One counterfactual I’ve wondered about is how different the Civil War would have been if Lee had accepted Scott’s offer of field commander-in-chief. Having a unified strategy in the hands of a capable commander in the early days of the war would surely have made some difference.
I think we can safely assume that Lee would have taken personal command of the Army of the Potomac, and thus the Union would not have had to suffer from the hesitancy of McClellan.
One of Lee’s greatest strengths was recognizing the ability of others–witness his willingness to give Stonewall Jackson free rein. If he had been in command on the Union side, I think he would have given Grant faster promotion in the first half of the war.
This, plus considering the fact that both Jackson and Albert Sidney Johnston were killed fairly early in the war, I think that the war would have been significantly shorter if Lee had stayed with the Union.
You have to wonder how whole-heartedly Lee would have pursued the war. Even if he had decided his ultimate loyalty belonged with the United States, he would still have felt a strong loyalty to Virginia. It’s hard to see him leading an invading army towards Richmond.
So for reasons different than McClellan’s, Lee might have ended up following a similar strategy. There’d have been campaigns of maneuvering rather than direct assaults. Lee would have been trying to convince the southerners to reconcile with the United States while trying to minimize casualties on both sides.
Another possibility is that Lee might have decided to assume a defensive posture in the east and fight the war in the west. There might have been a stronger early effort in Tennessee and along the Mississippi River. You might have seen the combination of Lee and Thomas rather than Grant and Sherman fighting at Shiloh.
Ultimately, I don’t think Lee would have done as well as Grant and Sherman. Lee would have remained focused on winning the war either by maneuvers or by winning battles. He never would have developed Grant’s strategy of wearing the south down by attritional combat or Sherman’s strategy of attacking the southern civilian economy.
“General Lee tasked me with defending DC from an attack from the west.”
“Oh? I wonder who he tasked with defending DC from an attack from the south?”
“He didn’t say; must be one of those ‘Need To Know’ things. He’s a tactical genius!”
“Indeed. I ride now for distant Texas, where Lee believes we can kill it in the egg!”
I believe that the Union would still have won the war.
Scott had offered R.E. Lee the chief command of the U.S. forces at the request of Abe Lincoln. Two days later, Lee resigned his commission, and proceeded to Richmond, where he was designated commander in chief of the military and naval forces of Virginia by act of the Governor.
When Virginia troops were transfered to Confederate service, Lee was appointed a brigadier general followed by a promotion to general by June of 1861. Lee served as a military adviser to President Davis in March of '62, and replaced the wounded General Joseph E. Johnston in May of '62 which led to Lee’s command of the Army of Northern Virginia on June 1, 1862.
Lee was a West Point graduate, 2nd in his class, and he was a trained engineer. An engineer’s skillset, and mindset, usually makes them the best commanders. During his service to the Union, Lee served as a staff officer and later as a line officer. His skillset kept growing. Lee’s service in Mexico was considered extraordinary. He supervised the construction of Fort Carroll in Baltimore Harbor (what better way to learn how to defeat set defenses than by building set defenses). It’s easy to see why both sides would want Lee on their side.
Assuming Lee would have accepted command of U.S. forces, he would still have been junior to General-in-Chief Windfield Scott, who retired Nov 1861. Would Lee’s credentials have been more impressive than the very impressive credentials (and equally impressive, political, friends) of Major General George Brinton McClellan (who was also an engineer)? Which officer had the most political support? I suspect that McClellan would still have been offered Scott’s job before Lee but Lee would have been offered command after McClellan’s repeated failures.
Lee’s command decisions would still be subject to oversight from the Whitehouse, the Cabinet, the Congress, and influential political backers. Would Lee have performed as brilliantly for the Union, as he eventually did under the CSA’s less-constricting oversight? I don’t think so.
For example - Would Lee have allowed Sherman’s march to the sea? I don’t think so.
Would the war have lasted that long? Let’s say Lee wasn’t a southerner and highly motivated, would Lee have moved faster and been more successful than the line of generals who did command the Union army?
