Confederate Strength 1862

I can't seem to find it, and would be grateful for a link; I did however find an article here:

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/petersburg-wearing-down-lees-army

Which gives the number of Confederate casualties in the Petersburg siege as 28,000. All told that brings the Confederate casualties in the major battles to 151,270 before Appomattox.

I don't think I'm missing battles which would add to nearly 100,000 casualties suffered by Lee. I think the biggest one not counted in my list is probably one of the cavalry raids.
I am always impressed at how your inability to do the most basic thing, in this case read the book, magically fuels “the game” as you do rightly call it.
 
I am always impressed at how your inability to do the most basic thing, in this case read the book, magically fuels “the game” as you do rightly call it.
...this one isn't talking about a book. It's talking about the site you pointed me at, where I read the battle articles for all the individual battles Lee fought as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia (except for using consolidated articles for the Seven Days and Petersburg) and added them up and didn't come to the number you said.


In any case. How exactly is it wrong for me to ask for a specific citation?

...and now I come to think of it, where did I call it a game?
 
The fair comparison is Lee's casualties fighting Grant and vice versa.

Using the generally accepted numbers, Grant suffered 109,526 casualties against Lee. Lee suffered 74,028 casualties, to which you can add 27,805 who surrendered (total 101,833).

However, these are, at least in part, exaggerated for Lee. For example, the casualties used for 2nd Petersburg are 4,000, whereas actual casualties were closer to 2,400.
The fair comparison is Lee's casualties fighting Grant and vice versa.

Using the generally accepted numbers, Grant suffered 109,526 casualties against Lee. Lee suffered 74,028 casualties, to which you can add 27,805 who surrendered (total 101,833).

However, these are, at least in part, exaggerated for Lee. For example, the casualties used for 2nd Petersburg are 4,000, whereas actual casualties were closer to 2,400.
Grant’s way of fighting Lee was to command Sherman to March to the Sea, capture Wilmington & order Meade to maintain continuous contact with Lee. In the meantime, the Army of Tennessee was all but obliterated, Mobile was taken & Wilson tore the guts out of Alabama. Grant never personally commanded an army vs Lee. He was the commander of the entire US Army when he defeated Lee & the entire CSA army.

The army Grant did personally command was the Army of the Tennessee. That, of course is what a Grant as army commander compared to Lee as army commander looks like.
 
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...this one isn't talking about a book. It's talking about the site you pointed me at, where I read the battle articles for all the individual battles Lee fought as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia (except for using consolidated articles for the Seven Days and Petersburg) and added them up and didn't come to the number you said.


In any case. How exactly is it wrong for me to ask for a specific citation?

...and now I come to think of it, where did I call it a game?
The book is less than $7.00 online. It is the first line of one of your posts in the repeater thread… vey revealing & refreshingly honest. I must admit that the posts are all the same, demands for references from books you won’t read. Obviously, I can’t tell them apart.
 
Grant’s way of fighting Lee was to command Sherman to March to the Sea, capture Wilmington & order Meade to maintain continuous contact with Lee. In the meantime, the Army of Tennessee was all but obliterated, Mobile was taken & Wilson tore the guts out of Alabama. Grant never personally commanded an army vs Lee. He was the commander of the entire US Army when he defeated Lee & the entire CSA army.

The army Grant did personally command was the Army of the Tennessee. That, of course is what a Grant as army commander compared to Lee as army commander looks like.
Did Grant tell Sherman to march on Savannah? That would be news to Sherman. Grant wanted Sherman to remain in Georgia to deal with Hood, and then march to Mobile.

Such was the confusion, that Halleck had to arrange for two different supply convoys, one off Savannah, and one off Mobile, because nobody knew which way Sherman was going...
 
Did Grant tell Sherman to march on Savannah? That would be news to Sherman. Grant wanted Sherman to remain in Georgia to deal with Hood, and then march to Mobile.

