I don’t think it’s been mentioned yet, but McClellan was one of 3 US Army officers dispatched to observe and analyze the Crimean War. He returned in 1856 with a great deal of insight into siege operations, having witnessed the Siege of Sevastopol firsthand. It could be that seeing that siege and absorbing some of the many lessons of that war (a great many being negative) somehow led McClellan to conclude that well-fought defensive campaigns had a better chance of making a general look good than a poorly-fought offensive campaign. Just my 2 bits…
And in that light, it’s particularly remarkable that the army went heavy in Lincoln’s favor.
He actually didn’t tell them that; he had them sign, sight unseen, a statement to that effect that he then didn’t reveal to them until after he’d won the election: http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/lincoln/presidency/HealingTheNationsWounds/ExhibitObjects/BlindMemo.aspx
I regret that you see it that way.
To suggest that there was a viable strategy in the Eastern Theater, or any theater of the war, other than for Union forces to engage Confederate forces and to keep up the pressure until something irrevocably broke is just fundamental error.
In the spring of 1864 with Grant in over all command, that strategy was finally put into effect in Virginia, in Tennessee and Georgia, in the Trans-Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast. A year later it was all over because pressure was universally applied and that pressure was maintained, local setbacks and unprecidented casualties notwithstanding. With Grant and his people in charge there would be no falling back to reorginize and reequip. It was war to the knife and the knife to the hilt. That was an approch McClellan could not understand or implement.
As far as Little Mac’s experience in the Crimia was concerned, as almost any student of that sorry affair would tell you, the Crimia was the last place to learn how to wage war.
Well, it taught a few important lessons. It pointed up the role of the railroad in ferrying supplies, and also showed the ugly future of disease as a bigger killer than battles.
If nothing else, the Crimean war was a good object lesson of things not to do…
Eh. It showed the ugly past of disease as the big killer in battles. By WWI, health standards drastically reduced “diseases of the camp.” (ignoring the Spanish Influenza of 1918, anyway. It was previous wars that generally featured more deaths from disease than battle, not future ones.
While you’re right about the weaponry, I don’t think it’s accurate to characterize Lee as taking advantage of defensive firepower as a deliberate strategy. He went over to the offensive at every opportunity (and sometimes when there wasn’t an opportunity.) He did fine on defense but he never wanted to be there. And Pickett’s Charge was not some kind of weird exception – in fact, he ordered costly frontal assaults almost from the moment he took command of the Army of Northern Virginia (starting with Boatswain Swamp and Malvern Hill).
The last two passages I quoted point to an issue I seldom see discussed when comparing the merits of various commanders…nobody is a perfect robot. You can’t expect people to always behave optimally – people have their tendencies.
Generals who avoid making costly mistakes are liable to miss golden opportunities, and conversely, generals who ruthlessly seize the advantage sometimes misjudge and make costly mistakes…and you have to take the good with the bad. If you want a Grant, someone not afraid of Lee and willing to commit all-out, you’re going to endure the occasional Cold Harbor. If you want a Lee, who “will take more desperate chances, and take them quicker than any other general in this country, North or South,” you’re going to get the occasional Gettysburg. It was Shelby Foote who said (on Ken Burns’ documentary, I believe) “Gettysburg…was the price the South paid for Robert E. Lee.”
Aggressive generals make mistakes, nonaggressive ones miss opportunities.
What, no alternatives whatsoever other than bludeoning frontal offensives? If this is the case, it would seem the generals of WW1 learned the lesson well.
If you think the Overland Campaign was nothing but bludgeoning frontal offensives, I would suggest you have misunderstood the Overland Campaign. Throughout the entire campaign Grant was attempting maneuver warfare. Half the battles were started by Lee, not Grant. And the times where there were Union frontal offensives, there were reasons to expect them to work. The Mule Shoe would have worked if the Union could have coordinated better. And Cold Harbor, while a terrible mistake, was formulated on the idea that Lee’s army had functionally broken down. It hadn’t; but Grant had good reason for thinking it had.
Do you have a specific strategic suggestion on how the campaign should have been conducted? Where and how should have Grant moved the Army of the Potomac so as to avoid the terrible bloodshed, while still keeping a hand on Lee?
Except for the American Civil War, where (according to at least one cite), disease casualties exceeded battle casualties. That’s all I meant by saying that the Crimean War pointed to the future.
The Crater was another example. An innovative idea that could have succeeded if it had been executed better.
No I do not think that. It’s not the argument I am making. I was responding to this:
You guys are overly sensitive to Grant’s military reputation. I am not saying Grant was a senseless butcher, or whatever you are reading between the lines. I realize that this has been said by others, but I am not echoing them.
