What Ten Union Individuals Were Most Detrimental to Ultimate Union Victory?

Excellent post . The above should end the debate or assertion that McCellen could or could not fight. It is quite reasonable that if McCellen had the 50 k more men that Grant had McCellen could of seized Richmond. That is not to argue that Grant was the most successful general in the ACW.

The thing is, 50K is actually excessive. Grant had 170K (in terms of troops passing through his army) but McClellan wasn't asking for more than about 140K (in the same measure) - functionally this is less than 30,000 more troops before the Seven Days. He was specificially asking for McDowell's corps, and we also know where he would have put them - north of the Chickahominy, either along Tolopatamoy Creek or otherwise in a place which would have allowed them to block Jackson's flanking move.
Since the only thing which allowed Lee to drive McClellan away from Richmond was the flanking attack, those extra troops would have rendered McClellan's position secure.
 
Vote Here:
Hi Lefty. My remark was based on something I read in a Naval History of the war written around the turn of the 20th Century. It stated that the declaration necessitated a lot of diplomatic scrambling in France and England in order to prevent the Confederacy's recognition. The same source also suggested that the north had to demonstrate the ability to enforce a blockade, something that wasn't a given at the outset, for the blockade to be considered legitimate.
That's a valid point. Nations tend to recognize or not recognize nations based on their own self interests. The USN was thanks to Secretary of War Floyd ( if I got the name right) spread out all over the world and it would take months for all the ship's to get notified and back to America. Plus it would take time to build up a then small Navy.
Overall as pointed out the blockade actually worked out quite well in the long term.
Leftyhunter
 
Vote Here:
That's the first option. I said:


This indicates that either McClellan's AotP was much higher in quality than Lee's compared to the quality situation for the AotP and AoNV in their other battles or that McClellan had something to do with it.


Now, if this were true, we should expect that the Confederate advantage would not be in place for Second Manassas and Chantilly, but that battle is just as bad as the other Union ones not generalled by McClellan.

Perhaps Jackson was just better than Pope.
 
Vote Here:
Perhaps Jackson was just better than Pope.

It's possible, though Lee was present for much of the second half of Second Manassas and he sent in the main attack.
I think there's a definite argument that Pope wasn't very good, but the interesting problem that comes about is to look at later Union battles like Spotsylvania (another "neither side obviously has the defensive advantage" battle) - is it really possible that the Confederacy got better relative to the Union at almost exactly the same rate the Union commanders got better?
 
Vote Here:
It's possible, though Lee was present for much of the second half of Second Manassas and he sent in the main attack.
I think there's a definite argument that Pope wasn't very good, but the interesting problem that comes about is to look at later Union battles like Spotsylvania (another "neither side obviously has the defensive advantage" battle) - is it really possible that the Confederacy got better relative to the Union at almost exactly the same rate the Union commanders got better?

Longstreet sent in the attack, not Lee.

The upshot is any attempt to reduce war to quantifiable equations is crapola.
 
Vote Here:
No sir, its a reference to him as a General period. His performance was always poor, even when he had a success, (Port Hudson probably could've been handled better), his failings in the Shenandoah alone should have gotten him the boot. On Red River, I'd say the idea had chances of big success, but Banks botched it royally, just as he usually botched things.

Wherever he was he was more of a waste and detriment than an asset in my eyes, even with apparent success, someone under him would have a chance to pull it off as well if not better than him. But that's me.

Thank you sir.

USS ALASKA
 
Vote Here:
Arguably the blame for Butler's repeated military failure's has to go to Lincoln ; after all he is the boss.
Butler is not all good or all bad he did some good work in New Orleans.
Leftyhunter

The point against that is that Lincoln did not want to appoint Butler to commands, and only got the ability to sack him after the fiasco at Fort Fisher. Butler was simply too politically popular, and Lincoln's attempts to keep him out of the limelight caused the Radicals to bristle since he appointed other 'Democrats' to command positions. This is more of a legitimate case where Radical pressure on the Lincoln Administration was detrimental to the war effort.
 
Vote Here:
In declaring a blockade Lincoln inadvertently acknowledged that the South was a sovereign entity.

It did no such thing. The international laws of war considered a blockade as an act of war which allowed United States and the so called Confederacy to be recognized as a belligerents. Belligerent does not equal sovereignty.
 
Vote Here:
Longstreet sent in the attack, not Lee.

The upshot is any attempt to reduce war to quantifiable equations is crapola.

There's little evidence CEV's even mean anything in a mathematical sense either. Unsurprisingly, Lancaster's Square Law does not ever deliver a perfect result for predicting battles.
 
Vote Here:
The upshot is any attempt to reduce war to quantifiable equations is crapola.
They're undoubtedly a valuable tool, though - that's why they exist as a concept. It's just a more quantified way of expressing how someone who defeats an enemy who he outnumbers 4:1 is less impressive than someone who defeats an enemy who outnumbers him 4:1.

