>The Wilderness was a mean place for a battle; a large expanse of scrubby underbrush and second growth forest. Union artillery crews found unburied skeletons left from the Chancellorsville battle a year ago and old timers remembered the horror of that fight, men crippled by gunshot wounds being unable to get away from the forest fires that were creeping closer to burn them alive.>It was here that Robert E. Lee chose to make his stand; the dense vegetation would cancel out the Army of the Potomac's advantage in numbers and especially artillery and if they wanted one square foot of Wilderness ground, they were going to pay for it.
>>18246912On paper the AOP had 118,000 men but in reality they counted all noncombat personnel like teamsters, medical staff, cooks etc in the total and the actual number of combat troops in the battle was about 90,000 dudes.
>>18246919In McClellan's Own Story, he claims about 1/5th of the army's paper PFD strength must be subtracted to get an accurate total for the amount of troops actually on the field.
if you visit the battlefield today it's changed to open old growth forest and looks very different than the jungle mess it was back then
The Army of Northern Virginia had only counted actual combat troops in their returns since spring 1862. The Western Confederate armies were a bit slower to do this; the Confederate strength at Shiloh was on paper 45,000 men but only 30,000 of them were combat troops.
>>18246919late war Union army returns did eventually switch to only listing combat personnel
>>18246996By 1864, yes.
>>18246919my understanding is they had 86k infantry, 13k cavalry, and 314 artillery pieces. the month between May 5 and June 3 saw AOP take a total of 30k casualties. in late August the combined strength of AOP and the Army of the James was only 45k men. this was not solely battle losses but thousands of men going home when their 3 year enlistments expired.
A bunch of Confederate records got destroyed when Richmond was burned in April 1865.
>>18246912You are exactly right. In one of his earliest letters as president, Jefferson Davis worried that there weren't enough men to both man the army and keep the servile populations in check. Publicly, Davis stated that worries about enough slave patrollers wasn't a problem because slaves were too loyal to take advantage of the situation. It is a sterling example of the Janis headed pronouncements on slavery so common at the time.
>>18247058The Confederacy was based upon what I call a self-defeating ideology. On top of the dehumanizing evil that slavery is, the desire of the slaves to be free and escape from the plantations made it untenable.Patrick Cleburne was denounced by many of the diehards in the Confederate army because they saw the suggestion of ending slavery abhorrent and against their code but they ignore the fact he was essentially suggesting they still subjugate black people ala Jim Crow, which is what many of these ex-Confederates did once Reconstruction ended and they got into power.Isn't it depressing? How so many military historians go on and on discussing the minds of these generals yet either forget or actively ignore the awful thing they fought for and how that factors into their thought process? I see so many people that say "Oh, if only the Confederacy ended slavery, they could have won", as if it wasn't the fact they were defending slavery that the war even started in the first place. I used to be one of those people tbqh.
>>18246986You raise some good points. However, it was Washington's conservation of force tactics that won the American Revolution.
>>18247075Yes and no. Britain was limited in how much military resources they could use in the AR because some troops had to be kept to garrison Ireland and others were stationed in India, and the Royal Navy had to leave a significant amount of vessels in home waters or otherwise the French would take advantage to invade England. The Continental Army suffered from serious lack of supplies, equipment, and discipline, but luckily the British couldn't put enough troops in North America to defeat them.The Confederacy was in a far worse situation as the North is not separated from them by an entire ocean and can devote almost all of its resources to the Civil War with no other military concerns outside guarding frontier posts from Indian attacks and communications and transport had all advanced significantly as they had railroads, steam ships, and telegraphs none of which existed 80 years earlier.It's more the rule then the exception that civil wars are won by foreign powers intervening and the ACW is not the exception to the rule because the major military powers of Western Europe just tried to make as much money from both sides as possible although by 1864 they started to constrict military sales to the Confederacy.
>>18247075Except at Chickamauga, the South never really took advantage of interior lines. As Fuller wrote, Lee's fixation with Virginia ruined CSA strategy by refusing to stand down on the defensive and allowing strategic concentrations in areas where the CSA was losing. Yes, that could be a risky strategy, but since they were at a disadvantage they had to take risks. The advantages they had was interior lines and a vast territory that had to conquered, and they basically chose to ignore them.
It's important to distinguish why/how the Americans won when they did - French intervention was critical - from whether the British would have eventually won. The latter point is doubtful. The British problems included distance from the homeland and the vast size of the colonies, coupled with a large % of the population opposing British rule. In that regard I think it's too easy to dismiss the success of a "Fabian strategy". Green's campaign in the Carolinas is a good "micro example".Washington was nothing special as a battlefield tactician. Trenton and Princeton were brilliant operations, but they were staged against what were effectively outposts. In major battles against Howe Washington was defeated twice by the same tactic - Long Island and Brandywine. Even what should have been an American victory was turned into a repulse at Germantown, in part because Washington accepted Knox's bad advice that time and effort should be diverted to reducing the garrison at the Chew House. Washington's real skill wasn't strictly a military skill (and he had next to no training, even with his F&I war experience). It was his persistence and inspiration in keeping his army together despite significant obstacles, both British and American (e.g., Congress).
