Did The West Matter?

[adam]

Hi

As I am sure you all know I am new to the American Civil War. One aspect on which my knowledge is considerably lacking is the Western Theater.

To me it seems that everyone and everything was concentrated in the Eastern Theater. This seems to be the decisive area. Did the Confedracy delibrately leave this front to fall away, or did they really attempt to hold this area? From what I have read and watched so far it seems that all the best commanders and troops where in the East maybe except Sidney Johnston and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Yet I also read at how crucil control of the mississppi River was and that whoever had this controlled the Western Terrain. Why did the Confederates let this fall so easily, or so it appears to me and please correct me if I am wrong in this assumpation.

Did the West matter or did the war rest on the defeat of the Eastern Armies. Please feel free to help me learn ore of this area.

 

[ole]

Adam:

INCOMING!

Many, if not most, are convinced that the war was won in the west. While Lee sparred with a succession of commanders over the hills in Virginia, the Confederacy was successively denied the largesse of the transMississippi, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia and the Carolinas.

Why did the Confederates let this fall so easily, or so it appears to me and please correct me if I am wrong in this assumpation.

This has been discussed, on this board and others, for many years. In all those years, I've seen no single, convincing answer.

The Shenandoah Valley has been labelled the breadbasket of the Confederacy. Not so. It was the breadbasket of the Army of Northern Virginia. Most of the rest of the Confederacy and its other armies were the fields and gardens of the west. (And, by "west," I mean anywhere Lee wasn't.)

Lee had a substantial army in Virginia. Its equivalent was attempting to defend at least four states. Against Grant and the brown-water Navy, and Rosecrans. While Lee was valiantly and successfully defending Virginia and Richmond, generals of lesser capability were being rolled up in the backyard.

"Why?" is an excellent question. From my recliner, it looks to be short-sighted. A conviction that it would be a quick, decisive rebellion. The Confederacy was not prepared for the war it got. As simple as that.

ole

 

[30th_il]

Ole,
Re: "INCOMING".....LMAO!

 

[Elennsar]

An imperfect overall history of the Army of the Tennessee and its failures (and by the Emperor it had a lot of them) is Connelly's two volume history.

As best as I can tell, while "the (far) west" (Transmississippi) was relatively unimportant, Mississsippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee were quite important. Particularly the last two, but don't overlook the first.

So, please, by all means read up on Connelly's history and McMurry's Two Great Rebel Armies for a good overview. Plenty of important stuff happened in the "West" (defined for purposes of my statement as the middle of the Confederacy). Not as glorious, necessarily, but it was not irrelevant.

 

[johan_steele]

The only CS army truly destroyed in the field was in the West at Nashville, Vicksburg was the largest surrender of CS troops prior to Appomatox. The largest loss of CS guns in any one engagement was in the west. ALL of the strategic losses of the CS were by western troops in the "west." By the end of 63 the CS was at best an empty shell w/ the enemy closing in from all sides.

The east... the AoP did a superb job of holding Lee and the ANV in place and never letting Lee destroy them or take Washington.

 

[adam]

Once the Confederates had lost Vicksburg, was there any attempt or plan to retake this city. I imagine that once the Union held it, there was no chance.

Should the Confederacy have considered the Western theatre the key battleground or was it just the age old problem of fighting on two sides and the impossibilities that this imposes.

 

[Elennsar]

This is all "as far as I know", most of my Western knowledge is on the Army of Tennessee and most of my knowledge on the war is on the East, but..

In order.

1) Not as far as I'm aware of. Hopes? Yes. Actual plans as in preparing how to go about it and who to use and so on? None of that.

2) I would not say key. The Confederacy mishandled its resources in the West.

I don't think commiting oh, Pickett's division as suggested in May of 1863, while it would add another 9,000 men to the West, or even going so far as Beauregard's plan (20,000 from Lee) would have made a difference without better leadership.