Such was the confusion, that Halleck had to arrange for two different supply convoys, one off Savannah, and one off Mobile, because nobody knew which way Sherman was going...
Good heavens, who do you think had all those stars on his shoulders? The text of Sherman & Grant’s discussion & decision making is not a secret. Far from it, I am astonished that anybody who is interested in this subject hasn’t read them. What did Sherman do when he artived in Savannah? He hopped onto a ship & reported personally to Grant. It was, after all, Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign that opened Sherman’s eyes to the potential of that kind of campaign.
 
The book is less than $7.00 online. It is the first line of one of your posts in the repeater thread… vey revealing & refreshingly honest. I must admit that the posts are all the same, demands for references from books you won’t read. Obviously, I can’t tell them apart.
I just received a reply, my friends at the Civil War Roundtable of G.B. tell me that for 29 pounds 50 Amazon of G.B. will deliver Autumn of Glory to your door. The articles in their news letter are excellent. Don’t try the references wheeze on them.
 
Good heavens, who do you think had all those stars on his shoulders? The text of Sherman & Grant’s discussion & decision making is not a secret. Far from it, I am astonished that anybody who is interested in this subject hasn’t read them. What did Sherman do when he artived in Savannah? He hopped onto a ship & reported personally to Grant. It was, after all, Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign that opened Sherman’s eyes to the potential of that kind of campaign.
Halleck.

As Ludwell H. Johnson pointed out before I was born, the idea that Grant was actually directing the war is not well supported. Really, Halleck and Sherman were the major strategists. Grant was a field commander.

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It is the first line of one of your posts in the repeater thread… vey revealing & refreshingly honest.
...nope, can't seem to find it with the forum's search engine. It's not in the Repeaters versus muzzleoaders thread, and not in the Influence of repeating rifles in the Civil War thread.
 
The book is less than $7.00 online.
But I wasn't talking about a book in that post. I was talking about the American Civil War Battlefield Trust site you pointed me at, where I cannot substantiate your claim about Lee suffering 240,000 casualties during his time as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia.


Speaking of which, though, I was hoping to find a digital copy (one where I can do keyword searches, take screenshots and so on) rather than a copy available for purchase online, not least because on Amazon a physical copy of Autumn of Glory is about £20; on the LSU press it's $30; on Barnes and Noble it's also $30. I'm not sure where you're looking to find it for $7 or less, and if it's available in digital format for that price I'd get it straight off.
 
But I wasn't talking about a book in that post. I was talking about the American Civil War Battlefield Trust site you pointed me at, where I cannot substantiate your claim about Lee suffering 240,000 casualties during his time as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia.


Speaking of which, though, I was hoping to find a digital copy (one where I can do keyword searches, take screenshots and so on) rather than a copy available for purchase online, not least because on Amazon a physical copy of Autumn of Glory is about £20; on the LSU press it's $30; on Barnes and Noble it's also $30. I'm not sure where you're looking to find it for $7 or less, and if it's available in digital format for that price I'd get it straight off.
Google ‘Autumn of Glory’ & one of the first copies on sale is $6.48.

One thing does puzzle me, however. Anybody who studies the Western Theater has a copy of Connelly’s bio of the A of TN. Why would you want to cut & paste from a book everyone is familiar with?

Remember all those posts you wrote about the Vicksburg Campaign when you didn’t know that the Mississippi was blockaded downstream as well? If you had read any book on the subject, you would never have embarrassed yourself like that. When I was last in London, fish & chips with a beer was about 30 pounds, so the book doesn’t seem all that big an expense to avoid a repeat of that humiliation.
 
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Google ‘Autumn of Glory’ & one of the first copies on sale is $6.48.
Nope, can't find it for anything like that price on the first page of results. Google is probably giving you different results than me, because their algorithm takes into account things like previous search history and location.

One thing does puzzle me, however. Anybody who studies the Western Theater has a copy of Connelly’s bio of the A of TN. Why would you want to cut & paste from a book everyone is familiar with?