>>18247058Despite being a West Pointer, Jefferson Davis was a far worse strategist than Lincoln. Lincoln had no special attachment to many of his generals and would gladly fire them for screwing up (even if some like Banks, Butler, etc were untouchable due to their political connections).Now Davis, he kept incompetents in command partially because they were West Point classmates or otherwise buddies of his from the prewar Army. It gives you pause for thought that a lot of the top Confederate commanders were fairly old dudes like AS Johnston, Joe Johnston, and Lee while the top Union commanders were generally younger men like McClellan, Grant, Sherman, Burnside, Sheridan etc.
>>18247062yet still if you read Confederate leaders' postwar letters and memoirs, none of them aside from Jubal Early tries to defend slavery even when they vocally defended it prewar. most seemed to think it was for the best that slavery was gone.
>>18246912wasn't it true that Sheridan acted illegally by sacking Warren at 5 Forks? by law only the president could appoint or dismiss a corps commander.
>>18247203That has never been the case in US Army regulations, even in the 21st century. A lieutenant can if necessary order the arrest of a major general for incompetence or derelicition of duty.
>>18247209while true the laws as it stood in the ACW expressly gave the president authority to appoint and dismiss corps commanders
>>18247213A board of inquiry long after the war agreed that Warren's dismissal at Five Forks was carried out improperly and extralegally, but nobody but Warren himself cared at that point. I don't think Lincoln was going to overrule Grant or Sheridan especially not with the war nearly at its end.
>>18247219tbqh Grant had initially thought well of Warren when he came east in early 64 and considered that he might be a good replacement for Meade if that was necessary. he didn't really know Meade at that point or what to expect from him. as for the rest:>Sedgwick was a solid journeyman who did his job competently but not outstandingly>Burnside was, well, BurnsideGrant surely knew that Burnside, Butler, Banks, and Sigel were idiots but Burnside was at least in a position where it was easy to keep a leash on him.
>>18247228General Failure by Thomas Ricks, The Atlantic, November 2012This article goes down problems of command in the US Army from WWII to the War on Terror and mentions that in WWII sixteen of the 155 division commanders were removed for unsatisfactory performance as well as five corps commanders.
>>18247231>>18247228Good corps commanders in the ACW were rare. Suffice to say that army or corps command is a lot more complex than division or lower, which mostly just involves maneuvering troops on the field and doesn't deal with logistics, grand strategy etc. Neither side was that good at promoting talented division commanders eg. Patrick Cleburne while known dumbass Leonidas Polk stayed in corps command simply because he was a Davis butt buddy.
>>18247244no way would Polk have gotten a high level command if he wasn't a classmate of Davis and AS Johnston at West Point. dude didn't even really serve in the army since he left after graduation to become a minister.
>>18247244Cleburne screwed himself over by suggesting using black soldiers (never mind that he didn't actually propose abolishing slavery). That said I think Lee was pretty good overall at appointing talent from the lower ranks even if the talent pool got smaller as the war went on.
>>18247276The ANV had a horrendous officer casualty rate. From the Seven Days to Gettysburg they lost 36 infantry brigade commanders and a number of artillery battalion commanders. Not all these men were talented officers but quite a few would sorely missed in 1864.
>>18247355some of that was Southern military tradition promoting the idea that officers had to be in the front lines or they'd be considered cowards
>>18246912So why did they call it "The Wilderness" and not "Second Chancellorsville"? There was already an established convention for naming battles that took place in the same location in sequential order (ex. Second Bull Run/Manassas).
>>18247360That was true. Southern culture has always glorified machismo. You will see the many times in the war when Confederate generals ordered banzai charges:>Shiloh>Seven Days>Stones River>Chancellorsville>Gettysburg>Chickamauga>all battles Hood led as AoT commanderA few generals like Longstreet and Joe Johnston seemed to sense that different tactics were called for but this kind of tactic cost them a lot of precious manpower they couldn't afford to lose.
>>18247368The "Grant the Butcher" Dixietard meme makes no sense considering the horrendous losses the AoT and ANV took in most of their battles by launching head-on attacks.
>>18247368an understated cause of the Confederate defeat was also the fact that the Union had far better intelligence services and Confederate telegraphic transmissions were easily and routinely decrypted. during the Petersburg Campaign the Confederates intercepted every single telegraphic transmission Grant made with Washington, but they decoded just one of them. E.P. Alexander describes this in his memoirs and says it was almost an accident that they pulled it off.Lee often preferred his generals not send communications over the telegraph as he knew it wasn't secure but this made things slower and more inefficient.
