Monday, July 3, 2023

One Hundred and Sixty Years Ago

General Robert E. Lee ordered General Pickett (and against the advice of General Longstreet) to charge the Union Lines at Little Round Top in the Battle of Gettysburg. At roughly the same time, Confederate cavalry under the command of General J.E.B. Stuart attempted to get behind the Union lines to disrupt things if the charge succeeded.

As we all know, Pickett's Charge was a failure. The charge was, to my mind, a Napoleonic War charge against a well-positioned enemy equipped with rifled muskets and artillery. Pickett's division was shot to doll rags.

Stuart's attack similarly failed. In part, it was because he had fired two signal cannon to let Lee know he was in position, which alerted his enemy. Part of the Union cavalry forces in opposition was a brigade from Michigan commanded by Gen. Custer, whose cavalrymen were equipped with Spencer repeaters. They turned back the Rebs.

The following day, the siege of Vickburg ended when the Confederate garrison surrendered to the forces led by General Grant. The two battles, taken together, marked the turning point of the war. With fits and starts, sure, the tide was now flowing to Appomattox.

I have never understood the veneration of of General Lee. He lost his war. Losing at Antietam gave Lincoln the breathing space and the cover to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which, among other things, drove a stake into the efforts by Confederate diplomats to gain formal recognition from Great Britain (or any other European nation).

Lee fundamentally misunderstood his task. He kept trying to hit home runs, get a knockout punch. But his job was to just keep the fight going until the Union gave up trying to beat the South. He didn't have to win, he had not not lose badly. Yet Lee kept rolling the dice on a grand victory and losing.

Add to that, Lee couldn't or wouldn't see the overall picture of the war. He fought as though all the mattered was the Army of Northern Virginia. He didn't seem to know or grasp that the losses in the west were strangling his cause. I don't know if he ever considered sending troops to oppose Gen. Sherman's attack on Atlanta and his march to the sea.

In fairness, Lee's army was badly equipped and badly fed. Desertion and draft evasion were epidemic in the Confederacy, especially after both widespread conscription and the "Twenty Negro Law" were enacted. Operation Anaconda eventually chocked off almost all foreign trade. The Confederate government didn't order farmers to grow foodstuffs instead of cotton, so warehouses were full of cotton that couldn't be traded to European merchants for weapons. Meanwhile, the Union both grew its own food and made its own weapons. In a war of attrition, most of the cards were held by the Union.

But all of the glorification of Bobby Lee is countered by one salient point: He lost his war.

9 comments:

  1. Economically, the North fought with one tied behind it's back. The long term prowess of any military is a function of its peacetime economy.

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  2. We're still kissing their asses, have been all the way back to the Cavaliers

    It's why we (still) have Idaho ...

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  3. Because for the South, it was a crusade for their mythology, rather than how do we cold-bloddedly win. Alas, not only then but now....and it's an infectious disease that has spread to the nation at large and its 'conservative' Right. We should be cold-bloodedly responding to the adapt or die challenge facing us (and humanity). Instead the Wrong is fighting a holding action against reality.
    As Milton gave Lucifer these words: Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.

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  4. One minor correction, which I offer only because it makes Lee's decision even WORSE: According to "Gettysburg" by Stephen W. Sears (and other sources I've read), on July 3 Lee ordered Pickett, Pettigrew, and Trimble to charge the *center* of the Federal line, not Little Round Top. He apparently did this because he'd already tried attacking the right and left of the Federal lines without ultimate success. This allowed Hunt's Federal artillery to get them in a textbook-perfect crossfire, as I understand it. And, since Meade anticipated an attack on the center, he had troops and reserves ready to face it.

    Up until Gettysburg, Lee had been a good (maybe great) tactician, but to your point about him fighting the wrong war, a horrible strategist. At Gettysburg on July 3, he was also a horrible tactician.

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  5. Stewart, they are so, so proud of the fact that their ancestors fought and died for the right of the rich to own people.

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  6. Is peacetime economy moving away from the hard red states with departing workers and a significant brain drain?

    There are indicators that it is happening.

    https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/05/08/middle-americas-brain-drain

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  7. Lees actions should be looked at taking into account that his first loyalty(and maybe his only loyalty) was to Virginia.

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  8. From Wikipedia:
    Tennessee (especially East Tennessee), North Carolina, and Virginia (which included West Virginia at that time) were home to the largest populations of unionists. Other (primarily Appalachian) areas with significant Unionist influence included North Alabama, North Georgia, Western North Carolina, the Texas Hill Country, northern Loudoun County in Virginia, the State of Scott in Tennessee, the Free State of Jones in Mississippi, North Mississippi, North Texas, the Arkansas Ozarks,[3] and the Boston Mountains in Arkansas.[4] These areas provided thousands of volunteers for Union military service. Western North Carolinians, for example, formed their own loyalist infantry, cavalry, and artillery regiments, while West Virginia seceded from Virginia...

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  9. I posted the above to point out that a lot of southerners, even during the war, were against the Confederacy and slavery.
    I started today off playing the Union song "Rally Around the Flag", my favorite verse is:

    "Down with the traitors, and up with the Star!"

    With a mother from West Virginia and a dad from Virginia, I had ancestors who fought on both sides. I took the Union side a long time ago when I became a US Army Infantry officer. As a North Carolinian, I recognize that we are a swing state with a Democrat governor and a gerrymandered Republican legislature. We have a lot of progressive people who are fighting for the good...

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