That's assuming more than a little about the ubiquity of a book with a listing on a "rare books" site and for which the current Amazon version was last reprinted twenty years ago (paperback) or twenty-seven (hardback), but I'm not actually a scholar of the Western Theatre for the most part; I'm an amateur on a discussion board. When you mentioned Wheeler's returns all being inaccurate, I asked you for an example because I was curious, and that's when you told me about Autumn of Glory - whereupon I checked for all the information in the book I could get available online, which (lest we forget) included multiple examples of Connelly actually looking at Wheeler's returns and taking them as fact.

Remember all those posts you wrote about the Vicksburg Campaign when you didn’t know that the Mississippi was blockaded downstream as well? If you had read any book on the subject, you would never have embarrassed yourself like that. When I was last in London, fish & chips with a beer was about 30 pounds, so the book doesn’t seem all that big an expense to avoid a repeat of that humiliation.
I don't actually remember that, though it's quite possible that it happened; if you could provide a link to remind me, I'd be grateful to relive it. It'll go well with the link to when I called the repeater issue or whichever it was a "game", which I'd also appreciate since I can't find that either - I imagine I could have referred to something like "that's not how the game is played" as an idiomatic way of saying that someone isn't doing things the way they should, of course.
(I'll decline to play into the "let's bring up the old mistakes our interlocutors have made" practice.)

If you got charged £30 for fish and chips for one, you were quite significantly ripped off - that's about what it costs when we get it for six.
 
Halleck.

As Ludwell H. Johnson pointed out before I was born, the idea that Grant was actually directing the war is not well supported. Really, Halleck and Sherman were the major strategists. Grant was a field commander.

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This 50-year-old excerpt does not seem to do the author justice. Perhaps it's taken out of context. The excerpt seems to confuse the question whether Grant was in fact coordinating Union operations at all with whether he was doing so "infallibly" - which, of course, he was not, any more than Washington, Scott, Pershing, Eisenhower, et al, performed at that level. I'm uncertain as to the identity of the unnamed revisionists who apparently (and absurdly) proposed that Grant was "infallible." The excerpt also suggests apparent unawareness of Grant's readily-accessible correspondence with Sherman in May 1864 and on June 18, 1864, not to mention the voluminous correspondence between them in early 1865. It could be, of course, that they were just two old former colleagues catching up in their spare time. Or perhaps the difference between devising a coordinated strategy and micro-managing its implementation is elusive. If one is undertaking a war on multiple fronts and has appointed subordinates who need a paint-by-numbers set of orders to execute it or 24/7 oversight, there's been a fatal defect in the hiring process. The notion that Sherman - not Grant - was "really running the war" in Fall 1864 because Grant accepted Sherman's proposal of a march to the sea at a time when the CSA was tottering on its last legs must be out of context, because surely the author knew better and because his reference to Thomas at Nashville actually undermines the point about who was "running the war". As we have seen elsewhere, Thomas was well aware that in December 1864 he was acting under Grant's direct authority as a subordinate.

At least the excerpt uses an "equal opportunity" approach to criticism, pillorying both McClellan and Grant for the same "obvious mistake". Whether in either case that's accurate may be a different question.
 
Nope, can't find it for anything like that price on the first page of results. Google is probably giving you different results than me, because their algorithm takes into account things like previous search history and location.



That's assuming more than a little about the ubiquity of a book with a listing on a "rare books" site and for which the current Amazon version was last reprinted twenty years ago (paperback) or twenty-seven (hardback), but I'm not actually a scholar of the Western Theatre for the most part; I'm an amateur on a discussion board. When you mentioned Wheeler's returns all being inaccurate, I asked you for an example because I was curious, and that's when you told me about Autumn of Glory - whereupon I checked for all the information in the book I could get available online, which (lest we forget) included multiple examples of Connelly actually looking at Wheeler's returns and taking them as fact.


I don't actually remember that, though it's quite possible that it happened; if you could provide a link to remind me, I'd be grateful to relive it. It'll go well with the link to when I called the repeater issue or whichever it was a "game", which I'd also appreciate since I can't find that either - I imagine I could have referred to something like "that's not how the game is played" as an idiomatic way of saying that someone isn't doing things the way they should, of course.
(I'll decline to play into the "let's bring up the old mistakes our interlocutors have made" practice.)