Regardless, the fact of the matter is that McClellan inflicted more casualties on Lee than any other general bar Grant, and that he inflicted more casualties per loss than Grant did. If one considers Grant's attritional strategy to be of any merit, then someone apparently so much better than Grant at winning an attrition race deserves note.

When you look at what McClellan was actually doing with his campaigns (fighting on a shoestring relative to the force ratio allowed to other Union commanders) it's impressive that he did what he did.


But if you remain steadfastly unwilling to consider equations, then consider the other question I raised. I'll rephrase it here:
What do you think McClellan's most harmful mistake was in terms of the manoeuvres or actions of his army, and why?
 
Vote Here:
They're undoubtedly a valuable tool, though - that's why they exist as a concept. It's just a more quantified way of expressing how someone who defeats an enemy who he outnumbers 4:1 is less impressive than someone who defeats an enemy who outnumbers him 4:1.

Regardless, the fact of the matter is that McClellan inflicted more casualties on Lee than any other general bar Grant, and that he inflicted more casualties per loss than Grant did. If one considers Grant's attritional strategy to be of any merit, then someone apparently so much better than Grant at winning an attrition race deserves note.

When you look at what McClellan was actually doing with his campaigns (fighting on a shoestring relative to the force ratio allowed to other Union commanders) it's impressive that he did what he did.


But if you remain steadfastly unwilling to consider equations, then consider the other question I raised. I'll rephrase it here:
What do you think McClellan's most harmful mistake was in terms of the manoeuvres or actions of his army, and why?

You have mistaken me for a McClellan basher.
 
Vote Here:
Sir, Montgomery Blair - the Postmaster General under Lincoln?

I b confused...

Thanks,
USS ALASKA

Yes. I inadvertently left off Postmaster. Sorry my omission led to the confusion.

Lincoln removed him in 1864 by request of the Radicals. If he was effective, I don't think Lincoln would have agreed to remove him.
 
Vote Here:
...but another botch he made early in the war was to declare a blockade on the Confederacy.
It stated that the declaration necessitated a lot of diplomatic scrambling in France and England in order to prevent the Confederacy's recognition.
Sir, will have to respectfully disagree with this. If anything it cut down on '...diplomatic scrambling...' every time a ship was stopped...
To wit;
Third, they served a diplomatic and international legal function. A formally-declared blockade gave certain rights and responsibilities to the blockading power, including a recognized right to stop and search neutral shipping on the high seas, and the right (and responsibility) to detain/impound suspect vessels and cargoes and submit them to a court's jurisdiction for determination of whether the ship and cargo should be released to their owner or seized in the name of the government.
https://civilwartalk.com/threads/the-blockade-waste-or-war-winner.74051/
This is a common misapprehension. The pros and cons of "blockade" versus "port closure" were debated extensively in Lincoln's cabinet, and it was fully understood that "blockade" would grant de facto belligerent status to the Confederacy. But in the end, it came down to what Britain could live with. Britain would not cooperate with a "port closure" as that was administered under domestic law, and Britain, not being part of the US, had no reason to comply except voluntarily-- and that would be materially aiding the Union rather than remaining neutral. The administration was extremely reluctant to give the slightest shade of legitimacy to the Confederacy, but in this case the realities of international relations forced their decision.
Essentially, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles campaigned earnestly for Lincoln to declare the ports of the South closed, as that was something that was clearly legal under existing precedent and did not have the weakness of an implied recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent. But Britain would never have gone along with it, and attempts to coerce them into going along with it would likely have led to an increased chance of war with Britain. The blockade decision, though it had the "con" of implied recognition of belligerency, was something that Britain would tend to support; first, because it allowed her to remain neutral instead of forcing her to decide which side to support (as voluntarily abiding by the port closure would clearly be aiding the North); and second, because Britain herself was one of the most frequent operators of blockades, she had a national interest in increasing the legitimacy of blockade operations.
https://civilwartalk.com/threads/blockade-proclamation.88108/
Given that the Lincoln administration wanted to close off the seceding states from exterior resources and assistance, there were two known methods of doing so:

1) Port closure. The simpler and less-expensive of the options; the country simply declares one or more ports to be closed to entry. This is administered under municipal/domestic law and litigated in the usual court system of the country. It does not require military presence to be enforceable, but to be practicable it requires a civil/enforcement presence in the ports in question.

2) Blockade. The more elaborate and expensive of the options. Under certain conditions accepted in international law and diplomacy, a country stations warships off the coast of another country to prevent ingress and egress. This is a creature of international law and the law of war and is by definition a military action; related legal challenges are mounted in special-purpose courts ("prize courts") and among the diplomatic representatives of the countries affected.