Lee wouldn’t have been the only Union officer with Southern roots. Of course, the media, and Lee’s political enemies, or those who favored other officers over Lee, would have been free to attack Lee’s motivations.
Lincoln’s telegraph connections allowed him to oversee military operations on an almost daily basis. Davis had to wait for dispatches from the front. Lee would have had more freedom under the Davis administration than he would have under the Lincoln administration.
Lee, Grant, Hood, McClellan, Hooker, etc. were all subject to political oversight, supply chain problems, disease, transportation problems, and slow or unreliable battlefield communications. Lee would certainly have moved faster and advanced farther than a McClellan.
Lee made very few mistakes and he was lucky. Sometimes, luck is better skill. Under Lee’s command, the Union would probably (most likely) have had more (some?) victories during the early years of the war. Would those losses have convinced the South that further fighting was pointless? Probably not. The South still had a lot of faith in the fighting ability of the South.
I think an early or quick victory would have lead to more problems in the long run. As it was alot of confederates died in the war and if say 100,000 more had lived, they could have formed a guerrilla force to counter the union occupation and further harassed the black population.
Also a quicker end to the war would have meant fewer blacks serving in the Union army meaning less of a chance to show there worth.
Also the fact that Leee owned slaves and might not have been in favor of fighting to end slavery.
While it’s easy to slam McClellan for his lack of agressiveness in the field, it’s really selling the man short.
McClellan was - for his time - the greatest general the USA had at staff and development work. His ability to organize, raise and equip an army was second to none. The fact that he failed in the field is more the fault of the times (a general’s a general! Get out there, George!) and his senior leadership.
But letting McClellan do what he does best? Putting an army together from effectively nothing and getting it ready to go? That’s genius. Then turning it over to someone with great strategic and tactical ability like Lee? It would have accelerated the time at which Richmond falls by a year or two.
The CSA government would then have fled south, but with its political leadership in disarray it would have fallen to Longstreet or Joe Johnston to try to make some sort of defense-on-the-run happen. I’d say Johnston would be the better choice. Lee considered him a master of defensive war and counterpunching. But I’m not sure it would have worked out any better than any of the others.
With Anaconda working as it should - CSA ports blockaded and Grant and company cutting down the Mississippi and therefore removing Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana from the CSA - Lee removing Virginia from the equation pretty much leaves the CSA in desperate times long before Gettysburg.
But then, what would you have? He’d have 200,000 pissed off southerners with guns hiding behind every rock and tree and swamp.
No Jefferson Davis suggested to Lee to prepare for a guerrilla war but Lee wanted no part of that. As it happened there was enough bushwacking. Remember the bomb that blew up that Union steamboat that killed a couple hundred union wounded? Imagine even more of that plus retaliations.
The South needed to be thoroughly and completely licked so they didnt try it again.
I’d think the opposite is more likely. If that war had ended early - before the major bloodshed of the middle and end of the war - then reconciliation would have been a lot easier. There wouldn’t have been the memory of all those dead soldiers to feed the bitterness.
But I do agree that a quick war would have been much worse for black Americans. They were the ones who would have been sacrificed for an early peace.
I assume you’re referring to the April 27, 1865 sinking of the steamboat SS Sultana? A former Confederate had claimed that a former Confederate had told him that he had sabotaged the Sultana, but the official finding is that the Sultana’s boilers exploded due to excessive steam pressure, low water levels in the boilers, and a faulty boiler repair. Plus, the Sultana was grossly overloaded and was struggling upstream against unusually fast and high, spring time flooding condidtions.
…Although the Sultana had a legal capacity of only 376, by the time she backed away from Vicksburg on the night of April 24, 1865, she was severely overcrowded with more than 2,100 paroled prisoners
*Cause -
The official cause of the Sultana disaster was determined to be mismanagement of water levels in the boiler, exacerbated by the fact that the vessel was severely overcrowded and top heavy. As the steamboat made her way north following the twists and turns of the river, she listed severely to one side then the other. Her four boilers were interconnected and mounted side-by-side, so that if the boat tipped sideways, water would tend to run out of the highest boiler. With the fires still going against the empty boiler, this created hot spots. When the boat tipped the other way, water rushing back into the empty boiler would hit the hot spots and flash instantly to steam, creating a sudden surge in pressure. This effect of careening could have been minimized by maintaining high water levels in the boilers. The official inquiry found that the boat’s boilers exploded due to the combined effects of careening, low water level, and a faulty repair to a leaky boiler made a few days earlier.
