After Appomattox?

[Southern Son]

Can you imagne, what would become to your country if Lee gave his army the order to keep fighting on after Appomattox, in a Guerilla Warfare?

[larry_cockerham]

After a couple of cheers, they would have gone home. Uly Grant was watching.

[ole]

I lean toward thinking that, given the tenacity of the reb soldier, guerilla war, had it been encouraged, would have lifted the horrors of the bushwacking areas to new heights.

Most would have gone home to resume their lives. Enough would have remained in the field to make things miserable for everyone -- secesh, unionist, guerrilla, and USCT alike. Assassination of those trying to restore order, disruption for those trying to put their lives back together and, finally, massacres of entire counties by exasperated troops.

Then it would have petered out, probably from civilian pressure as much as draconian military response. You'd have Confederate veterans hunting down the bushwhackers with as much ferocity as Federal troops.

"Official" permission would have emboldened the slackers, deserters, and assorted Home Guardsmen to continue their depredations in the hinterlands. It couldn't last, but it would have extended the misery as long as it did last.
Ole

[larry_cockerham]

I don't much agree with your speculation, Ole. The men still standing at the time of Appamattox and Durham were physically and mentally depleted. There was no fight left, hence the very liberal parole requirements. Even Bedford Forrest, when approached down in Alabama for the possibility of leading a force west to continue the struggle, quickly nixed the notion. Peace was an unresistable force. There was no support for hardware or livestock left in the south, not to mention a good steak or pork rib. In my humble opinion, the war was over.

[samgrant]

Jeff Davis did not think (or admit) that it was over.

[Will Posey]

I think Jefferson Davis hoped to escape to the Caribbean or to South America to be president of a government in exile. At the point of his flight from Richmond, he knew there was no way the CSA could prevail militarily.

He would have seen this course as better than staying and being hung or worse.

[whitworth]

Perhaps if the war in Virginia ended in 1862, and McClellan had captured Richmond, we might have seen more guerilla warfare.
However there was a great deal of guerilla war in the western part of Virginia, Mosby's rangers between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Bull Run Mountains, Missouri and any area that had fallen to the Union.
Earlier in the war, Lee decided that most of the partisan groups had a more negative affect on the southern civilians than any real benefit. He felt that Mosby's soldiers were the only effective unit in Virginia.

By 1865, the Union had been to every significant part of the Confederacy. The people were weary of war. I think Lee was highly thought of immediately after the war by Union soldiers and the North because, though he fought to near the absolute end, it was the absolute end.

[samgrant]

Check out these previous posts:

http://civilwartalk.com/forums/showt...ight=guerrilla

also:

http://civilwartalk.com/forums/showt...ight=guerrilla

and specifically to my post therein:

http://civilwartalk.com/forums/showt...illa#post39750

which has a link to an interesting (hold the presses, that link no longer works!)

Heres a link for that one that doesn't work:

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache...d=1&lr=lang_en

Here's a link to Sweeney's entire thing, in case you are interested:

http://faculty.msb.edu/sweeneyr/wp/wpnew.htm



what do ya think?

[ole]

I'm agreeing, Larry, that the bulk of the soldiers were done in and wanted nothing more than to go home and try to get something to grow that would get them through the winter of '65-'66. My point was that there were enough hardcases and those buttheads at home to keep some discomfort going. For a while. And even among those who were done with it were a few that didn't mind takin' out a yankee or two if the occasion presented itself.

And there was some of that anyway, wasn't there? Nothing big; nothing organized, obscurely recorded, if at all, but events that are unnoticed. Somebody gets shot; somebody's barn burns mysteriously, a soldier is murdered -- no biggy. But it did continue.

Now. If there were "official" permission for such, do you think that these occasional incidents would have been diminished?

I believe there were enough partisans, as a percentage of remaining southern manpower, veterans or not, to have maintained a really self-destructive turmoil for an as-yet-to-be-determined time. We're really talking human nature, aren't we? There were the last dogs to die, but with "permission," there would have been many more.

I think I need my nap.

[gary]

Pretty hard to fight when you have to ask the Union Army for food.