Keeping in mind the caveat that emotional responses are occasionally idiotic ;). Many seem to have found the Charge of the Light Brigade quite moving.
But was it war?
This.
Remember, there was still a Confederate Government in Richmond, and it rejected several attempts to settle the war in it’s last few months (in one, the VP of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, met personally with Lincoln, IIRC). Problem was the North wanted to discuss re-integration of the Southern States into the Union, while the Confederacy, with defeat staring them in the face, insisted it was a conversation between two independent governments.
So with the Confederate Government refusing to surrender and Lee still having an Army in being (albeit much smaller come 1865), he was duty bound to either continue to fight or to resign.
Even when the Army of the Potomac cracked his lines at Petersburg, he was still trying to get his army around Grant and down to North Carolina, where he could join forces with the only other major Confederate force still available (Joe Johnstons) and somehow defeat Sherman and keep the cause alive. He only surrendered at Appromattox because the Federals caught up with him and put a couple of corps in his path.
I doubt the horses did.
Lee
For this arguement, I’m going to leave out the moral dimension. In the real world, it’s always hard to separate morality, but I’m not going to discuss for two reasons. Fiorst, because it’s far easier to judge externally, when you dont’ care or don’t have to care about the issues involved. Second, moral questions sometimes lead to people ignoring realities they don’t like. Even saints have to eat and sleep, from time to time. And we all live in a world where we have to struggle to separate out shades of grey.
Lee was a great fighter; among the best tacticians in history. He could, and did beat larger armies in offensive actions. Moreover, Lee seems to have been able to outthink the opposing commander. Up until that time, he was able to confuse each of them, had a frightening and seemingly precognitive ability to know when they would and would not attack, and was able to force each fo them to retreat in confusion even if Lee often took heavy casualties.
But the man had a weakness, and it was strategy. That was something he never entirely grasped. Lee never entirely understood the war as a nation-wide phenomenon. His understanding of the war was narrowly focused on the Virginia theater (which emcompassed parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland,and North Carolina). yet he downplayed or even ignored events occurring elsewhere in the Confederacy.
In fact, noone ever really ran the Confederate war effort as a whole. We can fault Henry Halleck for many things, but he did at least do that. Lincoln became a true Commander-in-Chief, assigning resources and missions with an eye towards grand strategy. However, Jefferson Davis did not guide the war in that sense, and neither did his secretaries of war. This was a crippling fault from start to finish. The Confederacy started a war without a real plan and one didn’t appear during it.
Yes, Lee should have gone to his government after Gettysburg and told them that the war couldn’t be won. But a great many people raised those questions during the war. The Confederate government could not or would not allow it. And they knew. They could see the strategic situation deteriorating day by day. They knew how crippling the loss of harbors, railroads, and finally everything west of the Mississippi was. July, 1863 would have been a fine time to end a war.
But they didn’t. They didn’t end it after Atlanta, or after Nashville, or after Petersburg. If all that didn’t change the minds of the Confederate leadership, then nothing would have. In fact, to the extent Jefferson Davis was concerned, it didn’t. He scheming to somehow continue the war even after Appomattox.
We don’t really know what kind of a grand strategist Lee was – he would have gotten the chance to show us if he had taken Scott’s offer to be field commander-in-chief. He never got that chance on the Confederate side until just a few days before the end, and of course by then it was meaningless.
Having said that, I suspect that he would have been a good strategist. He was able to recognize other people’s talents and set them to work. Remember, several of his victories were not actually his, but rather Stonewall Jackson’s.
As things stood, however, I would argue that he was correct to ignore a lot of events elsewhere. His job was to fight in his theater of operations, nothing more.
smiling bandit, a nice analysis. I concur with most of it. But…
Davis and the Confederate Government were between a rock and a hard place; the only peace that they could accept would lead to the founding of the Confederacy; they never (to the best of my reading) ever contemplated unconditional surrender and returning peacefully to the U.S.
And that was the only non-negotiable point Lincoln had (besides accepting the end of slavery). Besides those two points he was willing to compromise, which might have gotten him impeached by the Radicals if he hadn’t been murdered. And those were the two points that the Confederate Government could never accept, since it would mean dismantling their own government.
So due to that fundamental disconnect, the war had to be fought out to a finish.
I’m not as much in love with Lee as many are; a lot of that came from the “Lost Cause” historians who almost deified the man. He was a great general; one of the ten best in US history, but he did have, IMHO, a major flaw: He was always looking for the “decisive battle.”
By that I mean a Napoleonic victory, one so devasting that the enemy would be forced to seek terms or surrender. That explains why he (at least till Grant arrived) would always force the attack, always make the bold moves, always take the risky gamble; he wanted to defeat the Federals so badly that the Government in Washington would be forced to seek peace.
And he tried his very best (which was very, very good indeed) to do this. But he was doing it with a weaker army, with a weaker manpower and industrial base, and against an enemy that could re-build a defeated army and come back ready for more.
And meanwhile the attacking style he preferred also cost his army casualties they could not afford. It should be noted that the two most devasting victories he won were both while standing on the defensive (Fredricksburg and Cold Harbor).
In the end he was doomed to lose when Lincoln found a general who was willing “to put in all his men” and forced Lee onto the defensive (where again, he was quite competent, but it was not his preferred method).
IMHO as always. YMMV.
Lee lost his chance for Nobel Hero when Pickett asked (after the battle was lost) is he should go ahead with his “charge” - and Lee said yes.
Short form:
11 cannon, 1700 rifles behind a stone fence.
