Worse Than I Thought, Failure of Confederate Leadership in the West

Rhea Cole

Major
Joined
Nov 2, 2019
Location
Murfreesboro, Tennessee
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The Magnificent Seven

Worse Than I Thought, Failure of Confederate Leadership in the West
This summer & fall I have spent many a long afternoon sitting in a rocking chair on our screen porch in the historic center of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. I had plenty of time because COVID had canceled all my CW Round Table Signal Corps presentations, NPS living history programs & blacksmithing events. I bought a pack of many colored post it notes & began reading up on two campaigns that I did not fully understand. In order to get out of the house, my wife & I took long afternoon drives with Dr Michael Bradley's Tullahoma, The 1863 Battle of Middle Tennessee in hand. For the first time, I began to understand the topography of Middle Tennessee & its profound importance in Rosecrans' fifty mile wide advance on July 23, 1863.

As if I had sent out a request, two new books appeared; David Powell & Eric J. Wittenberg's Tullahoma, The Forgotten Campaign that Changed the Course of the Civil War, June 23-July 4, 1863. & David T. Dixon's Radical Warrior, August Willich's Journey from German Revolutionary to Union General. Thanks to the author's long hard labors, my understanding of the battle of wits between William Rosecrans & Braxton Bragg expanded exponentially. Hammering it all home, I joined a tour of the Tullahoma Campaign sponsored by the Huntsville CW Round Table. Thanks to John Scales & Greg Biggs, the profoundly three dimensional nature of that campaign was laid out before me.

Apart from the opening battles of the River War, I didn't know very much about what happened between the fall of Fort Donelson & Battle of Nashville. The Tullahoma Campaign, Chickamauga-Chattanooga, Atlanta & the March to the Sea could not have happened without the flow of supplies into the Nashville Depot. "The Supply For Tomorrow Must Not Fail" The Civil war of Captain Simon Perkins, Jr., a Union Quartermaster by Lenette S. Taylor is unique. When Quartermaster Simon Perkins settled his books, he was supposed to burn them. Instead, he stashed them in his attic. There they sat for 125 years until the family asked graduate student Lenette Taylor. She opened the boxes & discovered over 20,000 items, much of it still neatly tied up in red tape. Perkins ran the Nashville Depot during the Tullahoma Campaign. His trunks held the original documents.

Dove tailing right into Taylor's book is Tinclads in the Civil War, Union Light-Draught Gunboat Operations on Western Waters, 1862-1865. Myron J. Smith, Jr. has written an exhaustively researched chronicle of the River War in the West. It is practically a day by day, blow by blow account of actions big & small from the first day to the last. Dove tailing into Smith's book is the newly published Defending the Arteries of Rebellion, Confederate Naval Operations in the Mississippi River Valley, 1861-1865. It is literally the other side of the coin. I stuck my color coded post it note bookmark onto pages so that I could flip back & forth between them. Hearing Neil Chatelain's talk on the CWT zoom meeting was gravy. A whole new aspect of the war has opened up to me.

Last night, Jerry T. Wooten's CWT talk was excellent. Johnsonville, Union Supply Operations on the Tennessee River & the Battle of Johnsonville, November 4-5, 1864 is the definitive book on the subject. I am going to have to download the unique collection of photos that he ferreted out recently. I was very impressed with how he developed the Johnsonville State Historic Park. One of my favorite living history events is every fall at Johnsonville. He & I shared a long, dark, wind swept, cold day firing cannons over downtown Nashville from atop Fort Negley during the 150th of the Battle of Nashville. The seven years Wooten spent researching his book is evident on every page. The Johnsonville depot & the Nashville & North Western Rail Road that linked it to Nashville is the final piece that dove tails with the others, locking the magnificent seven in place.

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This heptagon of books (yes, I did have to look that up) has crystalized my understanding of the leadership of Union & Confederates in the Western Theater. Neil Chatellain, in his book & talk distills it into a single phrase. Confederate tactical victories did not lead to strategic victories. The best known example is detailed in Jerry Wooten's chapter on Forrest's victory at Johnsonville. It was tactically brilliant, but strategically irrelevant. Lenette Taylor chronicles the contestant drumbeat of tactically brilliant attacks on Union supply lines. Quartermaster Captain Perkins & a host of brilliant railroad engineers deprived those attacks of any strategic impact. The supply for tomorrow really did get through. Dr. Bradley, David Powell, Eric Wittenberg & David Dickson combine to show what the river war & supply flow allowed the Army of the Cumberland to do. It literally all fits together, every part links to the other, locking in place with remarkable precision.

