Um, I believe that Sampiro (always helps to get the name right, btw) was agreeing with you, and simply offering more examples of such elements, especially human elements. Your post is snarky, and snarky for no good reason, under the circumstances. 
Yes, I was. (Thanks DS.)
To Candide: Yes, I do understand the meaning of counterfactual. I’ve also always been fascinated by the human element of history- the butterfly effects where a microbe can swing the fate of an empire- which is why I quoted the section of your post that addressed that and that alone when I made the comment. Do you understand quoting the relevant portion?
And you’re an asshole, btw. (Sorry- I shouldn’t say that in Great Debates, since it’s really more a statement of fact than something to be debated.)
I was going to let this go because I agree with what you wrote 100% Lemur. But the thread goes on and I want to clarify (and I am a bit of a j@ckass that has a hard time leaving anything unsaid).
While I agree that you cannot ask a general to be perfect, I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask that they not make a Military mistake that will cost their side the war. If they do make such a mistake, this is a factor that rightly should be weighed in any discussion of their “brilliance”. True Lee did not, ultimately, cost the South the War – but it is reasonable to speculate that his mistakes at Gettysburg were “war enders” & really only the failure on Meade’s part to pursue saved the South. Lincoln, Seward and Spavined Gelding all believed this.
My object in raising this point was only that this needs to be weighed in this discussion of Lee’s “brilliance”– not to excoriate Lee for not being perfect.
Whew! That Spavined Gelding post is not something that should be inflicted on a person cold sober.
Moderator’s Note: Candide, this really is pointlessly snide, and I see absolutely nothing in this thread leading up to this either–it’s not like this was some heated debate about current politics or religion or computer operating systems that was bound to get somewhat personal sooner or later.
Moderator’s Warning: That said, Sampiro, if don’t like someone’s tone in Great Debates, you can: Take the high road and ignore it; Report the post; Pit them. You should know better than to break the rules with a direct insult like this.
Alright, it’s a fair cop, but society is to blame. Apologies to Candide.
The reason generals seem more common in the Civil War, of course, is that back in the good old days generals were likely to be near or in the fighting. These days most of 'em seem to be in some high-tech bunker half a world away from the bloodletting.
If this is supposed to be a rap on modern generals it misses the mark. It’s all a question of the ability to command and control and that is a function of communications. Had Civil War generals had better communications they would have been further away from the action too. You get a much better view of the whole operation from a point rmoved than if you are crouched behind cover in the middle of it.
In WWII, BG’s Norman Cota and Theodore Roosevelt Jr. landed on Omaha and Utah beach respectively. Roosevelt was in the first assault wave and I think Cota was too but I’m not sure of that. Lt. Gen. Leslie McNair was quite a way forward and was killed by friendly fire in the bombing that preceded the breakthrough at St. Lo. Maj. Gen. Maurice Rose was killed by a German soldier while riding in a jeep far up front and Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner was killed on Okinawa by enemy artillery fire.
I’m confident that if there were a reason for a general to be up front today, one would be there.
I have nothing to contribute to this thread, but have taken a lot of knowledge and perspective from following it. A big thank you to all the contributers for the mostly civil discourse and thoughtful analysis.
I see that I have been summonsed.
Of all the army commanders active in the American Civil War Lee was surely the most accomplished. When you consider all that he managed to do from the time he took command during the Seven Days in 1862 until the Army of Northern Virginia was driven out of the Petersburg defenses in the spring of 1865 it is hard to imagine any other Southern of Northern commander who could have done as mush with the army he had, the political situation he had to contend with and the simple fact that the economics and demographics were stacked against him.
Lee’s mistakes at Gettysburg is a popular topic – the big mistake being the grand bombardment and assault on the third day. Given what Lee knew or had reason to know, however, his decision to attack the Union center is not all that reckless or unreasonable. Under Lee the Army of Northern Virginia had repeatedly beaten the Army of the Potomac under a series of commanders. At the Seven Days Lee had driven McClellan away from Richmond when the game seemed all but over. At Second Bull Run he had come within an ace of staging army destroying battle against Pope. At Antietam he had preserved his army in a situation in which a more aggressive adversary might well have destroyed the Army of Northern Virginia. At Fredericksburg he had decisively beaten Burnside with little effort. At Chancellorsville in a slugging match he had simply out-generaled Hooker with only part of his army. On the third day at Gettysburg he had good reason to think that he had beaten the better part of the Northern army into ineffectiveness in the first two days of fighting, that there was very little fight left in the Army of the Potomac and that an all out push would knock that army out of the war. With the growing war weariness in the North and the prospect of European intervention the destruction of Meade’s army was a glittering prize which made the gamble of Pickets’s Charge well worth the risk.
