Lincoln Abraham Lincoln's Arithmetic

dlofting

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I was reading the last chapter, "An Assessment of Command" from "Meade and Lee at Bristoe Station" by Jeffrey Hunt when I read something I'd never seen before:

Lincoln and Halleck believed that Meade's sole task was to destroy Lee's army. In the president's eyes, it didn't matter where the Union fought the battles to produce that result.

The commander-in-chief had summed up the gist of this strategic point of view after the battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. William O. Stoddard, the president's assistant private secretary, remembered Lincoln propounding " a sense of awful arithmetric" in the wake of that bloody defeat. He acknowledged that the North had lost 50 percent more men than the Confederates in that dreadful engagement and then reflected that "if the same battle were to be fought over again, every day, through a week of days, with the same relative results, the army under Lee would be wiped out to its last man, while the Army of the Potomac would still be a mighty host. The war would be over. The Confederacy gone." (emphasis mine)


Hunt referenced Carl Sandburg's "Lincoln: The War Years" vol. 1, 632

The Sandburg passage is pretty much the same but adds "No general yet found can face the arithmetic, but the end of the war will be at hand when he shall be discovered."

Unfortunately Sandburg didn't use footnotes, nor could I find a bibliography so it's hard to verify the accuracy of the statement attributed to Stoddard.

I did an internet search on Stoddard and found that he wrote several books, among which are two that deal with Lincoln's life. Both are in the public domain and available on line so I searched in both on the keyword "arithmetric". Neither showed a quote similar to the Sandburg wrote but I did find the following in "Abraham Lincoln :the true story of a great life":

Other men, in distant corners of the country, could not understand, as did the President, that such a victory as that of Chancellorsville,won at so great a cost to the South, was, in its true and final effect, a damaging blow to the Southern cause. They overlooked the simple arithmetic of the matter and refused to see how hardly General Lee could spare the men he had lost, and that a very few such fights would leave the Rebellion without an army. If General Lee's own records are to be trusted, nearly a fourth part of his movable strength was temporarily or permanently destroyed, while the Union loss, relatively, was but fifteen per cent, instead of twenty-five. One bitter complaint made against General Hooker, indeed, was that he had not employed his men and had kept 37,000 of them out of the fight although they were near enough to have turned the defeat into a victory for him had he but set them free. With excellent show of reason could Mr. Lincoln urge, as he speedily did, that another battle should be sought and fought before the enemy should be given time to recuperate. He urged in vain.

There was a man then in training for him, in the "West, who had learned that precise lesson of the stern arithmetic of war : but Grant had not arrived, in 1863, and it seemed impossible for the President to enforce his conviction of the truth upon the mind of any commander he had as yet discovered. All the apparent evils of the defeat were therefore permitted to remain, and Secretary Stanton himself is reported to have declared that the darkest hour of the whole war was just after Chancellorsville.


This could, of course, be just Stoddard's incorrect memory of events as the book was written, in 1888, well after the events described. But it could also be true. If so then maybe Grant wasn't the architect of the "attrition strategy" that many historians see as the basis for the 1864 Overland Campaign. Even if he was it's possible that it had Lincoln's strong support....something to think about at least.
 
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It's also worth pointing out that Lincoln's arithmetic on the matter is completely wrong.


There are three ways to analyze this.

The first is to take the raw results of Fredericksburg, and simply repeat them over and over.

Fredericksburg saw the Army of the Potomac (with 142,551 AP in the force which was actually at Fredericksburg) take 12,653 casualties. The Army of Northern Virginia (with 91,760 AP in the force there) took 5,377 casualties.

Repeat this over ten times and you have the Army of the Potomac down to 16,021 men while the Army of Northern Virginia has 37,990 men. So obviously the AoP would be destroyed first.


The second is to apply Lanchester Square, which recognizes that it's much easier for a large force to beat a small one than the reverse, and using this indicates that seven iterations of Fredericksburg (with Confederate casualties set at the same every time) would destroy the Army of the Potomac down to the last man by the time the Army of Northern Virginia is down to about 55,000 men.


The third, meanwhile, is simply to point out that men are not robots. Fighting a battle is hard, but fighting a losing battle is much harder than fighting a winning one (on morale) and being forced back in retreat is also exhausting. In particular, it is one of the hardest things to get men to do to have them attack, make no progress, and then get them to attack again - since the men involved are individual thinking beings capable of pattern recognition, they are able to realize very quickly that they are simply being made to do something "impossible" over and over again, and will conclude that their officers have no regard for their lives.

Once this sets in, it can take months to rebuild an army to the point it is capable of offensive action again. The classic example of this is "Cold Harbor Syndrome" but another from WW1 is the French mutinies of 1917 - the army's morale has not broken and they will fight defensively, they have recovered from the immediate shock of losing the offensive battle, but they have decided that they don't trust their leaders to be committing them to fights that are winnable.




A lot of the "strategy" used by various commanders in the Civil War, and which Lincoln didn't always have a lot of patience with (depending on the commander and the situation), was trying to ensure that battles would be fought at "good odds". This is because if you take care of your men and only ask a lot of them in situations when it's truly needed, they will be more likely to pull out all the stops when it's needed. Not that this always worked, of course...


Relying on attrition as a strategy is absolutely something that can work, but it must be under circumstances where it is sustainable for your side and unsustainable for the enemy. Fredericksburg is more sustainable for the Confederates than for the Union.
 
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