At a certain points during my months long dive into the Tullahoma Campaign & what made it possible I would sit back & say out loud, "GOOD GRIEF! IT WAS WORSE THAN I THOUGHT!" The simple fact of the matter is that in the Western Theater, at every time it mattered Confederate leadership failed miserably to rise to challenge. The very guiding principle of the creation of the Confederacy created a fractured command structure more often than not manned by men who fought tooth & nail to preserve their parochial interests no matter what. The Confederate Mississippi flotilla had no commander at all. Every captain commanded his own vessel & made no attempt to cooperate with each other. Forrest was sent off into West Tennessee to attack Sherman's communications at the same time that Sherman left Atlanta & destroyed the rail road all the way back to Chattanooga. On & on & on, the bright spark of Confederate tactical brilliance had blinded me to their strategic futility. The books I read this summer-fall has cleared the dazzles from my vision. In all candor, the reality is kind of depressing. Knowing the truth takes some of the fun out it. The inescapable conclusion form my literary heptagon is that Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Porter et al were like men playing checkers with a gang of five year olds.
 
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"The inescapable conclusion form my heptagon is that Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Porter et al were like men playing checkers with a five year old."

After your study and conclusion, I am curious how the Confederacy could have done better if there had been adults playing the Confederate side of the game. Your insight should prove interesting.
 
"The inescapable conclusion form my heptagon is that Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Porter et al were like men playing checkers with a five year old."

After your study and conclusion, I am curious how the Confederacy could have done better if there had been adults playing the Confederate side of the game. Your insight should prove interesting.
It was the lack of an adult. The Mississippi River defense was divided between six separate commands. They did not cooperate, plan or work together. The second in command of two of them actively hated each other. Every chance they got they did their best to confound & frustrate each other. The cavalry interdiction campaign was a series of disconnected all too often ego driven raids. The real flashes of tactical brilliance were just flashes in the dark. I will leave it to imagination what would result if Forrest, Wheeler, Morgan along with half a dozen partisan rangers were locked into a room to see what would happen. The very fabric of Confederate culture made uniting under a unified command impossible. As my mom used to say, there is no point in ordering dogs not to bark.
 
There can be little doubt that the lack of a unified, national command structure and strategy was a prime ingredient in the defeat of the Confederacy. The southern political and military leadership failed to: devise a workable approach to ensure independence and to direct appropriate resources to that end; end the practice of separate military "fiefdoms;" and, effectively coordinate naval and army resources. These problems were particularly glaring defects in the western theater, but also in the east given Lee's Virginia-centric approach to the war. The Union too, was plagued by many of these problems but at least it generally settled on a strategy of aggressive movements to gain control of the seaboard and inland riverine routes, and acknowledged the need for a real general-in-chief with Grant's appointment in 1864.
 
Jefferson Davis and His Generals by Steven Woodward is now 30 yeard old. Probably time for a new work to revisit the topic.

Engineering Victory by Thomas Army stresses the selfishness and lack of central control as serious Confederate problems with regard to their railroads. The same problems the OP points out.

The Confederacy's epitaph being "Died of States Rights" may not be quite accurate. But perhaps it should be slightly amended to say the egotism and selfishness that underlaid Southern society -not just States Rights but also slavery, plantations, unilateral secession, and honor culture - was fatal to trying to run a country, especially in wartime.
 
The Confederate leadership also viewed the west (particularly trans-Mississippi), as a dumping ground for allegedly ineffective generals. Lee exiled Magruder, Holmes, and Huger from his command to positions in those areas for which little strategic thought was given.
 
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The Magnificent Seven

Worse Than I Thought, Failure of Confederate Leadership in the West
This summer & fall I have spent many a long afternoon sitting in a rocking chair on our screen porch in the historic center of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. I had plenty of time because COVID had canceled all my CW Round Table Signal Corps presentations, NPS living history programs & blacksmithing events. I bought a pack of many colored post it notes & began reading up on two campaigns that I did not fully understand. In order to get out of the house, my wife & I took long afternoon drives with Dr Michael Bradley's Tullahoma, The 1863 Battle of Middle Tennessee in hand. For the first time, I began to understand the topography of Middle Tennessee & its profound importance in Rosecrans' fifty mile wide advance on July 23, 1863.

As if I had sent out a request, two new books appeared; David Powell & Eric J. Wittenberg's Tullahoma, The Forgotten Campaign that Changed the Course of the Civil War, June 23-July 4, 1863. & David T. Dixon's Radical Warrior, August Willich's Journey from German Revolutionary to Union General. Thanks to the author's long hard labors, my understanding of the battle of wits between William Rosecrans & Braxton Bragg expanded exponentially. Hammering it all home, I joined a tour of the Tullahoma Campaign sponsored by the Huntsville CW Round Table. Thanks to John Scales & Greg Biggs, the profoundly three dimensional nature of that campaign was laid out before me.

