The person you SHOULD be aiming at is Jefferson Davis, who refused to give Lee the authority he needed to coordinate between the various armies. Lee was a member of the extremely rare breed who recognized when his subordinates (namely Stonewall Jackson) had more talent than he did, and Lee gave Jackson the necessary troops to pull off his feats.
If Davis and the Confederate Congress had had more sense and less jealousy of Lee, and had made him field CINC early in the war, things quite possibly might have been different. As it was, Lee made fools out of most of the Union generals that he opposed, but his authority was limited to one theater.
Lee is not overrated. At that level, a general must be a diplomat every bit as much as a tactician or strategist, and Lee was – again – one of the very few people who combined a high level of diplomatic skill with a high level of military skill.
Actually, that’s kind of a refrain in warfare; armies are always initially trying to fight the last war. You saw it in World War I, when nobody realized the consequences of machine guns, or for that matter, had learned the lessons of the US Civil War. You saw it again in 1940, when the French distributed their armored vehicles among their infantry units as support (the right tactic for 1918, FYI) , instead of concentrating them in dedicated armored units. You saw it in 1862 when the Civil War armies tried to fight as if they were in battle some 50 years earlier.
Sometimes they realize the tactics suck, but can’t find a better alternative; WWI was rife with examples of that.
Pickett’s Charge is an example of trying to win a battle using outmoded tactics. But what other choice did he have? Essentially he had to win the battle that day, or disengage and effectively give up on his drive northward.
Beyond that, it’s not like other generals didn’t use the same tactic after Gettysburg. Cold Harbor (unsuccessful), Spotsylvania Court House (successful), Franklin (unsuccessful) and Missionary Ridge (successful) are all examples of frontal assaults that were made post-Gettysburg.
Nobody in that day and age organized an attack at night, especially one of that size. Command and control of bodies of men in that time depended on visual signals and seeing where one was going; not to mention the commanders could not see if they were winning or losing the fight and would likely end up getting shot or captured (see Jackson, Stonewall). And keeping 15,000 men quiet on a 3/4 mile march in full battle gear? Not possible.
So do I. Old Slow Trot was the most effective commander at all levels of command (and for this discussion, did make several successful frontal attacks during his career–Chattanooga and Nashville). IMHO.
One point that has not been added; besides the artillery barrage and attacking on a front he figured had been weakened to reinforce the flanks (Lee continued to attack that morning on the left (Culp’s Hill) to draw Federal attention that way), J.E.B, Stuart was supposed to bring his cavalry, absent from the field the first two days, into the rear of the Federal formation, or at least cause such consternation that Meade would be unable to reinforce the center of his line.
Unfortunately for Lee, the great days of Confederate cavalry domination were over by then, and Federal cavalry held Stuart at bay allowing Meades’ reinforcements to flow into the battle while Lee had nothing left in reserve.
Lee was a very good tactician - possibly the equal of the great commanders of antiquity - but his political field of vision was narrow and he had no strategic understanding beyond that needed to execute his tactical maneuvers.
Lee got nicknamed “The King of Spades” in 1861, and got criticized by the anti-government Richmond Examiner for building fortifications around Richmond, and the whole reason that the siege of Vicksburg took almost two months, even though the Confederates were outnumbered over two to one, was that Vicksburg was surrounded by Confederate trenches, redoubts, and gun pits.
Meanwhile, here’s a picture of US troops in trenches near Fredericksburg in 1863
Longstreet, meanwhile, had built extensive trenches and defensive works in Fredericksburg himself before the battle.
Here’s a map of the Union position during the siege of Fort Wagner in 1863. Those lines are all earthworks.
For that matter, there were trenches at Gettysburg itself. General Greene had built a rampart and trenches at Culp’s Hill, which Ewell’s troops, after heavy fighting, managed to take on the afternoon of the 2nd and hold until the next morning.
Did the Confederates consider themselves to be citizens of the United States? Yes or no?
It’s that simple. Once somebody declared himself to be a Confederate, he stopped being an American. There was no dual citizenship. The actual Confederates knew that.
Modern Confederate sympathizers want to pretend otherwise; that somehow think that they can pledge allegiance to the Confederacy while also being an American patriot. They’re wrong. It was a war and you didn’t get to be on both sides.