Because blockade presupposes an armed conflict, and a war presupposes an enemy, the way the treaties were written presumed another country, generally called a "belligerent" or similar term. Under the mid-19th century understanding of international law and the law of war, belligerency conferred a certain set of accepted rights and standards upon the belligerent, as well as a sort of de facto legitimacy. This conferred legitimacy was what Lincoln's cabinet would have vastly preferred to avoid, because it was logically inconsistent with the stance that the seceding states had not left the Union to form a separate country. Significantly, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles argued strongly for port closure and against blockade, based on this very conviction that the 'states in revolt' were not a separate country and therefore international law was inapplicable. (It also would have been considerably easier on the Navy to not have to mount a massive blockade of a 3,500-mile coastline.) (Much of what's said in many places about the closure/blockade debate is derived from Welles' recollections, and is filtered through his opinions.)

The Catch-22 here is that, since port closure is domestic and does not apply internationally, it doesn't apply to any other nations. In order to conform to a port closure, those other nations would have to voluntarily comply. In Britain and France's case, they saw this as a naked attempt to enlist their assistance against the rebellion, and therefore a violation of their own declared neutrality. (Seward tried to do this as well with offering to sign the 1856 Treaty of Paris outlawing privateering, which would have required France and Britain to help catch Confederate privateers. They didn't want to get involved at all in that, either.)

Blockade was the sole acceptable option from Britain's and France's standpoints. There was an established body of law to define and support it and well-understood customs and procedures. This was not a decision the U.S. could make unilaterally without significantly harming its relations with the other powers; as such, Seward was a strong proponent of blockade as opposed to port closure (and came in for a good deal of pen-lashing in Welles' writings as a result).

Essentially, it was the pragmatic reality of the situation that swung the decision toward blockade from port closure. The Lincoln administration had to face up to the fact that to maintain ideological purity in the stance of 'no separate country' that they would incur the wrath and opposition of other nations, and thereby make that 'separate country' all the more likely to exist.

It was not a decision taken lightly at all, nor an uninformed one. Even still, Lincoln tried to have it both ways by the wording of his blockade proclamation, justifying it in terms of collection of customs duties, but that was ignored by Britain and France.
But British merchant vessels were not required to follow American laws, only British and international law. A port closure would have been administered under American law, so a hypothetical British merchant vessel would have been arrested and prosecuted in an American municipal court, which the British were not prepared to accept, being a slight to British sovereignty; the alternative forced on the British in that case would have been to order their own vessels to obey an American law, which was not considered to be neutral behavior-- the British would be in effect obeying an American "blockade" of their own accord, with no American vessels needing to be present. It would be, in short, a "paper blockade."

There's also the matter of how the U.S. was going to have any enforcement personnel in the closed harbor.

Blockade, on the other hand, safeguarded the rights of neutrals in a way that was internationally accepted. U.S. vessels had the internationally-recognized right to stop and search vessels under neutral flags, provided they followed the legal procedures in doing so. (The actual technical fault of Wilkes stopping the Trent was not that he stopped and searched the vessel, which he had a legal right to do, but that he forcibly removed Mason and Slidell without submitting to due process in a legal proceeding. The bluster between Britain and the U.S. was actually about more than just that, but that was the formal legal principle involved. Stopping and searching other vessels had been a sore point between the U.S. and Britain for decades, of course.)

In the larger sense of "what does it matter," it was what Britain insisted upon (if you're going to blockade, really blockade, and put your ships out there and don't try to make us do it for you); and in the interests of keeping the war contained and winnable, Lincoln had little choice.
https://civilwartalk.com/threads/proclaiming-a-blockade-vs-closing-the-ports.99309/

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
Vote Here:
Sir, will have to respectfully disagree with this. If anything it cut down on '...diplomatic scrambling...' every time a ship was stopped...
To wit;

https://civilwartalk.com/threads/the-blockade-waste-or-war-winner.74051/


https://civilwartalk.com/threads/blockade-proclamation.88108/


https://civilwartalk.com/threads/proclaiming-a-blockade-vs-closing-the-ports.99309/

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
Thank you. That is certainly a more thorough treatment of the topic than the book I read.
 
Vote Here:
Thank you. That is certainly a more thorough treatment of the topic than the book I read.

Not a problem, sir. Until I read things like the above, I thought the same as you, "Why the heck did he do THAT?!?"

Apologies to @Mark F. Jenkins for pulling his quotes out of their original threads and thanks to him for writing all that up in an easy-to-digest manner!
687

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
Vote Here:
Not a problem, sir. Until I read things like the above, I thought the same as you, "Why the heck did he do THAT?!?"

Apologies to @Mark F. Jenkins for pulling his quotes out of their original threads and thanks to him for writing all that up in an easy-to-digest manner!
687

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

No apology necessary, but it took me aback to find myself cited! :eek:
 
Vote Here:
Back
Top