Apart from the opening battles of the River War, I didn't know very much about what happened between the fall of Fort Donelson & Battle of Nashville. The Tullahoma Campaign, Chickamauga-Chattanooga, Atlanta & the March to the Sea could not have happened without the flow of supplies into the Nashville Depot. "The Supply For Tomorrow Must Not Fail" The Civil war of Captain Simon Perkins, Jr., a Union Quartermaster by Lenette S. Taylor is unique. When Quartermaster Simon Perkins settled his books, he was supposed to burn them. Instead, he stashed them in his attic. There they sat for 125 years until the family asked graduate student Lenette Taylor. She opened the boxes & discovered over 20,000 items, much of it still neatly tied up in red tape. Perkins ran the Nashville Depot during the Tullahoma Campaign. His trunks held the original documents.

Dove tailing right into Taylor's book is Tinclads in the Civil War, Union Light-Draught Gunboat Operations on Western Waters, 1862-1865. Myron J. Smith, Jr. has written an exhaustively researched chronicle of the River War in the West. It is practically a day by day, blow by blow account of actions big & small from the first day to the last. Dove tailing into Smith's book is the newly published Defending the Arteries of Rebellion, Confederate Naval Operations in the Mississippi River Valley, 1861-1865. It is literally the other side of the coin. I stuck my color coded post it note bookmark onto pages so that I could flip back & forth between them. Hearing Neil Chatelain's talk on the CWT zoom meeting was gravy. A whole new aspect of the war has opened up to me.

Last night, Jerry T. Wooten's CWT talk was excellent. Johnsonville, Union Supply Operations on the Tennessee River & the Battle of Johnsonville, November 4-5, 1864 is the definitive book on the subject. I am going to have to download the unique collection of photos that he ferreted out recently. I was very impressed with how he developed the Johnsonville State Historic Park. One of my favorite living history events is every fall at Johnsonville. He & I shared a long, dark, wind swept, cold day firing cannons over downtown Nashville from atop Fort Negley during the 150th of the Battle of Nashville. The seven years Wooten spent researching his book is evident on every page. The Johnsonville depot & the Nashville & North Western Rail Road that linked it to Nashville is the final piece that dove tails with the others, locking the magnificent seven in place.


This heptagon of books (yes, I did have to look that up) has crystalized my understanding of the leadership of Union & Confederates in the Western Theater. Neil Chatellain, in his book & talk distills it into a single phrase. Confederate tactical victories did not lead to strategic victories. The best known example is detailed in Jerry Wooten's chapter on Forrest's victory at Johnsonville. It was tactically brilliant, but strategically irrelevant. Lenette Taylor chronicles the contestant drumbeat of tactically brilliant attacks on Union supply lines. Quartermaster Captain Perkins & a host of brilliant railroad engineers deprived those attacks of any strategic impact. The supply for tomorrow really did get through. Dr. Bradley, David Powell, Eric Wittenberg & David Dickson combine to show what the river war & supply flow allowed the Army of the Cumberland to do. It literally all fits together, every part links to the other, locking in place with remarkable precision.

At a certain points during my months long dive into the Tullahoma Campaign & what made it possible I would sit back & say out loud, "GOOD GRIEF! IT WAS WORSE THAN I THOUGHT!" The simple fact of the matter is that in the Western Theater, at every time it mattered Confederate leadership failed miserably to rise to challenge. The very guiding principle of the creation of the Confederacy created a fractured command structure more often than not manned by men who fought tooth & nail to preserve their parochial interests no matter what. The Confederate Mississippi flotilla had no commander at all. Every captain commanded his own vessel & made no attempt to cooperate with each other. Forrest was sent off into West Tennessee to attack Sherman's communications at the same time that Sherman left Atlanta & destroyed the rail road all the way back to Chattanooga. On & on & on, the bright spark of Confederate tactical brilliance had blinded me to their strategic futility. The books I read this summer-fall has cleared the dazzles from my vision. In all candor, the reality is kind of depressing. Knowing the truth takes some of the fun out it. The inescapable conclusion form my literary heptagon is that Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Porter et al were like men playing checkers with a gang of five year olds.

I would recommend you read Powell's Chickamauga series and Failure in The Saddle about how the AoT cavalry let Bragg down there as well. It is a trend that continued on and on and on.

Overall, yes it was dysfunctional at the corps, army command, district level and presidential level. Johnston was told to go take over but he shows up and Bragg and his wife are sick, and he decides it's not the right time. Bragg is probably not physically well enough to command leading into and during Tullahoma but he dare not turn command over to Polk or Hardee. Polk especially spends more time fighting Bragg and dealing with Richmond more than focused on defeating the Union forces he is facing. Davis shows up after Chickamauga and everyone wants Bragg gone but Bragg is kept in place.


Bragg cannot keep any sort of command structure over Morgan, Wheeler and Forrest. He gives them a command, they may or may not follow it. He has over 12k cavalry at his disposal before Tullahoma, and yet he has no idea what is going on.