I am merely stating that the evisceration of the South could potentially have won the war and did not require attacking everywhere, all the time, full force by the Army of the Potomac.
[Before you say more - not that I’m claiming the army of the Potomac did attack everywhere, etc.!]
I’ve gotten my share of broken teeth making this same argument before. I was inclined to let you take all the lumps this time Malthus, but since this keeps popping back up to the top of the forum, for the sake of solidarity* I guess I can live with a few more bruises.
It would seem to me the main counter-argument people are making against Grant threatening rather than attacking is that it would surrender the initiative to Lee. The thing is, I just don’t see what Lee could realistically do with that initiative while under threat from Grant.
Boldly abandon Richmond and strike in an unexpected vector? Not likely - I doubt Davis would ever have countenanced that, even if Lee were inclined to do so. Richmond was too symbolic. Losing the capital would have been a huge propaganda blow.
Take the initiative and attack Grant’s much stronger army? Grant was not McClellan - the most likely result would probably be another Gettysburg. Grant would have every advantage reacting to such a thrust ( well, putting aside his less competent subordinates ). It would have accomplished the same general thing as the Overland Campaign, only with the odds tipped in Grant’s favor.
Detach units to support other campaigns? Already outnumbered nearly 2:1 it would have made Lee that much weaker and as noted Union intelligence was much improved. It seems such a move would likely be detected eventually and afforded Grant the opportunity to assault a much weakened Army of Virginia. Again tipping the odds in his favor. And would an extra corps really have made that much difference against, say, Sherman in the Atlanta Campaign? Maybe, but again it doesn’t seem likely - Johnston would just have been a little less outnumbered and still up against a better general.
It still seems to me in hindsight, that Grant maneouvering to constantly threaten Lee while Sherman guts the Confederacy from the underside would serve the same purpose as the Overland Campaign with potentially fewer losses. Force Lee into a dilemma, where he had to either divide his forces and risk a devastating attack in a weakened condition or risk annhilation attacking a much stronger enemy under a first-class general.
The counter-arguument of course ( aside from the ones that state that I’m so stupid I must need help breathing 
) is that this is in hindsight. Grant and Lincoln didn’t seem to fully appreciate Sherman’s strategy at the time and Lee’s reputation was so formidable they didn’t dare give him a chance to pull a miracle out of his ass. Which is fair enough. But I think the argument that the Overland Campaign as implemented was the best possible option is questionable.
- I still tend to think you are wrong about some of the impacts of the Mongols on Russia and the putative impact of a more successful Mongol conquest in Europe ;).
While they did, vast6 strides were made in military medical training, technology, and organization during the course of the war, and as a proportion of all casualties, disease was less a factor than any previous war with sufficient records, stretching back several centuries of European history. The Civil War was a major turning point in the fight against disease, and within a few years the discovery of the bacillus would further revolutionize medicine.
Dude, these two statements are about as contrary as it gets. You really aren’t making any sense, and you display no understanding of the numerous factors which went into the decision.
While it was unlikely, this is exactly what Lee had done not once, but twice previously. And even in this late stage of the war they still made advances down the Shanandoah.
Uh, yes. As in, the very thing Lee in fact did do several times?
It wouldn’t have been required. Merely moving some troops had greatly weakened or turned around Union campaigns in the West several times. Seriously, we’re not making up wild possibilities here - this is what had actually happened, repeatedly, over the course of the war, when the Union army in the East was quiet.
You mean the same Grant who listened patiently to Sherman’s plans, considered the risks, and then told him to go ahead an do anything he needed to do?
Yeah, sure, if you have magical knowledge of when and where he would be. Somehow, that never worked out. Except for McClellan and he still managed to botch it up.
No, the problem we have with your view here is that you manage to completely ignore three major factors:
(1) What Lee had done up to that point,
(2) What Lee had the capability to do, and
(3) What Lee did in fact go on to do.
That is to say, you are sitting there arguing Lee could not possibly to do any of the things he did before the campaign, tried to do during the campaign, and actually accomplished in the course of it.
That’s a really bad argument. I like theory, too, but Lee threw out the book on military theory, wrote a new one, and included a bunch of loopholes just to screw with people, and even then wasn’t too fond of the rules. I mean, if you’re going to ignore history, there’s not all that much we can debate in a discussion on the Civil War.
I supect I am “making sense” to those with the will to read my posts fairly.
Point is I am replying to SB’s statement above, not what Grant actually did. There is a difference between posters here and Grant, notwithstanding you guys’ vigourous defence of the man. 