If you got charged £30 for fish and chips for one, you were quite significantly ripped off - that's about what it costs when we get it for six.
Oddly enough, I know exactly what the word game means. Obviously, you didn't go out to dinner with the kind of folks I did. Perhaps, since you are having chronic difficulties in finding access to books & their content, perhaps my friends at American Civil War Round Table (UK) can direct you in the correct direction. <acwrt.org.uk> They certainly have no trouble finding references. The articles in Crossfire, their newsletter are excellent.
 
Nope, can't find it for anything like that price on the first page of results. Google is probably giving you different results than me, because their algorithm takes into account things like previous search history and location.



That's assuming more than a little about the ubiquity of a book with a listing on a "rare books" site and for which the current Amazon version was last reprinted twenty years ago (paperback) or twenty-seven (hardback), but I'm not actually a scholar of the Western Theatre for the most part; I'm an amateur on a discussion board. When you mentioned Wheeler's returns all being inaccurate, I asked you for an example because I was curious, and that's when you told me about Autumn of Glory - whereupon I checked for all the information in the book I could get available online, which (lest we forget) included multiple examples of Connelly actually looking at Wheeler's returns and taking them as fact.


I don't actually remember that, though it's quite possible that it happened; if you could provide a link to remind me, I'd be grateful to relive it. It'll go well with the link to when I called the repeater issue or whichever it was a "game", which I'd also appreciate since I can't find that either - I imagine I could have referred to something like "that's not how the game is played" as an idiomatic way of saying that someone isn't doing things the way they should, of course.
(I'll decline to play into the "let's bring up the old mistakes our interlocutors have made" practice.)

If you got charged £30 for fish and chips for one, you were quite significantly ripped off - that's about what it costs when we get it for six.
ladder posts are not allowed on CWT
 
<historynet.com>Civil War Battles Resulting From Campaigns & Battles of Robert E. Lee is my idea of a source. it compares the casualty returns as they appear in major books by author. Very informative.
 
Oddly enough, I know exactly what the word game means. Obviously, you didn't go out to dinner with the kind of folks I did. Perhaps, since you are having chronic difficulties in finding access to books & their content, perhaps my friends at American Civil War Round Table (UK) can direct you in the correct direction. <acwrt.org.uk> They certainly have no trouble finding references. The articles in Crossfire, their newsletter are excellent.
What's going on here is effectively that I don't really want to pay a pretty substantial amount of money to get a hardcopy of a book to look up the reference required to demonstrate that a specific one of Wheeler's returns was inaccurate, when you had said previously that it was obvious and that all of Wheeler's returns were misleading.

You said the following:

The king of confusing returns was Joe Wheeler. At one point, IG found that the number of troopers mounted & ready for duty was 10% of Wheeler’s reported strength.
On the last day of 1862, Bragg lost about1/3rd of his army on the first day of Stones River. It would be weeks before an accurate count of the strength of the A of TN. Folks who study Wheeler report that as usual, his returns are wildly inaccurate.
Nobody who is at all familiar with Wheeler’s returns takes a one of them at face value, e.g. The extreme difference between what Wheeler reported & the numbers he actually had drives historians to distraction. Drilling down to actual numbers is, I am assured, vexing in the extreme.
Read the books. Wheeler’s screw ups extend all the way back to 1861.
When I pointed out that there were cases where Connelly had used Wheeler's returns at face value (i.e. using numbers taken directly from Wheeler's returns as true statements of Wheeler's strength) you said:
Has it crossed your mind that the massive difference between the numbers is the point?
You then went on to specify:

Look up Wheeler’s returns after his raid from Chattanooga to Middle Tennessee & back over the Tennessee. As was mentioned in an earlier post, an IG report is referenced. You really should read the book.
Which means that, rather than all of Wheeler's returns being wrong (as you had previously said, by saying that "as usual" his returns were wildly inaccurate and that "nobody who is at all familiar with Wheeler's returns takes a one of them at face value"), it was one specific set of returns which did not reflect reality.

