Rhea Cole
Major
- Joined
- Nov 2, 2019
- Location
- Murfreesboro, Tennessee
The Magnificent Seven
Worse Than I Thought, Failure of Confederate Leadership in the West
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.
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