Anyone who cheers for the Confederates is cheering against the United States. It’s no different than cheering for the Nazis or the Vietcong. And if somebody claims otherwise, I’m going to call them on their bullshit.
Again, to provide some fairness, nobody did it that way back then. The eventual decision by the Union to adopt a system whereby Grant was supreme commander of all armies, with Halleck serving between him and Lincoln as Chief of Staff as the effective master of all administration, was a novel idea at the time. That the function continues more or less to this day - it’s a bit more complex as you now have a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and more than one Supreme Commander, but it’s the same principle - is a testament to how well it works, and indeed most modern militaries have adopted it, but at the time it was a totally new thing, and the Union did not really adopt it as their system until after Gettysburg. Grant himself was not supreme commander (that wasn’t the title at the time, but whatever) until March of 1864.
Aside from the fact that nobody did it that way in 1861, and aside from the fact that both sides were saddled with a military tradition of too much politics and mistrust of giving people extra stars on their shoulders, the geographic scope of the war was incredibly massive - by some arguments, it was the largest geographic area over which a single war had ever been fought to conquer to that point in history. Much of it was astoundingly difficult to fight in, and this was in an era when telegraphs were the newfangled communication device. The idea of assigning commanders to armies and “departments” kind of made sense; what Grant was doing in Missouri in 1862 might as well have been taking place in Japan for all the immediate effect it had on what was happening in Virginia.
And, because of the lack of accurate scouting, which Stuart was supposed to have been providing, Lee couldn’t know that there really was no “rear” to the Union forces. They were effectively a circle.
I don’t think you understand what a Civil War is. In the English Civil War, which ones were still English: the Roundheads or the Royalists? In the current Syrian Civil War, are the pro-Assad or the anti-Assad forces actually Syrians? What are the other guys?
The Confederates considered themselves the true heirs to the legacy of Washington Jefferson, and Madison (slave holding Virginians.) They viewed the history of the United States to be their own, and they thought of themselves as Americans. They didn’t need to be citizens of the USA to be Americans, because a fundamental part of their argument for separation was that the DC-based government was no longer the legitimate suzerain of their state governments. Given that neither the US government ever accepted that they had left, and they never claimed a separate nationality (only another nation, I know, this may seem confusing,) it’s not a partisan issue about continuing to refer to them as Americans. Whether you want to differentiate them from loyal Americans by calling them Confederates, Rebels, Southerners or traitors is up to you, but you’re just being confusing when you refer to the other side as Americans.
Cheering for the Confederacy has nothing to do with whether or not the Confederates were Americans.
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All up the ridge of death
Charged the twelve thousand.
“Forward, Confederates!
Charge the trees’ copse!” he said:
Up the ridge of death
Charged the twelve thousand.
All the world astounded.
In wars like that you have two factions both trying to take over one country; both sides are claiming to be the real government. That was not the case in the American Civil War. The Confederates wanted to form their own country not take over the United States. Jefferson Davis had no desire to supplant Abraham Lincoln.
I think you’re wrong. Grant was not the first General-in-Chief of all American armies. Scott, McClellan, and Halleck had all held that command before Grant.
Some people criticized McClellan when he chose to simultaneously act as both General-in-Chief of the entire American army while also commanding the Army of the Potomac. Scott and Halleck directed the army from Washington. Grant traveled with the Army of the Potomac when he was General-in-Chief but Meade was in nominal command of that army.
The Confederates did not have an equivalent position for most of the war. Davis preferred to keep each army separately directed by political authorities (Davis himself) rather than have one general who was in charge of all forces. The Confederate Congress finally forced the issue by enacting a law which named Lee as the General-in-Chief in 1865.
The demonym for the Democratic Republic of the Congo is Congolese.
The demonym for the Republic of the Congo is Congolese.
Shouldn’t the United States of America and the Confederate States of America share the demonym American? It refers to the landmass, after all, which both shared.
Except “American” has acquired, in English at least, the meaning of citizens of the USA. I live on the landmass of North America, but I am not an American.
Yeah, because the name was the Confederate States of…something that starts with an “X” or something.
Seriously, no. The Confederates were Americans. They were other Americans, but they were Americans. The war was not between “Americans” and “Some other guys.”
(Also, the North’s position was that the Confederate states had never ceased to be part of the U.S.A.)
) there were less reasons for them to remember the holiday: