I submit there was no point to Gettysburg. Nobody planned to fight there. It was a meeting engagement and both sides had enough forces around to throw into it to make it a major battle.
I tend to disagree. The Confederates couldn’t afford to ignore these enclaves. So whenever the Union occupied a southern port, the Confederates had to assign a body of troops to the are immediately outside the enclave to hold the Union forces in check. So if the Union had 10,000 soldiers in Jacksonville (to pick one example) the Confederates had to keep 10,000 soldiers outside of Jacksonville. This exchange favored the Union which had more manpower to spread around.
It also benefited the Union blockade. Once the Union had occupied Jacksonville, it no longer had to have ships on station in the waters outside Jacksonville. Those ships could be reassigned to other ports the Confederates still held to tighten the blockade.
So I think there was a strategic benefit to retaking enclaves like Jacksonville. It would free up the soldiers being held on garrison duty around the enclave who could be assigned to other fronts. It would force the Union to re-establish the offshore blockade and thin out the coverage given to any individual port. And even if the Confederates couldn’t prevent the Union from recapturing the same port, they would at least make the Union do so. The propaganda value mostly flowed in one direction. Every time the Confederates retook the same city, the southern population would think “Hooray, we still can defend our cities no matter how many times they attack!” But every time the Union retook the same city, the northern population would think “Jeez, how many times do we have to fight for the same city?”
I have to agree with Jonathan Chance on this. Lee personally could have left for the West and taken maybe a division or two with him, but there was no way he was going to take the Army of Northern Virginia or the larger part of it with him. Moving the army would have been no small undertaking and could be neither quickly done nor undone. It would likely take a good part of a month or more just to transport the army one way and would put a severe strain on the Confederacy’s rolling stock. Sure, Union intelligence was always overestimating the size of the ANV, but overlooking its absence would be very hard to do, and impossible once formations belonging to the ANV began to appear and be identified in the West. Once the Army of the Potomac realizes there’s nothing between it and Richmond but local militias, the wars over. Lee wouldn’t be able to get back from the West before Richmond fell.
I was going to say something similar, the coastal enclaves were a testament to the Unions utter dominance of the sea. Retaking Norfolk might be nice, but all of those forts along the coast of North Carolina would be tough nuts to crack, to say nothing of Fort Monroe. The area around Jacksonville, Florida might have been easier to take out, but what would have been the ultimate point? The Navy could and would land troops somewhere else or right back at Jacksonville at will.
The real smart thing would have been to push for allowing blacks to serve in the Confederate army. He should have realized that ultimately the manpower of the north was going to overwhelm him.
Thing is the North certainly was getting tired of the war and the fact that they soon after were recruiting an unending supply of black troops to throw against the confederates meant the south had no chance of winning.
The Union army by 1863 may have been the most powerful army in the world. A European power would have no realistic chance of taking territory from the union.
Here is why Lee wanted control of Gettysburg:
http://www.gettysburg.stonesentinels.com/Gettysburg_Facts/Gettysburg_Facts-Road_Network.php
Same reason Bastogne was crucial to the Battle of the Bulge in Dec 1944.
But he couldn’t just take control of Gettysburg, he needed to act quickly afterwards. The North could put whole armies on trains and transport them within a week or two, if not days.
Our modern idea that “of course there are roads there” wasn’t a certainty even in 1863. It was in fact a retired resident of Gettysberg that invented the interstate highway system for military needs: Dwight Eisenhower.
“No matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn back.”
Most of the replies so far have had as a premise that Lee should have continued fighting to protect a bunch of pro-slavery traitors. Well, no, he shouldn’t have. He controlled a very powerful army in a region that supported one of the most horrific institutions in human history.
What he SHOULD have done is to communicate all the South’s battle plans to the Union and arrange for a series of simultaneous ambushes/surrenders of the Confederate army so that the slave-holding traitors that had taken over part of the United States would have their treachery ended once and for all. He should have done his goddamnedest to end the rebellion in a manner resulting in as little bloodshed as possible while dooming slavery to history’s dustbin.