But the Confederacy did fail in the West, and not entirely due to circumstances beyond its control (including but not limited to Federal strengths and leaders).

So, not enough resources to go around and not very effective use of what resources were available, both by bad generals and bad department organization by Davis.

Not to mention Davis's hold-every-inch. Insisting on holdin ground as much as possible? Fine. But treating pulling out one area to concentrate somewhere else, doing something nasty to the Union forces at point B (or even C), and then going off to beat up on A (or B), might have been better.

The Confederacy simply did not have the manpower to hold everywhere in sufficient strength, even if it diverted more troops Westward than it did. (Overall numbers seem even or in the "West's" favor, but the area of the "west" is much bigger than Virginia and the Carolinas.)

So...impossible to avoid difficulties, but not an unwinnable problem, if the generals and the strategies/tactics necessary were found. That's the short version.

Someone more familiar on the Western Theater can probably give you a better and more concise answer.

 

[Scribe]

Hi

Did the West matter or did the war rest on the defeat of the Eastern Armies. Please feel free to help me learn ore of this area.

Per Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller in his The Military History of the Western World, "that, as the most certain means to win the war was to wear out the North -- that is, to prolong the war indefinitely -- the correct grand tactics were to base the main forces on Chattanooga and to carry out a defensive-offensive camapign in Tennessee, while a covering force operated in Virginia. Such a campaign would not only have protected the great supply states of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia but would have kept open the vital crossingsinto Arkansas and Louisiana. It may be said that. had these grand tactics been decided upon, the Federals would have occupied Virginia, from where they would have pushed south through the Carolinas. This is unlikely, even had Virginia been overrun, for not only would the Confederate operations in Tennessee have drawn the bulk of the Federal forces westward, but topographical conditions in the east would have proved as difficult to overcome as in 1775-1783."

Fuller saw the Chattanooga-Atlanta area as the key to Confederate success "because the two main lateral railways in the Confederacy ran through these towns and linked the entire strategical area to the supply ports of Memphis, Vicksburg, New Orleans, Mobile, Savanah, Charleston, Wilmington, and Richmond."

 

[Baggage Handler #2]

The proximity of Richmond to Washington DC kept the armies in the east tied down. Had Richmond been just another city, the south could have had some advantage of maneuver (the north had to protect DC). But for whatever reason, they made it the capital instead of Atlanta or Columbia, SC, or even Montgomery AL. Consequently both armies were tied down while the west saw a very different sort of war.

I like the analysis claiming the Chattanooga - Atlanta corridor was the key to southern success. I haven't thought about it, but it seems reasonable.

For our original poster from the UK, the size of the CSA was approximately that of Western Europe. (the following are from memory and should be verified before quoted).
Georgia is something like 400 miles north to south. Tennessee is something more than that east to west and on the order of 150 miles N-S.
From the Ohio River near Louisville to the Gulf of Mexico is around 600-700 miles. From Charleston SC to the Mississippi River is going to be a similar distance, a touch over Brest to Berlin if I'm reading the map correctly.

Washington to Richmond was around 90 miles.
Chattanooga to Atlanta is around 100-150 miles, similar to London to Birmingham if you like.


The terrain is such that it naturally split into two theaters of operation. There exist, from the Pennsylvania/New York border down to around central Alabama a series of parallel ridges.
Here, if you can forgive the background music, is a , with the same lamentable music, was shot in Pennsylvania. The pilot in this case once set the world out & return record in sailplanes of just over 1000 miles, running the ridge nearly all the way. Neither of the airplanes in these have engines).

These mountains are very old, and in many places they have a similar height for ridge after ridge. In other places they climb to as high as 6000 ft MSL. In general the land in this area is very poor, with many many rocks, and natural resources are normally limited to timber with some deposits of coal in the northern areas (West Virginia and PA). It is rugged, relentless country to cross, thus it served as a more effective divider than a lake or small sea would have.