The Confederates lined up in a stand of trees across a (wheat?) field - a grass about knee high, and started to WALK across the field.
Pure suicide.
The plan had been that the troops behind the fence would have been attacked by artillery. That didn’t happen.
What did happen was the Union was ordered to hold fire until ordered.
11 cannon and 1700 rifles point-blank into a single line. Simultaneously.
There was no excuse for that “attack”…
The Nobel Committee has an award for heroism?
I agree. Lee kept planning on how to win battles and didn’t have a plan for winning the war. At least, not a realistic plan.
The Confederates won decisive battles - and the Americans kept fighting. So it should have been obvious that the war wasn’t going to be decided by decisive battles. And Lee should have recognized that and changed his strategy accordingly.
To give an example of a general who did that, there’s George Washington. Early in the war he wanted to defeat the British Army in battle. But he figured out that keeping the Continental Army in existence was more important to his cause than winning battles was.
Here’s a shocker: George McClellan might have made a better commander for the Army of Northern Virginia than Lee did. I’ll concede that McClellan wasn’t doing it out of strategy but he was, by his nature, committed to preserving his army. By avoiding the risks that Lee sought out, McClellan would have preserved the Confederate army much longer and might have outlasted the American willingness to fight.
This has always been an interesting point to me. I’d argue as a matter of history, a population that’s sufficiently dedicated to independence will win, eventually. That means, however, guerilla warfare and all the suffering and devastation it entails.
I don’t know that the South had it in it to resort to guerrilla warfare. But I don’t think the North could have held the South, if it had. That Lee rejected that option says something about him. He wasn’t willing to see the South turned into a wasteland, or to see the war turned against civilians. He fought the good fight, so long as it was limited to the battlefield. But after that, it was over, for him.
I don’t know if that’s true. The American Indians fought for their independence for decades - and they lost decisively.
If the southern states had tried to continue a guerrilla war, they could have done so. But the result would have been the south being kept under an ongoing military occupation.
I think Lee was correct in seeing that the southern states would get a better deal by returning peacefully to the United States and having their legal status as states restored as quickly as possible.
Not half as awful as the Boers themselves (and I say this of an enemy who invented concentration camps)
Sure, that really worked out well for the CSA and the Boers…
Is he in there with Benedict Arnold?
Well, gosh, there were lots of duty-bound men on the other side of that war, like Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas et al.
It’s interesting that people are focusing on Gettysburg as the pivotal point. Really, it was more Vicksburg, which was a strategic disaster for the Confederacy. The Confederacy lost a chance to win at Gettysburg, but they didn’t lose; they lost at Vicksburg.
Lee, of course, was interested wholly in the war in and around Virginia, but a person looking at a map of the entire war in August of 1863 would have immediately realized the Confederacy was doomed. Lee could have kept the Army of Northern Virginia intact and in fighting power right until 1865, but by that point there was essentially no country left for him to defend, as the Union had conquered pretty much all the rest of it that mattered.
Can’t argue with this. Lee was a traitor and his every action was wrong. Rhett Butler’s assessment of the South’s chances in the early part of Gone With The Wind was pretty spot on, any rational person in the South would have come to the same conclusion. It was hopeless from 1861.
I think you are correct-the southern “strategy” seemed to be: “prevent Richmond from being captured”. By 1864, the CSA army was largely starving, short of food, and even reduced to stealing shoes from Federal POWs. Lee wasted many men in pointless frontal attacks (on prepared Union positions). His mistakes greatly reduced the ability of his army to fight-and by the surrender, many CSA troops were actually starving.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that at the time Gettysburg was fought Lee was focused on Virginia to the exclusion of the rest of the south. One of his reasons for invading Pennsylvania was to force the north to pull Grant away from Vicksburg. It turned out he was too late for that to work, of course.
It also seems wrong to say that Lee never had a strategy to win the war. By gaining military victories in the north near large cities, he hoped to convince the citizens to press their leaders to negotiate with the southern states. Given what was going on in northern cities in 1863, this had a good chance of working if the battles were won. The strategy failed because they were not.
I have to dissent a little; while winning a victory on Northern soil could have helped the Northern opposition make the case that the war was in effect unwinnable, his primary reason for heading North was to relieve pressure on Virginia, which bore the brunt of the war for most of the period.
And Lee was asked at various times to transfer troops (and even himself) to the Western Theatre, and except for the movement of Longstreet prior to the battle of Chickamauga, he usually declined (which Jeff Davis let him do).
The alternative histories having Lee winning Gettysburg in Napoleonic style usually fail on what happened next. The noted historian Shelby Foote once said “I think that the North fought that war with one hand behind its back. If the Confederacy ever had come close to winning on the battlefield, the North simply would have brought that other arm out from behind its back. I don’t think the South ever had a chance to win that war.”
As I pointed out in another thread, the Pennsylvania campaign had no strategic value regardless of whether or not Lee had won a major battle during it. The Pennsylvanians weren’t going to rise up for the Confederate cause (and previous campaigns in supposedly friendlier territories like Kentucky and Maryland had also failed to gain local support). And the Confederates certainly didn’t have the resources to stay in Pennsylvania and hold any territory they captured.
Lee’s plan, such as it was, was that the United States would be so shocked by his raid into American territory it would immediately give up the cause. Which was a pretty unrealistic belief. The CSA had lost huge swaths of territory by this point in the war but the Confederates were still fighting. There was no reason for Lee to assume that the temporary capture of a small town twenty-five miles behind the lines would break the will of the entire United States.