Well, that was the only hope to save Vicksburg without sending a strategically disabling portion of the Army of Northern Virginia west, or going west himself. It had the signal weakness of not working unless the enemy behaved in a way that would be disadvantageous. Plans relying on enemy stupidity or error are typical of bad strategy. One would expect better of Lee; I see this as one of the clearest examples of Lee’s tragic flaw – his attachment to Virginia even when his military acumen should have led him to different conclusions. He used “pull Grant away from Vicksburg” as a rationalization to avoid transferring the focal point of the war west, from which he knew his forces might never return to Virginia.
The closest I can think of was the order by the military administrator of New Orleans, Benjamin Butler, that removed certain protections from women who protested against Union troops. As the linked article says, it wouldn’t have allowed rape, but “If a woman punched a soldier, for example, he could punch her back.” This apparently followed a number of instances of women spitting on Union soldiers.
I am not doubting this for a second, but, um, more details, please?
Then what? That’s what everybody forgets…what then? Even if Pickett’s Charge had made it to the Union lines semi-intact, it was in no way enough men to make a difference. The Union center was too deep and Lee had zero troops in position to exploit a breakthrough, even if he could have achieved one. Say the rebels get through (probably Armistead and Garnett). Stannard, Gibbon and Doubleday pivot right, the 8th Ohio pivots left, and Webb and Stone push straight ahead. Battle still ends with the Confederates getting their asses kicked. There was no way the flanks were going to give in, and with interior lines Hancock’s troops could shift around at will.
Gettysburg needed to be won the first or second day. After that it was all over but the shouting.
Trinopus - The reference was probably to Qualtrill’s Raiders and similar CSA groups.
I’m guessing he’s referring to partisan raiders like Anderson and Quantrill.
The Germans lost WWII by attacking Russia at all. They had to take at least Moscow and probably Leningrad as well before the mud hit in September/October 1941, and that was plain impossible.
Similarly the South lost the war by attacking the North at all. They had no realistic chance of winning.
In both cases the inferior economy needed their opposition to lose the will to fight in order to “win”, and in neither case was that ever going to happen.
Agree with the first part, respectfully disagree with the second part. In both cases the enemy capitol was less than 50 miles away from the front lines at various times, and capturing it would have absolutely created a low but not infinitesimal possibility of suing for peace depending on the circumstances.
Low probability events happen all the time. It’s like saying the British were never going to let some upstart colonists successfully rebel and take their land. Or the Americans were never going to lose a war against a 3rd world nation.
Yes, failure of the Secession was not inevitable until late in the war.
And in any case the “Sherman the Barbarian” storyline is as much propaganda to make one side feel superior to the other as you can expect to find in any war(*). He was no better and no worse than any other.
(*)Especially one in which one side does indelibly have have a morally indefensible component attached to their “cause”.
Oh, I can see the difference, alright. Mostly because I know that Arnold was a lot more heroic at first than popular history paints him. Which was kind of my point.
Ah? If so, I apologize for misinterpreting your comment. However, it certainly sounded as if you were merely dismissing both Lee and Arnold (who, you correctly note, was another far more complex character than the cardboard cut out that is presented to schoolchildren) as eeee-vul traitors and villains.
Every general always wanted more troops. Lee himself always fought outmanned, outgunned, and undersupplied. Typically his troop strength was between one-half and three- quarters of the enemy’s. Nevertheless, he usually won victories. To take troops from your most able general and send them to less-able generals, seems like generally a bad idea. You also have to take into consideration that the troops would be in transit for a great deal of time: meaning they wouldn’t be available anywhere. Finally, however important was Vicksburg- and I agree it was important - it was less important than Richmond. Richmond was both the capital, and the industrial and financial center of the South.
That’s an interesting issue.
Lee sent approximately 20,000 men against 5000. The idea, I think, is that had they succeeded, they would have turned the Union guns there against the lines on both sides, creating enfilading fire against the Union lines. The Union troops would not be able to stay in their positions under those circumstances- they would have to flee, and/or form new lines. But the new lines - assuming they’d been able to form them - would necessarily have left and right flanks, respectively, open to fire and/or attack from the rest of Lee’s army.
I’ve always assumed, that had attack on the center worked, Lee would have sent every available body forward to reinforce it. I think it’s a plan that could have worked. It didn’t, of course.
Well, sure, after they had already lost the biggest city in the South, which was New Orleans.