The Shenandoah Valley is to the west of the easternmost of these ridges, as is Gettysburg. The area from Adams county up to Harrisburg and toward Philadelphia is the best farmland in Pennsylvania, by far.

 

[Elennsar]

To quote McMurry (in Two Great Rebel Armies):

"Virginia had more white inhabitants (1,105,453), more slaves (490,865), and more military age white males (196,587) than did any other Rebel State. Virginia's 1,771 miles of railroad gave her more trackage than any of her seceeding sisters. Indeed, 19.8 percent of the Confederacy's entire railroad mileage was within her borders, and her one mile of track forevery 36.7 miles of area was second only to South Carolina as the best ratio in the South."

"Virginia alone produced more than 32.5 percent of the Confederacy's manufactured goods. Heer factories turned out more cotten goods, more woolen goods, more agricultural implements, and more of many other items than did the factories of any other Confederate state. Her production of bar, sheet, and railroad iron was more than three times greater than that of second-place Tennessee. Indeed, Virginia's iron production had grown by 194 percent int he 1850s while Tennessee's had declined by 30.8 percent. Virginia's 5,385 manufacturing establishments, the state's $26,935, 650 of capital invested in manufacturing, and its 50, 652,124 worth of manufactured goods dwarfed the contributes of any other Rebel state. Henrico County (Richmond) produced more of manufactured goods than did Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, or Texas. Had Henrico County been a state, it would have ranked sixth among the the then twelve Rebel states in the value of its industrial output, and the rest of Virginia would still have produced more than twice as many manufactured goods (measured by value) as Tennessee."

So even if Richmond wasn't the capital, holding Virginia and the East in general was very important to the South. While yes, the West deserves more notice than it has traditionally recieved, and yes it was important...treating the East as only important for purposes of holding Washington and appeasing the demand for "on to Richmond!" is ridiculous.

The Confederacy had to hold both Tennessee+Georgia+etc. and Virginia. Failing that, "Perhaps their only real chance for victory was to follow Lee's advice, trade space for triime in the West - which is basically how the way war was fought there anyway - and concentrate their strength in Virginia and seek to gain their independence by an overwhelming victory over the Army of the Potomac and the capture of Washington, D.C. " (McMurry again)

So, in brief, let's not overstate the West's importance. The war was certainly lost in the West before it was lost in the East, but it was not lost overall simply because it was lost in the West.

 

[30th_il]

I have always liked the perspective of Kendall D. Gott in his book, "Where the South Lost the War" It is an insightful idea that the South essentially lost the war when they lost at Ft Donelson and at first this doesn't see plausible but actually it has much merit logistically, politically and psychologically. A good read well worth the time.
So, yes...the west won the war.

 

[Elennsar]

If it lost the war at Fort Donelson, it is rather impressive (or crazy) that it continued for two plus years with a fighting chance of getting the North to give up.

Having not read Gott's book, I can't say how good it is, but I find it very hard to believe any event that happened in 1862 "cost" the South the war. It may have put the South in a very bad position and it may have been the first step on one (or more) of the paths that lead to Southern defeat, but "the war was lost when Fort Donelson fell" seems exagerated at best.

 

[Baggage Handler #2]

The key for a smaller army to defeat a larger, better armed force is to avoid getting tied down to a particular piece of real estate.

Had Washington allowed himself to be as tied to New York or Philadelphia as Davis was Richmond, the Revolution would have slammed shut in the early autumn of 1776.

So while Virginia may have had an important and very nearly 19th century economy, I think the idea that the south could have won by maintaining a mobile field force until the north got tired of playing is one worth examining.

 

[Elennsar]

The problem is that it needed to be able to mantain such a force. Washington was able to do so even with New York and Philadelphia fallen because they were "just" two cities. Big cities, not insignificant cities, but not vital to the survival of the armies-in-the-field.

