Lee's Gettysburg Campaign Was Doomed From the Start; Logistic & Horses
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It is great fun to speculate on what General Lee could of, would of, should of at Gettysburg. I personally have war gamed dozens of scnerios. While that was both instructive & entertaining, it did leave out the critical factor that made all my "cunning plans that could not fail" moot. In reality, Lee's diminishing supply of horses & lack of logistical assets doomed his campaign from the start.
The stated goal of the Gettysburg Campaign was to raid into Pennsylvania, cause alarm among the populous & dampen the will to win of the Northern Population. If possible, Lee was to fight one beat battle, defeat the Army of the Potomac & take Washington. From there, Lee was to publish a declaration the Jefferson Davis had written & await the inevitable Northern Collapse. Whatever doubts an educated observer may have about that collapse or the wisdom of the overall strategy that sent Lee into Pennsylvania, certain iron clad rules that even Lee's genius could not outflank applied.
Horses & mules were a diminishing asset. In 1860 there were 4.2 million horses in the Northern states, 1.7 million in the Southern states. A horse had to be five years old in order to be physically developed enough for military duty. No stallions, pregnant mares or mares with foals, hot blooded breeds, under or oversized animals need apply. The artillery, for example, required a Morgan or similar breed, 16 hands tall. About one million five hundred thousand horses were lost during the Civil War. Cavalry operations used up horses at an almost unbelievable rate. Each cavalryman could require two or there remounts during an active campaign.
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Henry Lovie, "Shell burst in the spot sketched [center left] killed 6 horses & wounded all the position & tore Sergeant Tosey previously wounded to pieces."
Every horse that was of military age during the Civil War was the issue of a stallion that stood to a mare before 1860. Both sides went to war with the existing stock & had no ability to add to it. Lee was running out of horses. The great horse & mule country of Kentucky & Tennessee had been closed to him for some time. In some cavalry units, more men were on the books without mounts than with. The Gettysburg Campaign & a theoretical follow on would have consumed horseflesh at an unsuitable rate. The huge farm animals that some of Lee's officers found themselves mounted on speak volumes about the impossibility of finding remounts in Pennsylvania.
During the first two years of the Civil War, the Union Army issued 284,000 horses to 60,000 cavalrymen. Indeed, the cavalry used up horses like the infantry used up shoes.
What would it have taken for Lee to mount his raid into Pennsylvania, fight his major battle & then sustain himself in Washington D.C. long enough to force the North to surrender? We can speculate, but a better use of our time might be to examine a campaign that started a few days after Lee recrossed the Potomac River. On June 23rd, William Stark Rosecrans ordered the Army of the Cumberland centered on Murfreesboro TN to attack the Army of Tennessee under Braxton Bragg. The logistical effort it took to chase Bragg to Chattanooga & stay there is a real world analogy for what it would have taken for Lee to take & hold Washington.
The best description of what became known as the Tullahoma Campaign's logistical challenge I know of comes from a Sanitation Commission report.
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It is interesting to note that the wagon train "extended forty-seven miles' is almost exactly the same as the line of wagons General Imboden guarded during Lee's retreat from Gettysburg. Given that, we can have confidence that the total of twenty-two thousand army horses, three thousand private horses (officer's mounts) & thirty-six thousand mules, "in all sixty-one thousand animals" is a fair approximation of Lee's animals.
66,000 X $140 = $2,240,000 at the average rate of $140/horse paid by the Union army during the war. When you figure that each of those animals would be replaced at least once during an extended campaign, $4,480,000 worth of animals would be required to sustain a campaign in Pennsylvania & Washington D.C. In reality, that number is probably very conservative. On an active campaign, the Confederacy simply had no means available to remount Lee's army or pay for it in the summer of 1863.
The daily ration for an army horse was 14 pounds of hay & 12 pounds of grain (oats, corn or barley). The 26 pounds per day of the 66,000 animals in the army weighted 229,000 pounds. Project a one month stay in Pennsylvania & the Army of Northern Virginia would have to transport 6,870,000 pounds of fodder just to meet the minimum requirement for keeping their animals alive. The next calculation is easy, the standard army wagon could carry 1,000 pounds of cargo. That is an astonishing 700,000 wagon loads to be driven both ways from somewhere in Virginia. Confederate rail roads transporting that volume of fodder to a forward railhead in Virginia simply could not have happened.
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Doubling teams to get up grades or other obstacles was a common occurrence. After all, a six horse hitch has only six horsepower.
The grim reports of the Confederate inspector general for transport make it certain that no such lift capability existed in the entire Confederacy even if fodder in that volume could be obtained. There were no surplus animals available to reenforce Lee. In June the inspector reported that the Army of Tennessee was thousands of draft animals & wagons short.
