Thank you, Brass Napoleon. In this, my second supplemental, post I will continue to elaborate my argument on the importance of Gettysburg, which will include a response to some above critiques, as well as offer my own challenges to the value of Vicksburg.
First, I would like to respond to doubt of Confederate momentum in the East in the summer of 1863. The Army of Northern Virginia enjoyed a clear momentum of victory at the tactical level by the spring of 1863, one that had potential to influence the overall outcome of the war. Historian James McPherson notes that Lee’s success during the Seven Days battles in 1862 had thrust the eastern theater to prominence in the war and caught the eye of European observers. He writes, “during the next two months Lee and Jackson’s offensive-defensive strategy came close to winning European diplomatic recognition. Antietam prevented that, but Confederate successes during the next nine months, again mainly in the East, reopened this possibility and so discouraged many Northern voters about the prospect of winning the war that the Copperheads made great gains and threatened the Lincoln administration’s ability to continue the war.” (McPherson, “Failed Southern Strategies,” in
With My Face to the Enemy: Perspectives on the Civil War, ed. Robert Cowley, p. 85) In
Hallowed Ground, McPherson similarly writes: “In the post-Chancellorsville aura of invincibility, anything seemed possible for the Army of Northern Virginia” (McPherson,
Hallowed Ground, 29).
Countless other writers and historians acknowledge the excitement and anticipation among soldiers of Army of Northern Virginia. Many saw the campaign into Pennsylvania as the best, and perhaps last, chance Lee had to influence the outcome of the war. Charles Marshall, quoted by Brass Napoleon in a post above, emphasized an
“important consideration was the moral effect of a victory north of the Potomac upon the people of the North. A victory over the Federal Army in Virginia would have tended to strengthen the peace party in the North, only in so far as it would have tended to assure the Northern people that they could not succeed. They would not have been impressed by our consideration for their peace or comfort in keeping the war from their homes and firesides. The copperheads were never weaker than when the Federal armies were successful, and the arguments for peace in the North would have been much more convincing if victory had placed Washington, Baltimore or Philadelphia within our reach than if gained in Virginia. Those of us who have studied Confederate policy during the war know too well the baleful influence upon the energy and efforts of the South, which was exercised by the delusion that the Confederacy could rely upon anything but her deeds for success.” (
http://leearchive.wlu.edu/reference/books/marshall2/09.txt)
Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon described the upcoming Pennsylvania campaign as “indispensable to our safety and independence. Allen Guelzo described the anticipation among Lee’s army during its grand review in late May 1863, where “rumors of a new campaign were already flying up and down the review columns, and George Campbell Brown, Ewell’s stepson and staffer, noticed that ‘they are all for [invading] Maryland & Pennsylvania.’ And perhaps, when they did, it would all come to an end. The great battle would be fought, and through the smoke and fire, the way home would finally be open, and there would be peace, independence, and plenty—but especially peace” (Guelzo,
Gettysburg, 45-46).
Historian Stephen Sears wrote that, in promoting the campaign, “General Lee was persuasive in his argument that in the Virginia theater the road to opportunity pointed north, and that the way was open. By recapturing the strategic initiative he had surrendered after Sharpsburg, he proposed to take the war right into Yankee heartland. At the least, a success in Pennsylvania would offset any failure at Vicksburg. At the most, a great victory on enemy soil might put peace within Richmond’s reach” (Sears,
Gettysburg, 17).
Edwin Coddington, in his study of Gettysburg, stated that “never again would General Lee have as good an opportunity to defeat his old foe under conditions which might bring about the decisive military and political results he so eagerly sought” (Coddington,
The Gettysburg Campaign, 259). And Glenn Tucker explained that “it was by all odds the hour to strike. The peace hope was high in the South. President Davis entrusted a carefully prepared letter to Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens, who had been a friend and close political ally of Lincoln in the Thirtieth Congress. The diminutive but resolute Georgian would carry it toward Norfolk, where he would be prepared at the proper moment to ask for passage into the Federal lines, and proceed to Fortress Monroe and Washington if possible. This letter was the peace offer. It would be laid on the White House table when Lee had shattered the Northern army somewhere beyond the Potomac” (Tucker,
High Tide at Gettysburg, 26).