In 1888, a St. Louis resident named William Streetor claimed that his former business partner, Robert Louden, made a death bed confession of having sabotaged Sultana by a coal torpedo. Louden, a former Confederate agent and saboteur who operated in and around St. Louis, had the opportunity and motive to attack it and may have had access to the means. (Thomas Edgeworth Courtenay, the inventor of the coal torpedo, was a former resident of St. Louis and was involved in similar acts of sabotage against Union shipping interests.) Supporting Louden’s claim are eyewitness reports that a piece of artillery shell was observed in the wreckage. Louden’s claim is controversial, however, and most scholars support the official explanation. The location of the explosion, from the top rear of the boilers, far away from the fireboxes, tends to indicate that Louden’s claim of sabotage was pure bravado.*
Lee would not have been the only Southerner to remain loyal to the U.S.: Winfield Scott himself and George H. Thomas (both Virginians), John A. Winslow (North Carolina), Robert Anderson (Kentucky), David G. Farragut (Tennessee), Montgomery Meigs (Georgia) and Sam Houston (Texas) are other key examples.
Robert E. Lee was a very skilled general and could, I believe, have won the war for the U.S. perhaps a few years sooner than actually happened, saving thousands of lives. He wouldn’t have stumbled and/or been as gunshy as McDowell, Burnside, McClellan, Pope etc. One downside: he might’ve won decisively before Lincoln was politically ready to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, meaning that slavery would survive and continue to divide the country. Perhaps the Civil War would’ve only been the first of two such armed struggles.
I wasnt aware of that. I’d heard only about the sabotage.
But going back to the rest of my post. I think a quicker Union victory would have lead to a longer prolonged guerrilla war because fewer confederates would have been killed.
Assuming, as RealityChuck pointed out, that Lee’s beloved Virginia hadn’t seceded (which also means West Virginia would never have become a State) and Lee, not McClellan, had replaced Scott, and Lee had allowed McClellan to reorganize the Union army, which Lee would then lead into actual combat, the Confederates would still have fought hard but might not have been as successful as they were to be under Lee.
But I believe the Confederates were fighting for states rights of their own beloved state, and to keep any damn Yankees from telling them what to do. Overall, the South would still have had to take a tremendous beating before they gave up the fight. The South would still have ended up in a very poor economic, financial, and militarily-prepared state.
Which, imho only, makes a prolonged guerrilla just as unlikely regardless of which side Lee fought on.
Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy, had the right idea:
“[In] the belief that his native Maryland would secede, Captain Franklin Buchanan, the popular and influential commander of the Washington Navy Yard, brought his commission to Mr. Welles [in the summer of 1861] ‘and with studied pathos and manner, and feelings not unaffected, laid it with emotion and tears’ upon the Secretary’s table. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘tearing out his heart-strings, parting with what was dear as life to him.’ Welles asked him ‘if he had spent his years in the service of the State of Maryland or of the United States government - had he been employed and drawn pay from the treasury of the former or the latter - had his honors from boyhood to age been derived from the state or the nation?’. Welles refused to accept the resignations of these officers but dismissed them from the service…”
West, Richard S., Jr., Mr. Lincoln’s Navy (Longmans, Green and Co., New York, 1957), pp. 48-49 (emphasis added).
Eggs-actly. Union officers resigned their commissions, or were dismissed, because they had already chosen that they could not fight against their own state, or that they would be in a position to fight for their own state if the need arose.
It was a personal decision that Welles chose to dismiss officers who had already made the decision to leave military service. I quit. You can’t quit because I’m firing you. Welles may have felt better about how these officers left the service but the results were the same. These officers choose their state over the Union.