There’s no “which was more important” here, though. Vicksburg was a catastrophic defeat that cascaded into the destruction of the Confederacy, or at the very least sped it up by a substantial amount. Losing Richmond would also have been devastating, though probably more to the willingness of the Confederacy to fight than its ability - it was not really that large a city and in theory a sufficiently determined government could have arranged more move production elsewhere. The morale blow may have been overwhelming, though.
The idea of moving troops from Virginia to Mississippi to prevent the fall of Vicksburg is interesting and might have worked in theory; given Lee’s ability to fight defensive battles it’s quite plausible he could have shed a corps and still held Richmond and Virginia, much as he preferred to take the war north.
The problem, though, is that one can’t put together a realistic scenario where that happens. The Vicksburg campaign didn’t start in Vicksburg, it started in Bruinsburg on April 29, when Lee was fighting Chancellorsville, and then proceeded east to Jackson, as Grant, rather than concentrating in Vicksburg, instead invaded Mississippi in an effort to hunt down and destroy Confederate units in detail. Lee was a great general with fine troops but he couldn’t be in two places at once.
By the time troops could have been moved in response to the danger, Jackson was lost, Vicksburg was cut off from the rest of the Confederacy and beseiged, and the Confederates had already lost a long succession of battles, a lot of men, and were in a state of organizational and political shock. Having a number of divisions arrive in late May might well have simply resulted in a few more divisions being placed into the hands of generals who would have pissed them away and getting them destroyed. There is a reason the Vicksburg campaign is often described as the most brilliant one ever fought on American soil, and it’s not because the Southern generals did a great job.
While I wouldn’t class either man as “evil”, I wouldn’t class either as “hero” either, like LinusK did. Both betrayed their own side, after all. But both were heroic before that (I’d argue Arnold more so in the sense that the Revolutionary War was a “better” war than the Mexican War). But if Linus considers Lee a hero, I’d want to know his reason for not considering Arnold one, too.
To add to what I said before - sorry for triple posting - I agree the odds were against the attack, but because frontal attacks usually failed, during the Civil War, not because it would have failed even if it worked.
In any battle plan, there are always things things that don’t go according to plan. Lee had ordered some 300 guns (a huge amount of artillery, for the time) to fire on the Union center, both before the attack, and while the troops were crossing the field. He didn’t know, ahead of time, that the pre-attack barrage would be almost entirely ineffective, because the artillery would overshoot its mark, or that there would be no supporting fire at all, because despite his orders, the artillery would not to be resupplied.
I’ll say this for Lee; he changed sides openly. Arnold switched over to the British side while pretending he was still fighting on the American side. So, in my opinion, Arnold’s betrayal was objectively worse than Lee’s.
Seems like there could be a case for viewing the degrees of “betrayal” fairly differently.
Lee never materially fought on the Union side during the Civil War. He and many others left at the onset of the war and were very open about the fact that in being forced to choose sides, their loyalty was to their home state. The “hero/traitor” tag probably just depends on where you were raised more than anything, which is ultimately unresolvable.
Benedict Arnold turned traitor during the war because he wasn’t happy with the the amount of credit he was getting, and most Americans are pretty well ok with him being labelled a traitor.
“Wrong” in the moral sense or in the practical sense?
There’s no perfect analogy, but… was General Giap wrong to keep fighting after the disastrous Tet Offensive? Was George Washington wrong to keep fighting after losing numerous battles to England? No- because they knew they could still achieve their ultimate goals.
Remember that the Confederacy was NOT waging a war to conquer the North. “Victory” for the Confederacy would have meant holding on until the North (hopefully) decided it had spent enough money and manpower, and let the South go on her merry way. That was STILL a possibility long after Gettysburg. If Lincoln had lost the 1864 election to George McClellan, the Confederacy might still exist today.
Would not the Union gunners have spiked their guns as their last act before retreating/fleeing?
On the basis of comparable actions – gun batteries being overrun – was spiking the guns commonly practiced, or was it generally not done? I did a Google search, and found numerous references to the concept of spiking guns. Apparently, a spike and a mallet were standard gun-serving tools. But I can’t find specific references to when it was done, and, alternately, when guns were, in fact, captured and turned.
(This is definitely a minor point, so apologies for possible highjacking.)
Beyond the morale loss, the big problem with the loss of Richmond is that the Tredegar Ironworks made up the majority of Confederate steel production. They had started to set up production elsewhere, but even with that, they still were dependent on Richmond’s industry.
I’m not sure if you’re agreeing or disagreeing with me. I’ll just add that Richmond was, to my understanding, the main site military manufacturing in the South: guns, bullets, artillery, etc.