Now, I’m not claiming to be a better Civil War general than Grant. Perhaps a better general than Burnside - I don’t want to display false modesty. 
But the notion that ‘all attack, all the time, by everyone’ is not only the best but the only strategy (which one again, is not Grant’s, but one raised here on the Dope) is I think not supportable. It is remarkably similar to the approach taken by some WW1 generals.
Fair enough, and more or less exactly what I was getting at - with the exception of the Mongol debate of course.
Naturally any speculation about whether a better strategy could have been used suffers from hindsight-itis.
My own suspicion is that the present rather empassioned, not to say febrile, defence of Grant is a reaction against the excessive calumny heaped on him in the past as a “butcher”. It’s just a swing of the popular pendulum.
Point taken. I somehow misapprehended your use of the word “future” to be a reference to all future wars, not to the immediate future which would be the US Civil War.
It’s arguable that most of the Overland Campaign was, as initially planned by Grant, “Grant maneuvering to constantly threaten Lee while Sherman gutted the Confederacy from the underside.” Grant repeatedly disengaged and moved by the flank. Sometimes Lee hit him, and on a few occasions Grant struck at Lee (I would suggest “opportunistically”), true, but I’ve argued before that you’re going to get that sort of opportunism from a Grant – aggressive commanders make the kind of mistakes to which aggressive commanders are prone. It’s worth noting that the worst of the attacks, Cold Harbor, was conceived as a quick strike before the Army of Northern Virginia could organize a defensive line and entrench. It turned into the horror we remember mostly because of two factors – repeated delays that gave the Confederates lots of time to set up and entrench, and a sort of rigid inflexibility that prevented the recognition that those delays had rendered the original reason for the attack dangerously moot from working its way through the chain of command (in both directions, really). I speculate that exhaustion may have been a compounding reason nobody really took a hard look and said, “wait a minute…”
I don’t think it was “the best possible option” as conducted. But I’m more sympathetic to the idea that the sort of commander who could conceive a campaign of maneuvering was liable to making opportunistic attacks that might well turn out to be mistakes. Remember that a recurrent refrain in the writings of many commanders (including both Grant and Lee) was “to maneuver the enemy out of his trenches so we can attack him in the open.” Arguably, Cold Harbor was exactly that in theory – an attempt to attack an army that was still moving into position “in the open” and had not yet entrenched. It’s just that in practice the “friction” of war turned it into another head-on assault on strongly entrenched forces.
I’m with you in wishing that the campaign could have been conducted with less fighting and more marching, but I envision there’s an imaginary line somewhere between “fighting” and “marching” and as we shift away from “fighting” and toward “marching” we run the risk of shifting away from a Grant and toward a McClellan. (You can’t always get a Sherman…in fact, he was pretty unique.)
At the risk of seeming needlessly contrary, I’ll point out that Grant famously lost his temper with men worried about what Lee was going to do:
[QUOTE=Grant]
Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what are we going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.
[/QUOTE]
So…LARP chess? I can’t say that I particularly disagree with this doctrine.
Well, it does sound nice. I mean, it’s humane, intelligent, and elegant rather than involving miserable and brutal bloodshed. It just didn’t actually work, and that’s usually a problem in the military. In factr, no general who used this went on to great success: McClellan has been discussed, Buell went nowhere (literally, in his campaign against Chattanooga) and Halleck managed to get himself promoted, but turned out to be nothing more than a glorified clerk who spent his time manuevering his brother officers and not the enemy.
It’s also worth remembering that this kind of war of manuever was not really based on experience. The Napoleonic wars had not been bloodless and manuever there usually set the enemy for a killing blow, not a cheap victory; rather, it was a reaction to the heavy loss of life in that era. Basically, if such manuevering could have won the war, it could not have done so before half the nation’s army died of old age.
Actually it was widely used during the condotierri period (Italy around the 15th century). You had all of these little city-states where the rulers hired mercenary companies rather than use their citizens for fighting. The mercenaries were in it for the money and had no interest in dying, so warfare became very ritualized. You’d maneuver around and if you gained a position of advantage, your opponent would concede you’d have won an actual battle and negotiate a truce. The two sides would get together and the side that “lost” would make some concessions to the side that “won” and a few towns would change owners. It was all very polite.
It ended with the religious wars of the Reformation, when tempers heated up. Soldiers started fighting for their faith and they no longer were content to just win on points - they wanted to crush their enemies and wipe their blasphemy from the face of the earth. And when religion wore thin, it was replaced by nationalism and ideology as causes worth killing and dying for.