The Anaconda Plan required the Union to seize Confederate ports, maintain a blockade, and capture the Mississippi. It also supposed there would be some level of general military activity so that the economic privitations it produced would have something to take effect on. It was an active plan and hardly the equivalent of “sitting on their hands”.
But that said, how does this bear on what I wrote? Both the Union’s plan to defeat the CSA by economic attrition and the alternative plan to defeat them by decisive battles were based on the premise that the North had to defeat the South. The Confederacy had no equivalent need; they had no more need to defeat the United States than they had to defeat Mexico or Canada.
Prime example: Nathan B. Forrest, who was a military genius by anybody’s standards, never rose to a major command because Davis, an arrogant classist, looked down on him as a slave-trader. (The fact that every penny Davis had was inherited and that he and his family owned hundreds of slaves between them while Forrest grew up penniless and fatherless but through his brains and industry became a millionaire by 1860 [when $1 million was worth more like $15-$25 million in today’s evaluations] cut no ice whatever; slave trading was a vulgar profession and Forrest had no family estate.)
Before the war, when the War Department was housed in a building no larger than a modern branch post office, Winfield Scott, a native Virginian, made the appointment of fellow Southerners a part of his assumption that the U.S. Army was his personal fief. Although congressmen North and South secured appointments for their constituents’s sons to West Point, after graduation their patronage ended and it was entierly up to Sott to see that the right sort of people made up his officer corps. Thus young Southern second lieutenants were placed on the fast-track to training and promotion, while Northerners such as Grant and Sherman soon were back in the civillian sector. Any congressman could get you a free college education, but only Winfield Scott could train you to be a commander.
Bearing in mind that there were over 1,000 general officers in the Civil War, and that out of any 1,000 men a fair number are fools, the comparative quality between the Union and Confederate officer corps is largely due to who was groomed for leadeship and who was cold-shouldered out, based on the regionalist preferences of Winfield Scott. So it’s somewhat ironic that he himself devised the Anaconda plan to suffocate the superior army he’d created, relying upon a navy he luckily hadn’t been able to contol as well.
Another factor in the early months of the war was that the Confederates got an advantage from the fact they were building an army from the ground up. There was a pool of experienced soldiers in the Regular Army prior to 1860. The secession split that pool. The Union regulars stayed in their original units; the Confederate regulars were divided up into new units. Then both sides vastly expanded their armies for the war. The results were the Union army ended up with a small handful of experienced units and a majority of completely inexperienced units; the Confederates had fewer units overall but each of them had a cadre of experienced regulars mixed in with the inexperienced new recruits. As any veteran could tell you, a single sergeant or lieutenant can make the difference between a good and bad platoon or company.
That’s right. Meade was overly cautious with respect to Lee but he was a fully competent military leader and was left in command of the Army of the Potomac after Grant was made Commander of all US forces.
According to the histories I’ve read, Grant had just one order to Meade and that was that his objective was Lee’s army. The words I’ve read are, “Wherever he [Lee] goes you go.” And Meade carried out those orders quite well.
I believe it was Bruce Catton who wrote that the Confederacy had a skilled militaary leadership cadre with an antiquated command system at the beginning of the war and they had that same structure at the end. The Union had a poor military leadership cadre and an antiquated command system at the beginning. At the end they had a skilled leadership cadre (Grant, Sherman, Sheridan etc.) and a modernized command structure.
Since this thread adresses competence or lack thereof, I have to question why I put Evil Captor’s post in the post above.
It’s all a sort of haze and what I remember is that someone put Meade in with the “dolts” and some one later defended Meade.
If I could find the later post now I’d cite it rather than the one I did cite.
In any case, Meade certainly wasn’t one of the lousy Union generals. After all, he did win at Gettysburg which most people regard as the beginning of the end for Lee’s army.