The disturbing thing is that even though the Northern army was not nearly as badly hurt as Lee supposed, Picket’s Charge almost worked. If it had worked it is possible, even probable, that with its center broken Meade’s army would have collapsed, opening all sorts of strategic and political possibilities.
Let me suggest that the most serious error Lee made was not in July, 1863, but was in June, 1864, when during the Overland Campaign Grant managed to shift his whole army south of the James river and besiege Peterburg and Richmond. To do that Grant bamboozled Lee and stole a 48 hour march on Lee. That maneuver put Lee in a sack from which he could not escape except in flight. That happened the next April and ended as it had to at Appomattox Court House.
The problem with this analysis is that Lee was missing the strategic point. He won battles but lost the war. He was in a situation where his victories were meaningless - the Union just rebuilt its forces, appointed a new general, and came back again - but his defeats cost him irreplacable resources. If Lee had won at Gettysburg, it wouldn’t have made any difference to the outcome of the war. He would have still had to go back to Virginia at the end of the campaign and faced the same strategic situation. So he would have had to keep fighting until eventually his luck ran out somewhere and he lost a decisive battle. A Confederate victory at Gettysburg would have just meant the Union would have won the war in 1866 instead of 1865.
Right. He was assuming the only way/best way to win the war was to have the equivalent of a photo-op in front of Independence Hall or the White House and demoralize the U.S. into bailing out. But if he’d been willing to conserve his resources, fight purely defensively (and send some of his troops west, as requested), the CSA could have won the war that way.
Since part of Lee’s legend is connected to the idea that he was unwilling to put the interests of the USA above those of Virginia, I guess it’s not surprising he wasn’t willing to subordinate Virginia’s “interests” to those of the CSA, either.
Which misses the whole point: the South was destined to lose the war no matter what any general did or didn’t do. To fault Lee on that basis is silly. No general wins anything by simply sitting in place and allowing the other side the initiative. :rolleyes:
It is also wrong to assert Lee was not a good general by pointing to mistakes he made. All humans make mistakes, even very good generals. Napoleon made mistakes, even in his best years: does that make Napoleon any less one of the best generals ever? The issue is not did he make mistakes, but rather, did he make a lot of mistakes. Given his war record, which was pretty damn good, and the fact that the North took damn near forever to reduce Virginia to captured status, I think we can accept as a given that he did not make a lot of mistakes.
Last, but not least, Gettysburg was not just some hare-brained wild goose chase. We, looking back, “know” the North would never have accepted less than complete surrender (though one wonders what the 1864 election would have been like had the Union forces not been already marching to victory). And it seems unlikely, in light of what we know, that the British would have intervened on the side of the South in 1863, regardless of what victories it might have won. But part of why the whole war was fought is that each side failed to comprehend, at a basic level, just how entrenched the other side was in its underlying philosophies. Each side always thought that, if they could just gain enough leverage, the other side would get “reasonable” and start negotiating for a just peace. And the Confederacy still thought that it could sway the British into supporting them, in which case the Royal Navy would have chewed the Union fleet to ribbons and ended the blockade, which would have allowed resupply of armaments and food, and then who knows how long until the war ends? So Lee wasn’t some stupid idiot who just didn’t comprehend the true situation; rather, he was working with what he and the politicians of the Confederacy assumed to be true. That, and, as I said above, you don’t win wars by sitting still and waiting to see what the other side does. :eek:
>>slight hijack<<
I’ve read a bit about the American Civil War and one thing always strikes me as horrendous.
How could men of the same country treat POWs as they did, I refer specifically to the terrible conditions at Andersonville
The north had its share of POW atrocities as well. The camp at Elmira, NY, which was nowhere near the number of prisoners as Andersonville, saw about 25 deaths per day from starvation cite- and it wasn’t the worst of the Union camps. Add to this that the Union did have the food and medicine to give prisoners while the south really didn’t.
In any case, the conditions of the hell-on-Earth prisons were attributible to several factors, important among them the racism (even by 19th century standards) of Jefferson Davis and his cronies and heartless/amoral but ingenious strategy on the Union part. Early in the war, p.o.w. exchanges were relatively common- we’ll give you one general, twelve officers, one hundred enlisted and five hundred of your privates for the same number of ours- and though the South stopped cooperating for a while after the Trent Affair ultimately they resumed when those men were released.
