Lee's Heart Attack.

The thing is, though, the tricky bit is getting over the "last hundred yards" - and you'd have to be quite blasé to accept a defensive position with a covered approach to it. Certainly some defenders made that mistake, but others did not.
Meanwhile close terrain also impedes the ability of marchers.

I'd feel somewhat more confident that war had changed from the Napoleonic period if what you actually saw during the war was Napoleonic tactics being tried and failing. But there's no appearance of the ordre mixte, attack columns generally do not appear (and when something like them does they usually work)...
When the defenders were rushed they might create a line in which they could not clear the timber and brush in front of the line. That may have happened at Spotsylvania. At Vicksburg, I believe one of tactical commanders found an uncovered draw, and his regiment made up to and over the parapet.
But the Confederates had many good military engineers and they knew the angles and fields of fire they wanted to defend.
 
I mean, it's not really a ringing endorsement of how much war has changed, has it, when there's very few cases the Confederate infantry advances at all because it's generally at a numeric disadvantage.


I don't think you need to call upon railroad logistics as the explanation - the opposing sides at the Battle of Leipzig were supplied by horse, cart (and possibly ship) and numbered 560,000 men between them, while Borodino was twice the size of Gettysburg and fought hundreds of miles into Russia.

It's just... a Napoleonic-scale war, fought by people who hadn't experienced it before.
And the people who were paying attention to the deaths due to disease in the US/Mexico war probably knew that camp sanitation and sources of fresh food were going to be critical. I don't know how much the disease rates in the Crimean war affected the US Civil War. I suspect very little.
 
I think Joe Johnston would have been given back his command. He was the best at doing all the administrative work necessary to keep the war going. But General Lee's health probably never completely recovered in real life. And eating bad food out of dirty dishes probably did not help him feel better.
That is a strong possibility. My belief however is that Davis would not have it, he having a grudge against Johnston since Davis was ousted from West Point. Davis allowing Johnston to take up the reins of the AoNV again would be a tough pill for him to swallow.
Maybe its just hindsight, knowing how Johnston acted in Mississippi and Georgia, letting oppurtunity after oppurtunity slip away until it was too late. Him in command of the AoNV to my mind would probably be a transplant of the Atlanta Campaign in Virginia.
 
I mean, it's not really a ringing endorsement of how much war has changed, has it, when there's very few cases the Confederate infantry advances at all because it's generally at a numeric disadvantage.


I don't think you need to call upon railroad logistics as the explanation - the opposing sides at the Battle of Leipzig were supplied by horse, cart (and possibly ship) and numbered 560,000 men between them, while Borodino was twice the size of Gettysburg and fought hundreds of miles into Russia.

It's just... a Napoleonic-scale war, fought by people who hadn't experienced it before.
Leipzig is a valid example. But Borodino was far outside of the French army's logistical zone and they paid an enormous price for fighting a battle there.
 
Leipzig is a valid example. But Borodino was far outside of the French army's logistical zone and they paid an enormous price for fighting a battle there.
They still got there, over five hundred miles and two months into Russia from where they'd started.
 
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