When all’s said and done, the charge could have still succeeded if an incompetant like Sickles had commanded the Union center. Never underestimate a bad commander’s ability to seize defeat from the jaws of victoey.
Fortunstely, Hancock was in charge, and he knew what he was doing.
It sounds like a pretty good book… Can you (briefly) summarize the direction of its revisionism and claptrappery? I’d like to be a little forewarned before I start reading it. Thanks!
Nonsense. And other words. The people of the so-called “Confederate States of America” were also “Americans.” It’s right there in the pseudo-country’s name. To try and say that anyone who was a “true” American was not a rebel is to push a theory that, fortunately, this country never bought. 
I stood at the point where Pickett’s Charge began, and looked across that flat, featureless terrain, and just shivered, thinking of how there was absolutely no place to hide or to run to ground.
The North thought all the states were still part of the U.S. – so, “American.” The South thought of themselves as Americans, just not USAians. So, yeah, you’re very right; the idea that the North was “American” is goofy, and no historians write that way.
(But I do get a small grin at the phrase “pseudo-country.” They certainly didn’t think so…but I do!)
So when you refer to people from the United States, what do you call them? The Usians?
Buell did a good job of researching it and it is very readable, but he is quite critical of both Lee and Hood. (He singles out General George Thomas as being the “best” of the six.)
I don’t think that I exaggerate when I say that Lee has continued to have a reputation as the “best” commander on either side in the war. (“Look at all his victories! Look at how much he accomplished with what little he had! His troops loved him!”) Buell respectfully addresses these statements, but finally comes to the conclusion that Lee had some serious shortcomings and that many men died because of them. OTOH, which commanding officer who has given battle can ever be said to have done everything perfectly?
Reaction to Buell’s book was not so much negative as dismissive. I seriously can’t recall any substantiative, reasoned responses to Buell’s points of view. It was simply a case of defending an iconic figure (Lee).
I highly recommend reading it. It actually provides an excellent overview of the entire war, especially the action in the Western Theater, which is often overlooked in historical accounts.
I am “Southern by adoption” so I came to my interest in the Civil War rather late in life. It has been eye-opening for me to be in the locations of the actual battles and to come into contact with so many people who are knowledgeable about the Civil War.
I haven’t read Buell’s book, but I agree that Lee is often praised too highly. He did, after all, lost the war which means there must have been some mistakes made. (Even if the mistake was to start an unwinnable war.)
I think Lee’s biggest mistake was trying to be Napoleon when he should have tried to be Washington. Lee kept trying to win the war by winning battles. A better strategy would have been to avoid battles and keep his army as an intact threat.
I think this is true, and I merely note that it wasn’t Lee who started the war.
You and several posters in this thread seem to be forgetting the artillery and massed fire effect. You might want to look at the battlefield casualties in the Napoleonic Wars on both sides before dismissing the weapons as ‘nearly-useless’. Yeah, smoothbore muskets weren’t accurate at more than 60 or 70 feet during the NW, but cannon and howitzers sure were, and massed formations and charges weren’t risk free.
That said, your overall point that the mindset with the generals hadn’t really caught up to the technological changes is mainly valid. And the sad thing was that it still hadn’t caught up by the time WWI kicked off either. The REALLY sad thing, IMHO, is that the Union COULD have put into the field things like repeating rifles and Gatling guns, but didn’t want to because the old mindset (and the America aversion to spending money on it’s military that pretty much permeated everything until after Vietnam) was systemic especially in logistics and procurement (‘well, if we give the soldiers repeating rifles they will just waste ammo!! Plus, you know, we will have to support all these new cartridges in the field, which means more paperwork and bother. Screw that noise!’).
Basically, to answer your OP, there were a few factors here. First, the Confederates were desperate by this time. They were obviously losing. They wanted to reverse this. So, they did what they had done in several other battles…they relied on the supposed superiority of their own elan and superior mental attitude of the Confederate troopers and the supposed inferior fighting spirit and leadership of the Union troops who would break and run if pressed. They knew they would get chewed up during the assault phase, but figured if they could just get stuck in that their superior elan would break the Union forces in the center and that this could turn the tide and give them victory.
While in hindsight it obviously wasn’t a good move, and a better one would have been to withdraw in good order to fight again another day, this wasn’t as obvious to the generals of the time as you make it out to be. This idea of elan or superior fighting spirit was pretty entrenched in the various militaries at that time and continued to be. And sometimes even against the odds you have an inferior force against a superior force and managing to break their moral and hand them a defeat.
Recent relevant thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=807820
XT makes a good point – sometimes “accepting losses” to force a situation worked. One famous example (although naval) was Trafalgar – Nelson’s men knew that by “breaking the line from windward,” i.e., turning nose-on toward a French line-of-battle and closing in, they would be exposing themselves to “raking fire,” more-than-ordinarily-effective fire down the long axis of the ships. But they calculated that they could withstand the damage and accomplish their objective.
In that case they were right. In Lee’s case he was not.
Despite the recognition in this thread that many generals at the time had not yet adapted to the new reality of massed rifle fire, it’s worth pointing out that Confederate General Longstreet was not one of them. He famously told Lee:
Wellington and Napoleon were fighting with smoothbore muskets, not rifles.
