Confederate Strategy

[Elennsar]

This is a two part question.

Did the Confederacy have the men, material, and leadership to hold both the Eastern and Western theaters?

Could the Confederates expect to hold out long enough to cause the Yankees to give up?

Not merely threaten Lincoln losing the election. Cause the election of someone who would accept Southern independence.

And based on the above - if the Confederates could hold both areas, and remembering that "the West" has a considerable pool of manpower (if dispersed), what could be done to effectively hold it?


I rather strongly side with Richard McMurry that the Confederacy did not have the resources to hold both areas and that the North letting the South seccede was not a realistic expectation.

A possibility, but not something to build a strategy on.

But others disagree.

 

[TxSouthpaw]

Two part answer: no and no.

 

[Elennsar]

Do you think the Confederates had any chance to win the war short of acts of God or alien space bats?

 

[K Hale]

I do. I think they could have won the war by not losing it until the North became tired of it, felt it was not worth the sacrifice in and said "Whatever." Like the British did in the Revolution. Of course it did not work out that way because Lincoln was too strong of a leader to allow this to happen; his job as he saw it was to hold the country together, by force if necessary. But that was not a known factor ahead of time. So yeah, I think it was within the realm of possibility.

 

[K Hale]

This is a two part question.

Did the Confederacy have the men, material, and leadership to hold both the Eastern and Western theaters?

Now, the answer to this one is a no. But that may be hindsight on my part.

 

[Baggage Handler #2]

I've occasionally thought that if both Forrest and secession bounced up 25 years before they actually did, he'd have been King Forrest of Mississippi and the Southwest until it dissolved at his passing.

There wasn't much in the backstories of John, Arthur, or Oliver to foreshadow their successes either. And of those three: Dukes of Marlborough & Wellington, and the lord protector his own self... Well I'd better stop now.

So yeah, possible, I think. But too much of the southern brass had been reading the same books and taking the same lectures for them to see how.

 

[K Hale]

Wait, what?

 

[Elennsar]

I would genuinely like to know how Forrest could have done more than he historically did.

Being an excellent raider and a tough fighter are valuable. But his great successes are against second rate opposition.

That's not to underrate the skill he showed on his end - but pulling off what he did versus someone with Streight's skills says a heck of a lot less than if Streight had been an experienced cavalryman leading experienced cavalry, instead of leading his infantrymen on mules.

Much as I think mules can be great animals, the idea of mounting a brigade on them is on my list of "Its just crazy enough that you should know it won't work."

King Nathan sounds believable. Forrest was the type that in ye olde medieval times carved out a kingdom by the sword.

So what could Forrest have done if given more authority?

Its tempting to say he would do better, but I am truly lost on how, even granting him all the good that's said of him by his admirerers - he still would be facing the same issues as any other Confederate general in the West.

 

[K Hale]

Its tempting to say he would do better, but I am truly lost on how, even granting him all the good that's said of him by his admirerers - he still would be facing the same issues as any other Confederate general in the West.

In short:

I want to know more about this King Forrest thing. What was going on 25 years earlier that would have enabled such a thing? BH, your post really threw me for a loop; other than recognizing Forrest's name, I literally have no idea what you're on about!

 

[Elennsar]

Not just Grant.

Grant was one of the issues, and an important one, but I was thinking more the politics.

Whether Davis was right, wrong, crazy, or even stupid, Forrest would have to work with him. No small part of the support Davis gave Lee had to do with the fact Lee did work with him. It cost the AoT's historical commanders that they didn't work with Davis's pecularities and wishes well.

Forrest versus Grant would be an area Forrest has strengths. Forrest versus Davis...well, what Colonel Andrew Jackson Grigsby (27th Virginia Infantry) said comes to mind.

http://aotw.org/officers.php?officer_id=906&from=results

Grigsby went to Richmond and had an audience with President Jefferson Davis. In the midst of the dialogue, epithets rent the air. The president leaped to his feet and shouted, "Do you know who I am? I am president of the Confederacy."

Grigsby replied in kind. "Do you know who I am?" he bellowed. "I am Andrew Jackson Grigsby of Rockbridge County, Virginia, late colonel of the Bloody 27th Virginia of the Stonewall Brigade,and as good a man as you or anyone else, by God!"

Forrest's record indicates he would be closer to Grigsby than Lee (perhaps not completely in that direction, but closer). The fact he (Forrest) had a right to claim that he was a man to be taken seriously is utterly irrelevant.

I'm not sure what happened in the 1830s to support Forrest as king of Mississippi, so I'm curious to. I just know he displayed the traits of kingdom carvers.

 

[K Hale]

I see. Yes, in the end it really does come down to who gets along with Davis, doesn't it? Lee was masterful at massaging Davis. No one had better people skills than he did IMO.

