, Lee’s back was against the wall. He made risky and dangerous attacks because he had good reason to think the alternative was worst.
So basically, the South was fighting a losing battle from the start, and really needed foreign support (which was shut down by superior diplomating from the North) to even have a chance.
Makes you wonder why so many Alt-history stories have the South winning.
Same reason alt-hist has alternative WW 2 scenarios. It’s fun.
That said, the South was hardly doomed. As McPherson pointed out, it had a lot of advantages, and successful rebellions have won on worse. The American Revolution alone much more in Britain’s favor in men, materials, and money than the Civil War was in the Union’s favor.
But the Civil War was won not by tactics (as in the Napleonic era) but by strategy, and that strategy was often political as well as military. It was a war of peoples first and foremost, and there the South had a critical flaw. Militarily, it could possibly hold out. But it was not nearly so unified as the elite classes thought. Large sections of the “nation” wouldn’t give a cent for it; they happily ignored anything beyond their doorstep. Other areas actively rebelled against the Confederacy. Pro-Union sentiment, though not a fiery passion, contributed over time to a slow decline in what people were willing to do for the South. Not for nothing did the grand Confedercy vanish, except as a romantic myth, after the war.
We can also see how this affected the wartime experience. Southerners were hit hard, and early. The government managed arms and powder, but began running short of troops a full year before the Union, with its far larger armies and no convenient slave class to grow food. Most people simply had no desire to fight for the Confederacy, and weren’t about to do so until forced to it. Union conscription was ultimately a response to Confedrate conscription, and more successful. Even after conscription, a Union soldier was likely to desert very quickly (as a bounty jumper) or not at all. The Confederate might well leave the moment he had a choice.