The eve of the Gettysburg campaign was perhaps the defining moment of Confederate hope in achieving independence through an offensive strategy. It certainly was the Confederacy’s last hope of achieving this, and denying a long-term federal strategy of victory through attrition. The battle of Gettysburg ended that hope. From then on, Confederate officials and military leaders could rely only upon a stubborn strategic defense to tire the northern population for some measure of independence.
Next, Brass Napoleon writes:
I disagree with the notion that Lee "recognized that Confederate independence could not depend on shuffling troops back and forth across the South..." Lee very much understood and agreed with that aspect of Confederate grand strategy and used it liberally both before and after Gettysburg. He approved Stonewall Jackson's detachment to the Shenandoah Valley in 1862. He detached Longstreet to Petersburg in early 1863. These were both major detachments before Gettysburg. Then he detached Longstreet to Tennessee in the fall of 1863, and detached Jubal Early back to the Shenandoah Valley in the summer of 1864. These were both major detachments after Gettysburg. In all cases, Lee understood that the detached troops would perform a mission, then return to him. And in all cases they (or their remnants) did.
It is important to note that the only examples above that took place before Gettysburg were
within Virginia—a movement of troops within the same theater of operations and, thus,
not examples of shuffling troops
across the South. It is not a coincidence that the first time Lee agreed to send a portion of his army outside of Virginia (Longstreet’s maneuver into Tennessee) was done only
after the defeat at Gettysburg. Lee’s detachment of Longstreet to a different theater of war was, in fact, a complete departure from his previous strategy. In April 1863, Lee expressed to Secretary of War James Seddon his fundamental opposition to transferring troops across the Confederacy: “it is not so easy for us to change troops from one department to another as it is for the enemy, and if we rely upon that method we may always be too late” (Stephen Sears,
Gettysburg, 3). He maintained that position in the face of direct requests from Confederate officials to reinforce the West. In March 1863, Jefferson Davis asked Lee to “detach a corps for service in the West,” which Lee promptly rebuffed because, he argued, “an unexpected activity has been exhibited by the enemy in Northern Virginia” (Allen C. Guelzo,
Gettysburg, 33). In May 1863, Davis and the Confederate cabinet again debated the prospect of detaching part of the Army of Northern Virginia to aid the Confederate armies in the West. Lee personally traveled to Richmond to argue against this proposal. “The adoption of your proposition is hazardous, and it becomes a question between Virginia and the Mississippi,” he argued (Guelzo,
Gettysburg, 34). Even Longstreet himself offered to travel west to support Joseph E. Johnston. But Lee refused, telling his subordinate that the Army of Northern Virginia was about to launch an offensive and could “spare nothing from this army to re-enforce the West” (Guelzo,
Gettysburg, 35). Before Gettysburg, Lee rejected every appeal to detach part of his army to support Confederate forces outside of Virginia.
Because the Army of Northern Virginia had reined supreme in the Eastern Theater, and because of Lee’s reputation as the best and most successful general of the Confederacy, his insistence on retaining his forces in the East won majority support from Davis and the Confederate cabinet. This lobbying effort was described by historian Allen Guelzo as “the first battle of [Lee's] campaign” (Guelzo,
Gettysburg, 35). It was a gamble that pitted the future of the Confederacy upon the potential political and strategic benefits of a brilliant victory in the northeast. That gamble failed, denying Lee the promise of victory and the prestige he had used to dictate the Confederate grand strategy. In short, Longstreet’s men marched into Tennessee in spite of Lee’s vision of the war—but the loss at Gettysburg had taken away his power to prevent it.
My distinguished opponent believes that “clearly the ANV had not been the least bit subdued by its Gettysburg loss.” That is a hard position to take, as the loss at Gettysburg forced Lee, after only three weeks, to reoccupy the defensive area north of Richmond that he so badly wished to avoid. Desertions plagued his army, and his military goals for the remainder of that year had been reduced from a grand northern campaign to simply trying to protect portions Virginia from federal intrusion. We should not mistakenly assume that because Lee’s army remained a dangerous foe after Gettysburg, that nothing about its objectives, its strategy, or its ability to carry out an offensive campaign had changed.