Similarly, the British could not conquer and hold all of the colonies at once (it seems that way at least), the Union did have the power to do so.

So while "getting tied down to a particular piece of real estate" was ill advised, holding the cities providing vital supplies was not to be ignored.

 

[Baggage Handler #2]

The problem is that it needed to be able to mantain such a force. Washington was able to do so even with New York and Philadelphia fallen because they were "just" two cities. Big cities, not insignificant cities, but not vital to the survival of the armies-in-the-field.

Similarly, the British could not conquer and hold all of the colonies at once (it seems that way at least), the Union did have the power to do so.

So while "getting tied down to a particular piece of real estate" was ill advised, holding the cities providing vital supplies was not to be ignored.

I don't think I'm going to be able to give a considered opinion without a couple months worth of thought and rumination.
My initial thought is that the nature of the slave economy would have presented the greatest difficulty, but that's just a WAG.
I do think it's an idea worth rolling around for a while before either accepting or dismissing.

 

[Elennsar]

Agreed, I'm just pointing out the must-be-remembered differences that make it impossible to say "Washington won like this, therefore the South could have won like this." as a given, and my conclusion-of-the-moment from there.

It certainly could not have won its independence without said armies, but whether said armies (assuming they could get supplies somehow or another) alone would win it, regardless of how much territory was lost, is an interesting question.

 

[timewalker]

It has always been my understanding that the munitions factories in Richmond were absolutely vital for the Confederate war effort. To lose Richmond was therefore tantamount to losing the war. Ergo, there was a limit to the space which could be traded for time.

Washington's supplies came from elsewhere (i.e., France). With the Union blockade, the Confederates were not able to import all they needed. The loss of the manufacturing capacity at Nashville was a hard blow; the loss of Richmond would have been crippling.

 

[Glorybound]

Ok, I'll just throw in my .02 here since this is a good conversation. I sort of agree that the war was lost for the South, in the west, due to their numerous defeats in that region throughout the war.

They took two hard knocks early in 1862, that occurred in the west. First Henry and Donelson, then Shiloh.

Then the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863, and Chattanooga.

Sherman takes Atlanta, then marches to the coast.

The South then takes it on the chin at Spring Hill, Franklin, Nashville in late 1864.

All this is happening while the ANV is having it's way in the east for the most part.

Now this is a broad view of the war, admittedly, from far off, and I've left out Union defeats like Perryville, Chickamauga. But by and large, IMO, the war was lost for the South starting in the west. They continued losing in the west, mostly. Union victories seem to have progressed geographically from the west until eventually ending in the east, with the Overland Campaign and the siege at Petersburg.

Yes, there was fighting going on all over, east and west, but many of the Union victories, if not most of them, occurred in the west. Plus, the Union had early control of Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, and the big prize, 'Ol man river, after the summer of 1863. This is just the opinion of an amateur Civil War enthusiast...moi (I haven't graduated to buff just yet)


Lee

 

[larry_cockerham]

Lee, I suspect your opinion is fairly accurate. The 'breadbasket' of the Confederate states was in Mississippi and Alabama. In order to bring the war to a close and 'subdue' those states forming the Confederacy, that region had to be conquered. Arsenals such as Selma and Augusta were fanning the flames of war. The grand plan, probably more or less formulated by Winfield Scott, was to seal off the waterways and railroads, thus squeezing the southern states into submission. That's essentially what happened. Only the doggedness of the Southern spirit forced that brutal conflict into lasting four long years. This is one tough country that became tougher as a result of this trial. Bringing the embryo of freedom to a few hundred thousand folks was perhaps worth the cost, but it's a shame that result couldn't have been achieved by less destructive means.

 

[Borderruffian]

I'd say Donelson opened the wound that was a slow bleed and eventually killed the South. It opened the door to Middle Tennessee and all it contained. It allowed the eventual advance to Chattanoga and that split the Confederacy in two. Chattanoga began the long death knell.