The Confederate problem was they were forced to do the troop shuffle. They simply didn’t have enough soldiers to man a defense along every front. They had to keep moving soldiers between fronts to go to wherever the immediate threat was.
In the early part of the war, Union generals made this possible. Each Union theatre commander essentially treated his theatre as an independent entity. They would advance and withdraw based on the local situation rather than as part of an overall strategy. It was Grant who finally put an end to this and started planning simultaneous campaigns on multiple fronts.
It’s fine to condemn slavery (and bravely take on the pro-slavery movement) but let’s keep it realistic. The kind of turnarounds you’re suggesting are virtually non-existent in history. Nobody became commander of a Confederate army unless he was committed to the Confederate cause. If Lee had believed slavery was wrong and secession was treason, he would have been fighting on the Union side, probably leading a Union army like George Thomas was doing. And the topic of this thread would be “What should Johnston have done in the Summer of 1863?”
Except Lee didn’t want control of Gettysburg. Gettysburg was a classical meeting engagement, or in modern parlance a movement to contact; neither side planned on fighting at Gettysburg before it happened. Lee had no reason to control Gettysburg, nor any reason to fight at Gettysburg aside from the fact that the Union army was there. Longstreet’s plan, which Sailboat refers to, was to break off the fight at Gettysburg and find land of their own choosing upon which to fight the battle - land upon which they wouldn’t have to dig the Union out of the high ground but which the Union would have to dig them out of the high ground.
The role of Gettysburg has no relation to the role of Bastogne in the Ardennes offensive, the scale upon which wars were fought were vastly different. In WWII the front extended from Switzerland to the sea and the fighting went on non-stop 24 hours a day. In the Civil War the entire armies of both sides assembled and fought each other in an area of about 10 square miles or so outside the small town of Gettysburg for three days – which was considered a very long battle by the standards of the day, most pitched battles being decided in a day.
Confederate troops had already passed through Gettysburg on June 26th, chasing off the local militia and briefly occupying the town. The action at Gettysburg only began when troops of Pettigrew’s brigade approached Gettysburg on June 30th – allegedly looking mostly for shoes – and noticed Union cavalry arriving south of the town. Pettigrew’s troops returned to Cashtown without engaging them, and at dawn on June 1st A. P. Hill sent two brigades to Gettysburg to conduct a reconnaissance in force. From there the battle escalated into general engagement between the armies, with both arriving as fast as they could march to the scene of the battle. A potential source of shoes was the only significance of Gettysburg that caused it to be the scene of battle.
As a Major, he was assigned in 1919 to a transcontinental Army convoy to test vehicles and dramatize the need for improved roads in the nation. Indeed, the convoy averaged only 5 mph from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco; later, he saw how well the autobahns worked for Germany during WWII. I think those two items had more to do with his desire for an interstate highway system than his assignment to Gettysburg.
I disagree.
The South had no technological base; that was one of the primary reasons that the Civil War occurred and that the South lost the conflict. In fact the American had no significant levels of technology until the discovery of oil in Oklahoma and Texas in the early 20th century. It didn’t have advanced technology until the completion of the nuclear complex at Oak Ridge,TN during WWII and the construction of teh missile and space programs during the 1960s.
Also, the Confederacy was hardly an integrated unit. It was at war with the Union , yet vast areas of it were lukewarm to the war effort and most of the border states with exclusion of Virginia were under control of the Union by early 1863. Had a European power (France having the largest military and being the most likely to do so) decided to invade areas of Florida and Texas (which were lightly populated at the time) little could have been done to dissuade them.
You also seem to be forgetting that Spain, Portugal and France all had viable colonies in the New World at the time of the Civil War. Resupplying them wasn’t a major issue, so resupplying an army in the lightly populated American South wouldn’t have been. After all, the South’s “military” was engaged in combat with the Union and barely holding its own. It couldn’t have fought two wars at once.