While Robert Lee’s brilliance as an army commander is a significant factor in the success of the Army of Northern Virginia from June, 1862, forward, the internal political situation has got to be considered, too. In the South Jeff Davis fancied himself a strategist and pretty much had full control of senior military assignments. Lee had Davis’s confidence. Lee was safe in command of the ANV as long as he did not commit some major blunder. For reasons that aren’t clear Davis seems to have liked Bragg, an army commander who was teetering on the verge of out right mutiny by his generals. The reason Bragg lasted with the Army of Tennessee until the catastrophe of Missionary Ridge / Lookout Mountain might have been that Davis strongly disliked Joe Johnston who was the next senior Lieutenant General in the Confederate service. Davis was quick to replace Johnston with Hood as Sherman approached Atlanta. Davis didn’t think Johnston was sufficiently aggressive. Hood was, if nothing else, aggressive. He was so aggressive that his “attack and die” approach wrecked the Army of Tennessee in a series of offensive battles around Atlanta and at Nashville in December, 1864, while Sherman was playing the Devil’s lose in Georgia from Atlanta to the sea.
On the other hand, outside the Army of the Potomac Union command was pretty competent, including such obscure figures as Buell and Rosecrans, George Thomas, and Steele. The command of the Army of the Potomac was a political hot potato and much more subject to political whims and Congressional meddling that the other Union armies or any Confederate Army. Lee never had to deal with anything like the Congressional committees that took it upon them selves to oversee the conduct of the war.
Another factor is that the South lost the war. Confederate veterans sprang to the defense of Lee and found a scape goat for the loss of the Lost Cause in Lee’s staunchest and most dependable lieutenant, Longstreet. Jubal Early was the leader of the “Longstreet lost the war” faction. Old Jub was a powerful hater and was not slowed down by his own mismanagement of the Shenandoah Valley Campaign in 1864. Longstreet had made the mistake of criticizing Lee and especially Lee’s conduct of the Gettysburg Raid. He also became a Republican and took a job with the National government after the war.
In the North the effort was not to find a scapegoat but to claim all the credit one could for the ultimate victory. For instance, Dan Sickles’ attempt to claim credit for the out come of the Battle of Gettysburg amounted to a campaign of defamation against Meade. It was Sickles assertion that Meade was ready to withdraw from Gettysburg and that he would have if Sickles had not brilliantly induced Lee to attack on the second day of the battle.
By the time Grant came to supreme commend of all the Union armies, and Sherman took over the Army of the Tennessee the upper levels of command were occupied by experience and self confident officers who had been throughly tested. The generals were in agreement with each other about how the war should be prosecuted and more importantly were in agreement with Lincoln. From the spring of 1864 there was a consistent strategic and political plan. As soon as Grant took the field with Meade, Sherman, and Thomas as his principal field commanders, Bobby Lee brilliance and daring was not enough to preserve the Confederacy.
Quite the contrary, Ralph. The Union had many competent generals and a like number of less competent general officers. The same is true for the confederacy. Southern Generals like Braxton Bragg (who had a general talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory) were no where near being tactical or strategic genuises. As a matter of fact, Bragg was the target of an outright mutiney by his fellow general officers. He only lasted because of his relationship with Jefferson Davis who refused to fire him. John Bell Hood was equally incompetent when it came to commanding an army. While capable as a brigade commander, he was a monumental dud as an army commander and was responsible for squandering the confederate Army of Tennessee, one of the best fighting forces to take the field for the CSA. I do not know what books you are reading, but I would like to challenge the authors if they are feeding you tripe like this.
Union generals like Sheridan, Sherman, Grant, McPherson, Wilson and others too numerous to mention were extremely competent general officers. Indeed the south had its share as well in Lee, Jackson, Longstreet, Stuart to mention some of the more famous, but they also had their share of dismal failures (your term is moron I believe) as well. Hope this clears a few things up for you.