Then, Jefferson Davis went ballistic when he heard the north was recruiting black troops and he gave direct orders that any black man caught in a Union uniform was to be not captured but killed on the spot. Several of his officers carried out this order (including N.B. Forrest, who imho is overly villified for his role in the early days of the KKK [he actually resigned when they became mainly terrorists against blacks] but the fact he’s not so vilified for this or his slave trading before the war atones somewhat), incensing Lincoln and other Union officials so much that they ordered a general cease on prisoner exchanges. (There were exceptions, but usually it was high ranking officers for high ranking officers, and even that not to the level of before the war.) Suddenly both sides were simply overrun with the number of prisoners they had to provide for, tens-of-thousands where there had been hundreds.
The South by 1864 flat out did not have enough food to feed its men, let alone the tens of thousands of Union prisoners. Andersonville, which was intended for 5,000 prisoners initially with eventual plans to contain 10,000, was overrun before it was even completed as it became a sewer for Union p.o.w.s as Sherman and others penetrated the Deep South, until ultimately it had as many as 20,000 at one time in a facility not even really finished to deal with a quarter that number. (Ultimately almost 50,000 men came through, a quarter of whom died there and probably that many more having their lives shortened due to the time they spent there.) All of these men were kept in the open- no bars, no chains- and had to be confined by a the guards who they outnumbered by a ridiculous margin (and prison camp guards weren’t usually drawn from the elite ranks- a lot of older, younger [as in teenaged] and wounded served) which meant that these thousands of starving dying men who didn’t have a helluva lot to lose from storming the guards were kept in line by sheer brutality (the “dead line” being the most notorious). It was hell, but there is reason for serious debate as to whether Heinrich Wirz deserved the gallows when much of the sickness and the starvation and the violence was ultimately beyond his control, and certainly he was not the worst on either side in terms of inhumanity. (In fact he was capable of surprising humanity: his reaction when one of the “men” gave birth, for example, or allowing the prisoners to try and hang the gangs who preyed on them from within- some former p.o.w.s actually sent affidavits asking for clemency for him when he was on trial, but they were dismissed.)
Anyway, this isn’t to say there weren’t acts of inexcusable barbarism committed by guards on both sides, but much of it was evil at least conceived by necessity. And of course Andersonville, Elmira, and the other camps that were literally shitholes and disease gardens were as nothing compared to prison camps in the Philippines, India, and many other countries.
As for the strategic benefits, Grant and others recognized that the South had a far more exhaustible supply of men than the North did. In addition to the fact there were millions more northerners/midwesterners than there were southerners, the North was being flooded with immigrants from Ireland and other European nations, many of whom were literally recruited within a minute of getting off the boat. The South, which was blockaded to immigrants and much smaller populationwise, began to feel its lost men a lot quicker and a lot harder than the north did, and not exchanging prisoners was one way of strangling the South into submission as each man in a prison camp was one less in the field. (This was terrible news if you were a private from New Hampshire in a cattle car bound for southwest Georgia, but divorced from emotion and morality it was a good idea.)
If you ever get a chance to visit Andersonville, incidentally, do so. The field itself is just… a field in the middle of a thin pine forest, nothing but a few meager reconstructions to suggest the atrocity, but there’s a great museum dedicated to American P.O.W.s from all wars from Colonial times to modern Iraq. It’s impossible to see all the exhibits but the ones you will remember are some of the absolutely ingenious ways men (and sometimes women) stayed alive in these places.
Thank you Sampiro that summed it up very nicely
I’ll stand by my snark. It is, after all just an opinion, driven by an innate repulsion to the notion of leaders ordering people to their deaths whilst the chiefs sit in some (comparatively) cozy command center.
Whether Civil War generals would have behaved the same is a hard question. Doubtless some would have (McClelland comes to mind). But the idea of personal valor was more common then than now, so I suspect not a few Civil War generals whould have been in the thick of it even if they didn’t have to be.
>>Yet another teensy hijack<<<
It always seems strange that a nation that fought for its independance should go to war with itself less than 100 years after gaining it.
So you think Eisenhower, Bradley, Montgomery, Patton et al should have led the charge across the Rhine at Remagen Bridge?
R.E Lee knew that the North could not be defeated by his armies. but he gave the effort his best; and caused terrible losses to the northern Armies. What i have never understood: small bands of raiding cavalry (like Jubal Early) could have gotten behing the Union lines and threatened Washington-why didn’t they do this? There was a subatntial number of Northern Democrats (“copperheads”) who wanted to sign a peace treaty and end the war-Lee could have encouraged this by persuing raids on the North. My giess is, the North and South would have ended hostilities, and by about 1900 or so, peacefully returned to the former union.