The military situation in the Eastern Theater for the rest of 1863 was, indeed, a new stalemate. But that benefitted the Union cause. Even with a timid George Meade in charge of the Army of Potomac, Lee’s forces in Virginia were effectively nullified, in regards to the overall war effort, for nearly a year. (The most significant engagement in the East during the latter half of 1863 was a decisive Union tactical victory at Bristoe Station—a clear indication of how badly the fortunes of war had turned against Lee in 1863.) This left Lee and the Confederacy strategically on their heels. Lee had launched his campaign precisely because he recognized that his army could not indefinitely defend northern Virginia. He wanted a definitive campaign in the north. Instead, his army was thrust back into its old defensive area, having lost as many as one-third of its number and having failed to achieve virtually any of the anticipated tactical and strategic benefits from the invasion of Pennsylvania.
Lee hoped to rebound from the losses of 1863, but time was his enemy—and Gettysburg had cost him the time, men, and psychological momentum (in both the North and South) that he so desperately needed. Indeed, by the time he rebuilt his army to its spring 1863 size—at least the enlisted ranks, if not competent men to fill command positions—Ulysses S. Grant had arrived in the East, assuring that the Army of Northern Virginia could not regain the initiative.
Let us now look at how the Confederate loss at Gettysburg more directly affected the war in the West. Lee’s argument against reinforcing the West hinged on Confederate success in the East. The defeat in Pennsylvania crippled Lee’s stance against the allocation of Confederate troops to other theaters. In mid-August 1863 Longstreet privately wrote to James Seddon asking to aid Braxton Bragg’s army in Tennessee. In the face of a now subdued Army of Northern Virginia, Longstreet stated that his forces were “not essential” in Virginia, noting (and advocating) for a continued defensive posture by troops in Virginia. Lee remained cool to this idea until early September, when pressure from Davis and an obvious threat from Burnside at Knoxville forced him to acquiesce. Then, Longstreet’s two divisions rushed to Bragg’s army, taking a disjointed path along the Confederacy’s poor rail system, arriving in northwestern Georgia in piecemeal fashion. Nonetheless, these reinforcements bolstered the Confederate Army of Tennessee at a crucial juncture. Even reports that Longstreet’s men were being released to Bragg had panicked William Rosecrans. Ultimately, strengthened by veterans from Longstreet’s divisions, Bragg’s army repulsed the Army of the Cumberland and forced it into a near siege at Chattanooga—a reversal of fortunes in southeast Tennessee. The inaction in Virginia also allowed federal officials to redirect the 11th and 12th Corps from the East to aid the endangered Army of the Cumberland. More importantly, when Ambrose Burnside did not respond quickly enough to orders for his force at Knoxville to reinforce the Union army at Chattanooga, the War Department turned to the inactive Ulysses Grant—still sitting further west—for help.
For weeks the situation around Chattanooga stressed the Lincoln administration, as Rosecrans and his subordinates engaged in a series of accusations. Though much of the negative attention fell on Rosecrans, Lincoln feared that removing that commander could provoke political backlash at the fall gubernatorial and congressional elections (some of the same elections that Lee had hoped to influence with his campaign). Rosecrans was from Ohio, which had a gubernatorial race scheduled for October 1863, pitting notable anti-war Democrat Clement Vallandigham against pro-war Republican John Brough.
In the midst of questions of command within the Army of the Cumberland, Charles Dana—who had been dispatched to observe the military activities in the theater for the War Department—wrote to Edwin Stanton that “if it be decided to change the chief commander also, I would take the liberty of suggesting that some Western general of high rank and great prestige,
like Grant, for instance, would be preferable as his successor to anyone who has hitherto commanded in the east alone” (Peter Cozzens,
This Terrible Sound, 525).
Following the October elections, in which Republicans easily captured the Ohio governor’s office, and secured several other elected positions, Lincoln moved forward to finally reshape the command structure in Tennessee. He combined the departments of the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Ohio, and placed Grant in command of this new Military Division of Mississippi.