Necro thread or not, I think I will post something…
I wouldn’t want to overstate the SOuth’s supposed “unity”. If anything, it was even more divided, to the point of having multiple armed rebellions. However, it had a more military tradition and early in the war this gave it a certain advantage, in that quickly-raised units were more often equipped with experience, or at least a pretense of it.
Further, more trained officers stayed for the North - but proportionally, the South kept more at the start.
Compeltely wrong, I’m afraid. McClellan was a horrifically bad general, who personally failed in every battle he led and managed to wreck a number of things he wasn’t involved in. He was sometimes saved by subordinates. He was borderline treasonous, backstabbing vicious little snake. Further, you have it precisely backwards. Lincoln bent over backwards for McClellan, gave him every support possibly (to the extent of risking the Presidency) - and McClellan could easily have taken Richmond and defeated Johnson, but threw it all in the trash. By my count, he had (at least three golden opportunities to win the war, and his cowardice and treachery resulted in all three flying away. You may, if you wish, lay hundreds of thousands of dead at his feet.
Now, Little Mac wasn’t stupid. He actually was very intelligent. But he had such a terrible character that it destroyed him.
Meade did make some mistakes during the final campaigns in the East, which caused Grant to take a more active hand. Still, Grant evidently respected Meade and of course Meade was really something of a rookie in comparison, having never held an independant command.
A further issue of the intial quality difference was that the SOuth started arming and training during the latter days of the Buchanan administration. Lincoln didn’t even begin with raising soldiers, trying desperately to avoid sparking the Civil War.
McClellan did have his skills. He was great at building up and organizing an army. He knew how to maneuver his troops into a advantageous position.
But that’s when his fatal flaw would kick in - he’d lose his nerve on the verge of battle. It’s a cliche that every great military leader has to be a gambler - and McClellan was afraid to roll the dice.
Lee was a good general, but not as good a general as the propaganda makes out. He was highly competent, but even he knew he really blew it with Pickett’s Charge, which really was all his fault, not Pickett, who was following orders and knew what would happen.
Meade was not a bad general by any stretch. He won Gettysburg against Lee, who was a good general, and probably a better general than Meade.
Meade was absolutely correct not to pursue Lee. That would have put him out of his defensive positions and at the mercy of better cavalry.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was the most brilliant general in the war for slavery. A true genius. Him I’d put up against Caeser or Alexander and wonder at the outcome. Not Lee or Jackson.
Does anybody know if there is a significant age difference between the Generals of the Union and the Rebels?
I’ve heard it said that older Generals are always ready to ‘fight the last war over again, only correctly this time’. That is, older Generals tend to use outdated strategy, and fail to take full advantage of the newest weapons & tactics.
If it’s true that the Union had more older Generals at the start, while the Rebel armies were often younger men promoted to General ranks, this may explain some of the difference.
Here’s the ages (in 1860) of the various Union generals who had an army command or above:
Schofield and Sheridan were 29
Howard was 30
McPherson was 32
Slocum was 33
McClellan was 34
Burnside was 36
Foster was 37
Grant and Pope were 38
Sherman and Wright were 40
Rosecrans was 41
Buell, Butler and Ord were 42
Canby was 43
Banks and Thomas were 44
Halleck and Meade were 45
Hooker was 46
McClernand was 48
Hunter was 58
Scott was 74
This was not an army being led by a cadre of elders.
Funny…this was similar to what I posted but deleted it because the thread was insanely old.
Overall I will agree.
McClellan seemed to be a logistical genius.
Make no mistake that armies need that.
But a field commander? The guy sucked.
I was amazed Astorian suggested McClellan had “insufficient resources”. The Union army FAR outnumbered the the Confederate army. McClellan had a vastly bigger army but he kept thinking the Confederates were (vastly) bigger than they were.
IMO McClellan was a pussy. The guy had no clue about fighting. He was a wannabe politician and not a general.
Again, logistics he was great at and that is important. Leader of an army? No way. The guy sucked.