General Rosecrans ordered rations & ammunition be forwarded by wagons from Murfreesboro. The railroad was used exclusively to transport fodder. During WWI, the British shipped more tones of long fodder to France than they did ammunition. One problem with fodder is that the rail cars cubed out before they grossed out, i.e., ran out of room before they ran out of load carrying capacity. The fodder consumed by Rosecrans' animals came from what we would call the Midwest. The rail cars & steamboats that hauled it came from every line in the country. Southern railroads refused to consolidate under a military railroad command like did Union companies with the U.S. Military Rail Road. The territorial squabbling & general self-centeredness of Confederate rail executives resembled nothing I can think of but what happens when six small girls are cooped up in the back of a van on a 500 mile car trip. It wan't a pretty thing to witness.
How was Lee going to evacuate his sick & wounded? General Imboden reported that the convoy of wounded extended the entire 45 miles from Gettysburg to the Potomac. 10,000 wounded & stragglers were left in Union hands. It required the entire lift capacity of Lee's army to transport his wounded. Lee could sustain his fighting regiments or evacuate his wounded, not both. Confederate armies in the West abandoned their dead & wounded to be cared for by the Union army. How many men would Lee have had to abandon along the way during his advance toward Washington D.C., thousands, tens of thousands? There is no way to know, I don't suppose.
Where was Lee going to get the labor to man his logistical push into Pennsylvania & maintain his position in Washington D.C. for a month? The obvious source of labor would be the slaves of the men in whose interest Lee went to war. By 1863, a significant percentage, ranging as high as 75% in some areas, of the adult male slave population had run off. Anywhere Union forces had even passed through saw a wholesale exodus of slaves. Even when all the adult male slaves in the surrounding area were commandeered, the labor force was only a fraction of what was needed. Needless to say, Virginia did not have a surplus of white males available to do the backbreaking labor that was required. Lee simply did not have the labor pool to keep his army supplied on the projected Gettysburg/Washington D.C. campaign.
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Depending on the meat ration (salt pork in brine vs smoke cured bacon, e.g.) an army boxcar was packed with 8 to 9,000 complete daily rations. That meant that the ten car drags, which is all that the rickety Nashville & Chattanooga could handle, would deliver a single days' rations for Rosecrans' 80,000 men. A train an hour 24/7 passed through Murfreesboro headed south toward Rosecrans' army. The consists were lashed together as far away as Chicago & at the railhead on the Tennessee River at Johnsonville TN, 75 miles west of Nashville. Manning the rail yards, warehouses, building & maintaining the track were thousands of self-liberated black people. The Nashville & Northwestern Rail Road was successfully guarded & kept open by several regiments of United States Colored Infantry like the 13th & 100th. That labor source & military aide was not something Lee could count on. In fact, the opposite was true. The 25th Corps that took Richmond was an all United States Colored Troop unit.
As has already been alluded to, Lee had an almost impossible situation were his wounded were concerned. A week after the battle, a large cluster of Army of Northern Virginia wounded were discovered laying in the open under the shade of an orchard. Aide was called for immediately. The men had been left there when Lee retreated & only discovered by chance. Had Lee maneuvered to Washington D.C., many thousands more of his wounded would have suffered the same fate as the survivors of the orchard.
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Hospital train running between Nashville & Chattanooga.
In contrast, Rosecrans had "almost 20 hospitals in Murfreesboro". There were many more in Nashville. From there, the sick & wounded men were transferred by river or by rail to their home states. Special built rail cars were lashed up to form hospital trains. A diagram of the hospital cars is in the
The Official Military Atlas of the Civil War that most of us have in our library. Hospital ships, such as the luxury packet Red Rover, catered to the needs of soldiers without regard to which side they were on. Remarkably, once a soldier was in a Union hospital, he had a 90% survival rate. The fate of the many wounded that Lee would, of military necessity, have abandoned along his line of advance is, fortunately, only a subject of conjecture.
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Interior of specially constructed hospital car. If you look carefully, you can see the rubber straps that hopefully cushioned the bone jarring ride on the rickety N&CRR.
The final analogy of Lee's raid into Pennsylvania & Rosecrans' Tullahoma Campaign is provided by the battles of Chickamauga & Gettysburg. Lee, of necessity, had to make a precipitate withdrawal across the Potomac into Virginia. Rosecrans, on the other hand, was, as Lee might have been, pinned in place. Because of the high morale & sheer doggedness of the Army of the Cumberland, Chickamauga was reduced to a the level of a tactical defeat... an incident along the way in a triumphant campaign. There was no equivalent of the Army of the Tennessee or corps from the Army of the Potomac to come to Lee's aid should he take & hold Washington D.C. Both topography & manpower made such a move on the part of the Confederate Army impossible. Grant's army group smashed Bragg's Army of Tennessee & secured Chattanooga. There was no concentration of forces of that caliber & number that could have joined the Army of Northern Virginia in Washington D.C. In fact, it was Lee's defeat in Pennsylvania that allowed three corps of the Army of the Potomac to be transferred to Chattanooga.
There is a saying, "Amateurs talk about tactics, generals talk about logistics." Whatever the political reasons given for Lee's raid into Pennsylvania & dreamed of laying down the surrender terms on President Lincoln's desk were, the Army of Northern Virginia simply did not have the logistical support necessary to make such an outcome possible.