July 3, 1863: At the Battle of Gettysburg, the multi-divisional Confederate infantry charge, popularly known as "Pickett's Charge, failed with horrific casualties.
July 4, 1863: The Siege of Vicksburg ended with the surrender of the city to the Union Army. With the surrender of Port Hudson, LA five days later, the Union controlled the length of the Mississippi River. The fighting would go on for another 21 bloody months until the Confederacy surrendered.
Ever since I first read about Gettysburg, it seemed to me that Gen. Pickett got a bum rap. The charge wasn't his idea and he wasn't in overall command of the charge. He commanded the center division. The charge was commanded by Gen. Longstreet, who predicted that it would fail, but Gen. Lee ordered it anyway. Lee may have had a good reason to order the charge, he may have been counting on Gen. Stuart's cavalry to get behind the Union lines and cause a panic. But a heavily outnumbered Union cavalry brigade, led by Gen. Custer, stopped Stuart's attack and the Union center held.
Another bit of trivia is that, following the end of the Siege of Vicksburg, the Confederate soldiers were paroled back to the Confederacy. The custom of parole at the time was that paroled soldiers could not serve anymore. The Confederacy broke the custom, most of the parole soldiers were taken back into the Confederate Army, and the Union stopped paroling Confederate soldiers for the rest of the war. Given the dreadful conditions of POW camps on both sides, one can only guess as to how many Confederate prisoners died as a result of the end of paroles.
I'm also suspicious of historical turning points. President Lincoln could have left Gen. Meade in full command of the Army of the Potomac or replaced him with another "Peter Principle" general. The Confederacy could have appointed a commanding general for its armies, who then could have devised a strategic plan for the conduct of the war. Lincoln could have left Gen. Halleck in charge of the Union Army or found another inept general to command the Army. The Confederacy could have won a smashing battle in September or October of 1864, which might have then led to McClellan winning the presidential election and then suing for peace.
None of that happened, of course. And so the course of the war followed. Yes, the Confederate Army won a lot of battles in the months after Gettysburg. They still lost the war.
And the Confederates, now ably assisted by four justices on the Supreme Court, have been struggling to overturn the results of the war ever since. Were it not for the 13th and 14th Amendments, they might have succeeded more than they have.
How Blame Culture Ferments
1 hour ago
3 comments:
Pemberton was an idiot. He had been ordered by General Johnson to keep his soldiers mobile and *out* of Vicksburg and ignored the order because Pemberton was a close friend of President Davis while President Davis for some unknown reason hated General Johnson's guts (perhaps because Johnson was a master of maneuver warfare and Davis viewed that as "ungentlemanly"). It was the same sort of crony generalship that led to the collapse of the ARVN over a century later. Political generals simply are incompatible with winning wars.
I've never understood the veneration of General Lee. His war record is one that is fairly average if you consider it in the greater scheme of things. Granted, he did prevent the capture of the only first-class manufactury in the Confederacy (the Trafalgar Works in Richmond) for much longer than a bad general would have managed, but he also had no strategic vision and sucked up so many resources from the West that in the end, his army got starved to death by Sherman.
President Davis was supposed to be this military genius when the secession convention appointed him as President. I'm not sure where that came from, his only contribution to the U.S. Army as Secretary of War was a new hat. Maybe they liked hats. Who knows. But clearly he was a disaster as President of the Confederacy. At the time the Confederacy collapsed, he was the second-most-hated man in the Confederacy (the first-most-hated man being, of course, William Tecumseh Sherman). The post-war veneration of Davis as a saint of the Lost Cause was constructed from whole cloth because he was a bitter, vindictive, incompetent fool who lost the war for the South via his poor decisions in appointing generals and conducting the strategic sweep of the war.
General Grant really had no choice but to parole the Confederate prisoners at Vicksburg. They were starving and on the verge of death and incapable of being marched to POW camps, and Grant's own supply lines were barely sufficient to feed his own troops and were insufficient to haul tens of thousands of prisoners north before they died of starvation (note that Grant's own troops had arrived at Vicksburg on their own two feet, hard to believe in these days where our soldiers are driven everywhere in fancy mechanized vehicles). By letting loose tens of thousands of starving soldiers upon the South, Grant made it the Confederates' problem to feed and resuscitate them. That the Confederates later pressed the recovered soldiers back into duty is unfortunate, but other than simply executing them, there was nothing he could do.
The subsequent battles of the war did not involve extended sieges other than at the very end of the war, when Grant again paroled Lee's starving soldiers. At that point it no longer mattered, the Confederacy was done -- Sherman had already ripped the guts out. So it goes.
"Political generals" were a problem on both sides. So many of them had been politicians and would resume that career after the war ended.
Jeff Davis was pretty much acting as the overall Army commander, and he did a horrible job of it. He was no match for Grant.
The difference in generalship at the end, however, occurred because Lincoln appointed generals in the East and West who were both politically unpopular (Sherman was viewed as "crazy", Grant as "a drunken butcher") but who in the end proved to be damn fine generals.
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