Pickett’s charge was a stupid move given what Lee knew about rifles.
??? In the context of the ACW, they were all Americans; the usage of “Americans” to refer to the North/Union/USA was poorly chosen.
In the modern context, I often say Americans, but sometimes say USAians, Yankees or Yanks, Norteamericanos (which is goofy, since Canada is mas norte,) and certain other epithets of an even less dignified character.
(Yankees is another problem term, given that, today, I can mean it to comprise all Americans, but in the ACW it referred to the Union. Language changes with circumstances.)
Pickett’s Charge was a stupid move, period. The only chance the Confederates had to dislodge the Union forces was to move far to the right and attempt to flank them beyond Little Round Top as Longstreet urged. Even then it was doubtful they could have made much of a dent. The rebels lost the battle on Day One when Reynolds managed to hold just long enough.
Pickett never stood a chance of achieving an exploitable breakthrough. He didn’t have the troops, he didn’t have the support, and he was attacking the strongest point in the Union front.
Put “Gettysburg” into Search and read the past threads on the battle. We hash it out rather thoroughly.
Amazon had a cheap copy, so I sent off for it. Thanks for the recommendation. Bummer that people have been dismissing it without adequate substantive rebuttal. Not all revision is bad…and even the bad kind should be shot down on their merits, not merely by the fiat of consensus.
(This is, classically, why advances in science are difficult. New ideas tend to run into unthinking opposition.)
I’m sorry but this just isn’t true. The generals of the time knew full well what rifle fire was capable of. This wans’t 1861, it was 1863, and the bloody horror of the war was well understood. It’s absurd to think smart men like Robert E. Lee - or Longstreet, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, et al. were not aware of what rifles could do against an attacking enemy. Lee’s men had done the same to the Union troops in many battles. He knew exactly what the rifle could do.
Frontal assaults are quite often used because frontal assaults can and do work. They worked before 1863, worked in 1863, and continued to work after 1863. They will work in the future. A direct, ferocious attack, supported by capable combined arms, is often an excellent way to kill many enemies and take lots of ground. It sometimes fails - but flanking maneuvers can also fail, and taking the defense can fail, and anything can fail. In the case of Gettysburg, the attack did not work, because the enemy was more reinforced in that position than Lee had been led to believe, his adversary guessed correctly what Lee would do, and combined arms did not work in his favor. Had one of those things not been true then it might have turned out differently. As it is, with almost everything going wrong, two brigades did reach the stone wall; if a few of those things HADN’T gone wrong, who knows what might have happened? (Asked after the war why it failed, Pickett himself said, “I think the Yankees had something to do with that.”)
Castigating the commanders of 1863 for “not understanding” the power of a rifle is preposterous. Of course they did, and they reacted and adapted with remarkable swiftness; those who do not learn such things die quickly anyway. They were fighting without radios in terrain that often made communication over relatively short distances incredibly difficult. Controlling groups of men in such situations was crazy hard; it looks easy on a hex board or a video game but in real life it’s a thousand times harder. “Hey, everyone dig a trench” might work in some cases, and it might also cause your army to go to ground and become unmoveable and trapped.
Talking of hex game boards, that was one of the interesting features of Panzergruppe Guderian by SPI. Neither the Soviet player nor the German player knew the strength of an untried Soviet unit until it was actually attacked and flipped over. That feature was a neat and simple way to replicate the fog of war, in this case the complete lack of knowledge of how well untried Soviet units would actually perform in battle.
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The Confederates didn’t think they were all Americans. They considered themselves to be a separate country. They didn’t consider themselves to be Americans anymore than they considered themselves to be Canadians or Mexicans.
I’ll grant that the United States didn’t regard the existence of the Confederate States to be a legal reality. The official American position was that the Confederacy didn’t exist and the southern states were still part of the United States so the people in those states were still citizens of the United States. But that was a legal position; for practical purposes, the Confederacy existed. I suppose you could have used the term rebel to distinguish the Confederates, which would be more in line with the official position. But I feel Confederates is both a more specific and neutral term. Calling them Americans is silly. Jefferson Davis was not an American President; Robert E. Lee was not an American general; and Fredericksburg was not an American victory.
As for calling the American side the Union or the Federals, why do that? The people of United States were Americans before 1860 and they were Americans after 1865. Why should it change demonyms for one five-year period? Lincoln was an American President not a Union President or a Federal President or a Yankee President.
I said “some mistakes were made” in order to leave open the possibility that somebody other than Lee had made them. It’s possible that Lee was facing a hopeless position and nothing he could have done would have changed the outcome of the war. But I also think that Lee didn’t choose the best strategy in view of the situation he was facing.
Amazingly, I know this is a hard concept to grasp sometimes, you can <gasp> actually use the same word to describe more than one set of objects.
So, I call people from the United States of America “Americans” if there is no reason to qualify that term. I would call anyone from the Confederate States of America “Americans.”
If I wasn’t calling them “rebs.” Mind you, down here I’m a “damn Yankee.”