Finally, Mexico was “unified” enough to limit the French to coastal territories and a few places inland. Mexican forces actually won several significant victories including the Battle of Puebla which we now celebrate in the US as Cinco de Mayo.
This is inaccurate.
France and Prussia both had sizable military forces. France’s were large enough and competent enough to conquer territories in Indochina and Africa (modern day Algeria,Morocco,Tunisia,etc) among others.Also they wouldn’t have been taking territories from the Union. They would have been launching incursions into a lightly populated South already at war with the Union.
Russia had a large army. In fact they had the largest army in 19th century Europe. However, for myriad reasons, they did not colonize North America farther than current day Alaska. Nor did I suggest that they had any interest in the American South.
Both Britain and Spain had colonies in the New World ( Jamaica, Cuba,etc) and while they didn’t have very large armies, they would have still been a match for an American South whose forces were primarily concentrated in Virginia, the Carolinas and Tennessee.
Really ?
France, Britain, Prussia, Austria had an inferior tech base to the Confederate States ? These were the giant industrial powerhouses of technology and ‘adaptiveness’. Russia was just getting up to par.
Some of the smaller or quite disunited countries, such as Italy or Spain could have matched the Confederacy in technology; probably even Hungary or Bavaria could have matched them in intelligence and military skill.
One may admire the Confederate determination, but neither military ability nor courage were uniquely theirs. When they displayed either. Both the Unionists and say as a far-flung example, the Chinese, had these too.
If your topic weren’t, “What should Lee have done in the Summer of 1863?” but instead were, “What actions could Lee have taken in 1863 in order to loyally serve the rapists, murderers, kidnappers, and traitors who were his masters?” you’d be on-point. However, if we’re asking what he should have done, we ought to treat the question seriously.
But let’s not pretend I’m taking the popular position here. The popular position is that it’s gauche to apply moral standards to historical figures and that people who do so are provincial and unable to be serious students of history. I’m attacking that popular notion in this specific instance, because I think that when we study history divorced from an understanding of morality, we make its study bloodless and often irrelevant to our lives.
That said, I think that my rephrasing of your OP is what you intended to ask, having no interest in what he actually should have done, so unless I’m wrong, I’ll bow out.
How about you quit thread shitting.
You know perfectly well that “should” can mean many things, depending on context. Here, it was incredibly obvious that it meant, “What would a winning strategy have been?”, and not, “What was the morally correct thing to have done?”
ETA: And yes, the first question is worth asking, as a matter of history.
[MODERATING]
In fact that is quite clearly what the OP was asking, so he IS on point. This is unambiguously a thread about matters of military strategy. If you wish to discuss a different topic please start another thread.
Thanks,
RickJay
Moderator
Why Gettysburg? Lee was attempting to bring the war to the northern states. That might pressure the northern states to look for a peaceful end to the war. Lee was also looking for an advantageous place to confront Hooker on grounds of Lee’s choosing.
Hooker was attempting to prevent Lee from advancing on Washington, DC, drive Lee back into the south, and was also looking to confront Lee on ground of Hooker’s choosing. Hooker resigned shortly before Gettysburg, and Meade assumed command but Meade’s overall objectives remained similar to Hookers.
Gettysburg had not been a primary objective but it would do until some other location presented itself. Both sides had been looking for a fight and this terrain was considered advantageous. With 12 roads intersecting in Gettysburg, it was a major road hub. This battle happened to take place at Gettysburg because both commands had decided to fight for it.
CSA foragers were foraging. Shoes, food, arms, whatever they could find. And scouting enemy movements. Union skirmishers were also scouting the area and town for enemy movement. Lee and Meade decided to fight at Gettysburg because that’s where the enemy was and both commands thought they could win.
Pickett’s charge was poorly planned and should never have taken place but Pickett’s charge took place on day three. It wasn’t the reason that Gettysburg had become a battle field.
I believe it’s only about military strategy because of an unstated premise in the OP, and it’s a premise I believe to be false; my goal was to challenge that premise. However, if folks want to stipulate that premise, I suppose that’s how it’ll go, so I’ll bow out, as I said.