You're making my argument for me. You are saying that Lee and Davis had no strategic vision for winning the war.
And that is correct.
Your point was, essentially, "how could Southerners believe in the delusion of a decisive field victory?" If this was indeed a delusion, it was one deeply embedded across American society as a whole at the time that guided many legitimately bad ideas on both sides.
If my point ended there, I
would be making your argument for you. It is true that the Confederacy had little overarching strategy except for one or more successful battles of maneuver inflicting sufficient political shock to get the North to give up, but strategy flows from means. The Confederacy didn't have any means that could logically be applied in any way toward an ultimate expectation of victory; however bad their inferiority in manpower was, their inferiority in everything else but bales of cotton was far worse.
Strategically wise, rational leaders would simply have never fought the war.
Massive retreats by Johnston's army would not have been necessary if Lee had not destroyed Confederate forces in two disastrous invasions of the North.
That is the point that you still fail to grasp.
I don't intend to be disrespectful, but there is no other way to say this; you do not have even the faintest grasp of how armies in this era were formed, sustained, moved, or how they fought.
Consider that from the aftermath of the Seven Days to the final days of the Petersburg, the Confederacy as a whole consistently afforded Lee about 60-80,000 men. Virginia and North Carolina alone afforded Lee about 55,000 men on the eve of Third Petersburg, counting Pickett's command. Do you think this is just a coincidence of new recruits and recovering wounded arriving almost perfectly in tune with his rate of loss?
No; the real explanation is that mere availability of bodies wasn't the main bottleneck for Confederate deployments. The main bottleneck was the availability of local agriculture, wagons and beasts of burden, ammunition, rail lines and rolling stock, which limited the forces that could be usefully deployed in a given locality, how long they could be deployed there, how readily they could move, and their ability to give battle.
The ability of a region to sustain large forces was a perishable asset; long-term concentrations of large forces destroy the ability of that area to support operations. This forced the Union to build a massive logistical apparatus to support their offensive campaigns, and forced Confederate armies to move or starve.
The best way this can be expressed is by asking, "What was the largest city in the Confederacy after the Fall of New Orleans?"
The camp of the Army of the Potomac. The second largest was, for the most part, the camp of the Army of Northern Virginia.
The idea of "trench warfare" as a way for the Confederacy to win is painfully naive and predicated on a failure to understand anything of military logistics in an agrarian, semi-industrialized society.
It's useful to look at what actually happened when the Confederacy did undertake a large cross-theater troop transfer; Longstreet came up to the Army of Tennessee with none of his wagons, no beasts of burden, little artillery arriving too late. The single-track railroad sustaining the Army of Tennessee was only able to ship up this pure infantry force by completely neglecting the transport of food, ammunition, and the pontoon bridges needed for a pursuit afterward; the mobility of that 60,000-man army was afterward crippled under its own unimpressive size.
Look at the difficulty Johnston had feeding and moving just 30,000 men in Mississippi in 1863; more men would have made his poor availability of forage, rolling stock, animals, and wagons even more severe, and the state of the Confederate transportation network did not make it possible to substantially increase the basic logistical capacity of operations in Mississippi.
Geography and logistics condemned the Union to win the West slowly, but they also condemned the South to lose it slowly.
In contrast, Confederate emphasis on Virginia was a circle; it was the only place they could fight with ambition and the only place the war could be lost
quickly. Virginia had agriculture, industry, a large free and slave population, and multiple rail lines of both Confederate gauges. Confederate armies of 80,000+ could move like armies of 30,000 in Mississippi and armies of 60,000 in Georgia could only dream of, and this was not just a function of pushing more resources toward Virginia but a result of basic economic and logistical realities.
As the war dragged on, the Confederate economy and transportation network gradually collapsed; there was nothing Lee could have done or not done to fix the fact that the normal conduct of necessary economic activity meant that wear and tear on the rail system built up while the Confederacy did not have the industrial capacity to maintain or expand it. Compared to the mortal threat the Confederacy faced from the blockade and the breakdown of its rail network, fixating on a few thousand men here and a few thousand men there is painfully pedestrian.
Not even close. The South had significant advantages that the American colonists did not possess, in terms of land, resources, and West Point military training among several Southern generals.
The important thing in making points like this is to pose a
comparative analysis.
The Confederates' total strength was 4x that of the Continentals, and the area of the Confederacy was 2.5x. Wonderful; they had more stuff and more space.
The Union's total wartime strength, however, was about 15x what Britain deployed in the American Revolution. Britain did not have the number of troops and the political will to occupy the Colonies in force, the Union did.
The Confederacy also didn't have France and Spain to win their war for them...
Nor would they have had to. If they had utilized trench warfare like Lee's Army did in 1864 and used interior lines to rapidly transfer Confederate forces between the Eastern and Western theaters of war.
This is 100% categorically wrong. Lee ensured the Confederacy's defeat.
Lastly, you fundamentally do not seem to understand military operations of this era in general, and particularly in relation to military engineering.
European armies had for centuries used fieldworks and conducted sieges just like those in the American Civil War. The methods for defeating them by regular approaches, a sort of spiritual predecessor to WWI 'bite-and-hold' methods, was an established aspect of military science for 200 years by this time.
This sort of contest of ammunition, logistics, and engineering is impossible for the industrially inferior side to win, which is why when Union armies began regular approaches (Warwick Line, Corinth, Fort Wagner, etc) Confederate armies retreated without fighting regardless of how they suffered for doing so, or undertook to counterattack and preempt the use of regular approaches (Seven Days).
But this usually isn't necessary. Grant may have suffered heavy losses attacking Lee's fieldworks in the Overland Campaign, but after an attack failed he defeated them simply by moving around and driving Lee closer and closer to Richmond.
There is no heavenly law that says a general who sees a line of trenches has to attack them and can't just go around. In many cases, Grant came upon a line of fieldworks Lee had thrown up and simply passed around them without attacking; Grant took casualties not because fortifications are a cheat code and the Civil War foreshadowed WWI, but because he aspired to destroy Lee in the open and win the war before the election and he took risks to try to do so.
As much as some insist otherwise, this was not WWI. The armies were far too small and the nation far too large to build an endless chain of trench networks and defend everything forever, and absent that feature, any defensive line could always be bypassed. If it couldn't be bypassed, the Union's overwhelming superiority in the means of siege warfare meant the defender could be gradually destroyed by bombardment, disease, and regular approaches that ultimately inflicted a far worse toll on the army than a short, sharp battle of maneuver, to say nothing of the impact on the local economy.
Lee did not launch the Seven Days to prevent the "regular siege of Richmond" instead of inviting said siege because fortifications are awesome because he lacked your intellect, but because he actually understood the basic characteristics of the warfare of the day and accurately grasped that the Confederacy could not win protracted positional contests.
Unfortunately, many hold very strong opinions of the American Civil War without having the faintest grasp of the warfare of the era.
Bringing the