You also enjoined me to:
Read the book, the footnotes are there for a reason. Go online & read the original documents for yourself.

So it seems to me that there is a simple solution here, if (as you say) the original documents are online. And that is that you look up and provide the specific OR citations.

I would be delighted to be given those citations, and I would also be delighted for them to turn out to support the argument that you made in the first place. I do not want to somehow prove that Wheeler's returns were accurate - I want to see why we know they were not - and I was fully ready to look through the sections of Autumn of Glory that I can access and find it laid out there, but instead in every case I can see where Connelly discusses Wheeler's strength (which is not the whole book, but Connelly does it on multiple occasions in the sections which are available online) he does so by citing Wheeler's returns as accurate.
 
<historynet.com>Civil War Battles Resulting From Campaigns & Battles of Robert E. Lee is my idea of a source. it compares the casualty returns as they appear in major books by author. Very informative.
I can't even find that article, or an article by that title; it would help if you were able to provide a link. I can however find this article:

https://www.historynet.com/the-butchers-bill.htm

Which is an article by Bonekemper from the historynet site, and discusses the casualties incurred and inflicted by Lee's forces.
It includes this paragraph:


The result of Lee’s strategic and tactical aggression was that, within a single theater and in command of a single losing army, Lee saw his troops suffer 209,000 casualties (see Lee Table, P. 42)—losses the South could not afford. Lee’s single army suffered 55,000 more casualties than the four armies commanded by Grant in three theaters—all theaters where his armies were victorious. If a single statistic was indicative of the war’s outcome, it was Robert E. Lee’s army incurring those 209,000 casualties. On the positive side, Lee did impose 240,000 casualties on his foes, for a plus-31,000 margin.

Now, this does mention Lee, and it does mention 240,000 casualties, but it's Lee causing 240,000 casualties on his opponents; Lee recieves only 209,000 casualties.

My initial count was 211,400, so this seems pretty much identical to the numbers I got.
 
As you might have meant History On The Net, not Historynet.com, I found this article:

https://www.historyonthenet.com/civil-war-casualties-lees-battles

Title:

Civil War Casualties In Lee’s Battles and Campaigns​


This article has a large set of tables, and while the formatting is slightly broken the summary at the top of the article is like this:

Summary
The final table in this appendix contains my estimates of the warlong total civil war casualties incurred and imposed by Lee’s armies when they were under his command and control. This summary table reveals that Lee’s army imposed 240,322 civil war casualties on the enemy while incurring 208,922. Thus, Lee’s soldiers imposed 31,400 more casualties on their opponents than they suffered themselves.



And the table (with the formatting corrected) is this:

Table at bottom of article
Campaign/Battle
Total Confederate Casualties
Total Union Casualties
Seven Days’​
20000​
16000​
Cedar Mountain​
1300​
2400​
Second Manassas​
9500​
14400​
Chantilly​
800​
1300​
Harper’s Ferry​
286​
11783​
Crampton’s Gap & South Mountain​
3434​
2346​
Antietam/Sharpsburg​
11500​
12400​
Fredericksburg​
4201​
12653​
Kelly’s Ford​
133​
78​
Chancellorsville​
12764​
17287​
Brandy Station​
523​
866​
Winchester (June 1863)​
269​
4443​
Aldie, Middleburg, Upperville​
510​
613​
Hanover​
150​
200​
Gettysburg​
28000​
23000​
Retreat from Gettysburg​
5000​
1000​
Bristoe Station​
1378​
546​
Kelly’s Ford & Rappahannock Stn​
2000​
400​
Mine Run​
601​
1653​
Wilderness​
11125​
17666​
Spotsylvania Court House​
13421​
18399​
North Anna River, etc.​
3766​
3986​
Cold Harbor​
4595​
12737​
Petersburg Assaults​
4000​
11386​
Petersburg Siege/Campaign​
28000​
42000​
Appomattox Campaign​
41666​
10780​
Totals​
208922​
240322​

Is this the article you meant, @Rhea Cole ?
 
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