It was the Confederate victory at Chickamauga and Army of the Cumberland’s retreat into Chattanooga—achieved through the support of Longstreet’s division, which were only present due to the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg—that led to the downfall of Rosecrans and the ascension of Grant out of the west. Rosecrans’ military and political position in that theater had remained strong up to that point, even in the face of misgivings among other Union generals. Despite Grant’s success at Vicksburg, before October 1863, there was no obvious role for him in eastern Tennessee or the Eastern Theater. (While Grant thanked Charles Dana in August 1863 for his “timely intercession in saving me from going to the Army of the Potomac,” Dana wrote in a response that “there is no probability of any change in the command of the army of the Potomac, nor of any immediately, in that of the army of the Cumberland.”
https://books.google.com/books?id=5N2D5Fp928MC&pg=PA148#v=onepage&q&f=false) The entrapment of the Army of the Cumberland and the subsequent crisis in command prompted the Lincoln administration to shake up the entire departmental structure and promote Grant.
My distinguished opponent highlights Grant’s command in the spring of 1864 as the turning point in the East. Yet, Grant’s very place in that command occurred because of developments in the East, both with the repulse of Lee in Pennsylvania and with the Lincoln administration’s total loss of confidence in Rosecrans following Chickamauga. In short,
before Grant could carry his confidence, strategies, and tactics to Tennessee and then to Virginia, Lee’s army had to be held in check in the East and Union operations in Tennessee had to degrade to the point where Grant’s path to higher command was opened.
This, in turn, directs our attention to just how little the actual capture of Vicksburg changed Grant’s situation. In his memoirs, Grant himself complained that the War Department squandered the tactical and strategic value of his campaign: “Halleck disapproved of my proposition to go against Mobile, so that I was obliged to settle down and see myself put again on the defensive as I had been a year before in west Tennessee” (Grant,
Personal Memoirs [New York: Penguin Books, 1999], 319). Grant petitioned the War Department for an offensive against Mobile in July and August, and then became so frustrated with the inaction that he requested a leave of absence to visit New Orleans. All of these requests were refused.
Worse still, Halleck broke apart Grant’s army in the wake of the victory at Vicksburg. Grant wrote that “the General-in-chief having decided against me, the depletion of an army, which had won a succession of great victories, commenced, as had been the case the year before after the fall of Corinth when the army was sent where it would do the least good” (Grant,
Personal Memoirs, 320). Four thousand men, of the 13th Corps, were sent to Nathaniel Banks, forever removed from Grant’s command; the 9th Corps returned to Kentucky; and 5,000 men were routed north to Missouri—on the western side of the Mississippi, within the Trans-Mississippi theater which was clearly not neutralized by the fall of Vicksburg. A portion of his force remained at Natchez in garrison duty, and the remainder primarily chased guerillas and maintained their presence around Vicksburg. The fall of Vicksburg led to no substantial change in military activity in the West nor instant command potential for grant.
While Brass Napoleon points out that Pemberton’s Confederate army was suddenly removed from Mississippi, we see that most of Grant’s army was too. The War Department had nothing for Grant to do except parcel his men out to other ongoing campaigns in the West. Much of that support was directed to the Trans-Mississippi theater, due to the Lincoln administration’s fear that France would intercede into affairs in Texas. Grant later dismissed these concerns, and historians such as Steven Woodworth, in
Nothing But Victory, echoed that reasoning, writing that the French “certainly were not impressed by the succession of Union blunders that occupied good troops in the trans-Mississippi theater for the first nine months after the fall of Vicksburg [which] had made the trans-Mississippi strategically irrelevant to the outcome of the war” (Woodworth,
Nothing But Victory, 459). Yet, that was the state of affairs for Grant and his army in the wake of Vicksburg.
Only the call from the Lincoln administration to clean up the mess at Chattanooga several months later brought Grant and some of his soldiers back into a significant strategic campaign.
Brass Napoleon is right to see Grant’s command of eastern forces in the spring of 1864 as a crucial point in the American Civil War, leading to the ultimate capitulation of Lee’s army. But we must not pretend that Grant sprang from the parapets of Vicksburg to the shaded trees of the Wilderness in one swoop. His victory at Vicksburg did not assure him command in the east. As noted above, the capture of Vicksburg resulted in the temporary break up of his army and Grant himself sitting quietly, passively, while events to the east continued to dominate matters of command structure and the flow of the war. The Battle of Gettysburg ended the single most important threat the Union faced that year and resulted in new Confederate attention on Tennessee. That in turn bolstered Confederate forces at Chickamauga and ultimately forced the Lincoln administration to supplant Rosecrans, creating a window of opportunity for Grant.
And now I yield the floor to my good friend.