I'm partway through a book called An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government, or something similar to that. I don't have it in front of me... can't recall the author, but he's very down on Davis and blames Davis' ego for much of what went wrong. At the same time, he worships Breckinridge, about whom I don't know very much, so I'm being forced into a very favorable opinion of him.

 

[Baggage Handler #2]

John Churchill, 1st duke to Marlborough was given an allied army in Belgium to counter the French king Louis. His wife was uncommonly well connected, and that might have had something to do with how a fairly raw officer gets command of an allied army. Everyone-but everyone expected him to go on the defensive and hang out near Brussells or feint toward Paris. Instead he marched south to the intense consternation of the allied kings, leaving a large, capable French army free to dance all the way to Denmark. Then he turned East!! Away from Paris. By the time the French saw he was linking up with the Austrian prince Eugene it was too late. The two allied armies fell back, convincing the French near Vienna that they were retreating when Churchill turned on them and destroyed that army before turning back to face the threat of the northern French army. This is from memory and I've doubtless skipped a detail.

The point is that Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, saw things no one else did, planned efficiently and quietly and thoroughly, and executed with unrivalled aggression.
I see traces of this in the way Forrest approached and executed. 25 years earlier not even the CS bureaucracy could have stopped him.

The other two I mentioned are the guy who beat Napolean and the guy who beat king Charles on the English Civil War.

E will never agree, I feel his opinion is broadly deterministic. But in every contest you can force an opponent. I've done it in chess and bicycle racing and seen it happen in sailboat racing.

 

[Elennsar]

I see. Yes, in the end it really does come down to who gets along with Davis, doesn't it? Lee was masterful at massaging Davis. No one had better people skills than he did IMO.

The same really applies on both sides, even though Lincoln is more tolerant by a large measure than Davis. You have to be able to work with the big boss.

You have to be able to communicate what your army needs, what is up against, what you're planning - all that kind of stuff.

E will never agree, I feel his opinion is broadly deterministic. But in every contest you can force an opponent. I've done it in chess and bicycle racing and seen it happen in sailboat racing.

I don't know about determinstic. I do know that I don't think Forrest demonstrated that he could handle a large army or that his raiding and such would have mattered without success there.

Certainly Forrest was a talented man, but whether or not he could handle high command needs more than whether or not he was aggressive and canny and able to administer a large division (8,000 men).

 

[K Hale]

How many men did Forrest have under him at the max?

Did he manage infantry at any point, or just cavalry?

 

[TxSouthpaw]

I don't think you had to get along with Lincoln, I just think you had to win (or at least fight). Didn't McClellan snub Lincoln in his house? And he still kept him around.

 

[Elennsar]

Having to meet Lincoln's "I'll hold his horse if only he will win us victories." is still having to work with the big boss. Lincoln wanted the Army of Northern Virginia destroyed. Commanders not placing a priority on that were not on his good list.

Lincoln was a very paitent man and if you could demonstrate you could win victories and act aggressively that was good enough. But he wanted to be kept informed (out of curiosity more than being a control freak, perhaps, but informed nonetheless) too.

 

[TxSouthpaw]

Not sure if this hair can be split any further.

 

[Elennsar]

Probably not. But McClellan wanted McDowell to help him in the Pennisula campaign, and with the way he set things up and communicated, he didn't get him.

Making sure the big boss understood how Washington was secured (if it was) would have helped with that.

 

[Baggage Handler #2]

Prior to the war Forrest built up a million dollar organization from nothing. He did it over a broad geographic area and he did it well, no matter how onerous that business was.

Counting breadth of area, ability to pick staff, size of budget and raw number of people under him (of all types) he certainly outscored Grant. You could argue that he was one of the most qualified managers and leaders in the south in 1861.

Find a pre war officer who'd created rather than inherited an enteprise of that scope. There may be a few, but they're rare. Was he qualified. Yeah.

 

[ole]

A fast-moving thread.

No one man, with the possible exceptions of Lincoln and Davis, could influence the end ... and they didn't have all that much of a handle on the situation. At any given moment, a call could have catastrophic implications. Lincoln was very cautious with making that call. Davis? Nobody paid any attention to him.

This thread is exciting for the excellent thoughts it generates. In me, I get one: "What the hell were they thinking?"

Was just today looking up some stuff for Leah and I found that, in the single category of a napoleon (brass, 12-pounder) the Confederacy was able to make about 501. Union foundaries made, during the same period, 1,156.

That kind of tilts the see-saw, don't it?

I see a few possibilities in there that the Confederacy might have prevailed. But those possibilities were available only if there were a wimp in the White House. Bad timing. If the secessions had occurred at the beginning of the Buchanan administration, there might have been a good shot at independence.

Meanwhile, I have to marvel at the agenda of the fire-eaters. Moving an entire populace from here to there was masterful. There was and is always propaganda. Usually, it works only on a local level. But those guys almost created a new nation. Unfortunately, it also got a lot of other guys dead. But let's not dwell on that downside, for a while, it worked. Well.

Ole