I have posted and others have many times before. The AoT had good leadership at the brigade and division levels but the higher command was a complete cluster. You read it and literally want to scream at the pages...hello do any of you have a clue?!

The real shame is the foot soliders in that army continued to fight and fight and fight and they were let down over and over and over. To me that is why Franklin is so heartbreaking to read about. Those foot soliders had been through it all for over 3 years and never gave up but they had no chance.


The only real resolution would've been better leadership from Davis but frankly he made the situation worse not better.
 
I would recommend you read Powell's Chickamauga series and Failure in The Saddle about how the AoT cavalry let Bragg down there as well. It is a trend that continued on and on and on.

Overall, yes it was dysfunctional at the corps, army command, district level and presidential level. Johnston was told to go take over but he shows up and Bragg and his wife are sick, and he decides it's not the right time. Bragg is probably not physically well enough to command leading into and during Tullahoma but he dare not turn command over to Polk or Hardee. Polk especially spends more time fighting Bragg and dealing with Richmond more than focused on defeating the Union forces he is facing. Davis shows up after Chickamauga and everyone wants Bragg gone but Bragg is kept in place.


Bragg cannot keep any sort of command structure over Morgan, Wheeler and Forrest. He gives them a command, they may or may not follow it. He has over 12k cavalry at his disposal before Tullahoma, and yet he has no idea what is going on.

I have posted and others have many times before. The AoT had good leadership at the brigade and division levels but the higher command was a complete cluster. You read it and literally want to scream at the pages...hello do any of you have a clue?!

The real shame is the foot soliders in that army continued to fight and fight and fight and they were let down over and over and over. To me that is why Franklin is so heartbreaking to read about. Those foot soliders had been through it all for over 3 years and never gave up but they had no chance.


The only real resolution would've been better leadership from Davis but frankly he made the situation worse not better.
What? More books! Isn't this bad enough? I share your pity for the common soldier. They were putting everything on the line. No wonder they deserted in droves.
 
The real shame is the foot soliders in that army continued to fight and fight and fight and they were let down over and over and over. To me that is why Franklin is so heartbreaking to read about. Those foot soliders had been through it all for over 3 years and never gave up but they had no chance.

Very well said Sir.The disservice of the men in the field's efforts by the AOT command is sickening. The waste of lives at Franklin to me is one of the saddest aspects of the entire war. This takes us back to the never ending debate on the "what ifs" of Johnston not being replaced by Hood. Hood to me is even more controversial to consider than the the maligned Bragg, because I have not come to a conclusion myself on if I hate him or pity him. Hood is a very unfortunate character no matter how you look at it.
 
What? More books! Isn't this bad enough? I share your pity for the common soldier. They were putting everything on the line. No wonder they deserted in droves.

You don't have to read those 2 I recommended but just know the patterns you see in the spring of 63 around Tullahoma continue all the way into the fall at Chickamauga and then when the AoT is drive off from Chattanooga in November. It never ended because all of the main actors involved (Bragg, Polk, etc) remained.
 
You don't have to read those 2 I recommended but just know the patterns you see in the spring of 63 around Tullahoma continue all the way into the fall at Chickamauga and then when the AoT is drive off from Chattanooga in November. It never ended because all of the main actors involved (Bragg, Polk, etc) remained.
That’s ok, I probably will get them.. I just ordered Dr Bradley’s new book on command decisions during the Tullahoma Campaign.
 
It is an interesting side light, to me, of the battle of wills between Lincoln and Rosecrans to get the Tullahoma Campaign started in the first place.
It is interesting that had Rosecrans advanced a month earlier, the roads would have been dry. Had he waited a month, the roads would have been dry. As it was, a 500 year precipitation event began the day he did advance. Go figure that one.
 
Seems appropriate for the war.

Remember that in early 1862 Kentucky and Tennessee were undergoing massive flooding; by September of the same year the region was in the midst of a major drought.
It was an El Niño time. Indians & Spanish in South America had been aware of the current for centuries. I have never read anything that indicated that CW participants knew about it.
 
The Confederate effort in the west was somewhat dysfunctional, without a doubt, but I do think the geography and Union superiority in logistics also played a huge role.

By superiority I don't just mean the officers in charge, but the transportation systems, the engineering capability and the capacity to draw on an unspoiled populace gave the Union a huge advantage, which, to their credit, they used.

The rivers were also highways into the Confederate heartland, and again the Union had the engineers and manufacturers who could build the ships to use these.

I do agree that the books mentioned, at least those I've read, show how people like Rosecrans, Thomas, Sherman and Grant exploited all of this.
 
I can see there's a good bit of new reading I'm going to have to catch up on.

While it turned out the Western Theater was the key to the War, no one in the Confederate high command seems to have recognized that fact.
 
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