Saphroneth
Lt. Colonel
- Joined
- Feb 18, 2017
Which is ridiculous, of course, as tens of thousands of those troops never entered the Valley in the first place. Jackson certainly kept that many troops occupied (in fact you could argue he kept up to 75,000 troops occupied) but most of those troops wouldn't have been anywhere else in the first place.I've seen it stated as much as 60,000 and is probably over-generous, including ALL the Federal forces in Northern Virginia at the time, from McDowell's Corps at Fredericksburg through Fremont's and Banks' forces actually IN the Valley.
The actual decisive effect of Jackson's operations was that it kept the Department of the Rappahanock on the Rappahanock rather than reinforcing McClellan down on the Peninsula. In real terms that's between 10,000 and 30,000 troops who didn't participate in the Seven Days on account of Jackson's efforts, which were probably the decisive factor in the campaign.
It's probably indicative that Jackson actually did very little that was useful in terms of fighting in the Valley (i.e. no actual victories) until Banks was down to a single division, that his main offensive was against Banks' much smaller army which at one point dropped to just two brigades, and that almost as soon as significant Union troops began to reinforce in the Valley Jackson retreated back south.
Jackson wouldn't have looked like a military genius, or indeed have been able to do much, if the forces in the Valley had been kept at the original level of six brigades under Banks. Instead trying to economize and reduce the forces in the Valley to two brigades opened an opportunity, and then the Union (by which I mean principally Lincoln personally) massively over-compensated and paralyzed tens of thousands of troops.
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