>>18247219Removing Warren was technically unlawful and yes, even if Grant had the authorization to sack corps commanders it didn't mean he could delegate that power to Sheridan. All the same, I doubt anyone was going to overrule Sheridan and in any case it was only eight more days to Lee's surrender.
>>18247394the real problem was less Grant than the fact that he didn't know the AOP officers that well and the AOP had an extremely toxic culture that made it hard to accomplish anything.>Vicksburg campaign>Grant tells McPherson and Sherman there's a Confederate brigade in Raymond go remove them from there>you the boss>they go and evict said brigade from the town>they then go and occupy the state capital at Jacksonif that was the AOP the officers would shit their pants and report back that there were three entire Confederate army corps in Raymond instead of one brigade and they needed 30,000 reinforcements to have a chance.
The US cavalry raids continued and became larger. It was a strategy that had to work in the end. Most of the South's horses came from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas and the loss of that supply and the fact that their existing horses were gradually used up started affecting them hard by 1864. In the end the US cavalry was going to be able to conduct raids that the Confederates could not effectively oppose.
>>18247428it was also said that the South had a much stronger horse-riding tradition. that is people usually rode on horses to go someplace while Northerners preferred to just use them to pull buggies or carts. as a result the Confederate cavalry were in the early war a lot better. in addition most of the Northern farm boys preferred to join the infantry and get away from working with animals while cavalry recruits were typically city boys who thought it would be dashing and romantic but didn't know as much about handling horses.
>>18247439it's funny how when Rosecrans took over the AoC in late 1862 their cavalry was nearly worthless. many of the men didn't even have weapons or mounts. army HQ guard consisted of a regiment of Philadelphia blue bloods and when Rosecrans wanted to put them on front line duty they said it was an outrage and they didn't actually enlist with the idea of fighting. it was only seven more months before the AoC troopers were giving the Confederate cavalry as good as they got.
>>18247228The first casualty in the east was General Sedgwick, who was killed by a sniper. Wright took over and was not experienced. But the 6th Corp eventually became Grant's shock troops.
>>18247460>But the 6th Corp eventually became Grant's shock troops.Sure not the 2nd Corps?
>>18247473Originally the 2nd was the shock outfit of the AOP. But the 2nd Corps had always been that way and they were in the thick of every battle the army fought from Antietam onward and as a result eventually became totally depleted. The 6th Corps by luck of the draw didn't fight as much and preserved a lot more of their manpower and officers. They also missed a significant amount of the Petersburg siege as they were off fighting Early in Washington and the Shenandoah Valley and got a significant morale boost from those victories.
>>18247428the Northern states had more horses to begin with. once Kentucky and Missouri were secured for the Union their horses were added to the available supply for the Union armies. Texas was also cut off from the rest of the Confederacy during 1863 so they lost access to its horses. Tennessee was almost totally in Union hands by that fall.there was no question that the Confederacy would run out of horses. pre-20th century armies relied on a vast amount of horse and mule power and they went through horses like butter. the total horse population of the United States in 1870 had still not recovered to 1860 levels. Grant happened to know quite a bit about horses and knew that if the Confederacy's transportation system broke down, their animals would either go hungry or eat all the forage available. by war's end Hood had almost no horses left to pull his artillery, Lee had nothing to feed his troops or horses with, and the Union cavalry were now very effective raiders the Confederates couldn't do anything to stop.
It will have also been stated that Kentucky and Virginia were two of the top horse-breeding states--even though the latter did not secede from the union, it still goes to prove that the South had a stronger equine culture.
>>18247493The North had a lot more efficient and effective system of factory horse breeding and procurement of animals unlike the Confederates generally expecting men to furnish their own mounts.
>>18247219The battle was already mostly over when Sheridan sacked Warren. It was more that he personally disliked Warren than his competence as a general.
>>18247507Grant considered the 5th Corps division commanders all capable enough and not in need of Warren to babysit them. Warren was a typical engineer-officer good at logistics and planning but not so good at directing troops in battle and he didn't seem to understand that a lot of the maps the army had contained errors. Also Grant did eventually admit that letting Sheridan sack Warren was a violation of army regulations and he should have reassigned Warren someplace else earlier.
>>18247493that is true, Grant did know more about horses and their capabilities than most. a horse on average can handle a 10 mile round trip a day. Make them go >20 miles a day and they'll break down in a hurry. for cavalry it was different and troopers typically needed 4-6 changes of mounts on duty. Grant and Sheridan understood how cavalry could be used as raiders and fighters while Meade favored the McClellan approach of using them as an extension of the army signal corps.
>>18247493The total horse population of the US in 1860 was 6 million animals. Unlike a cart or a locomotive, a horse also takes 4 years to fully mature into a usable adult animal. The population of prime (4 to 10 year old) horses in the country was a computable number.
As soon as Grant cleared the Wilderness area, he sent Sheridan and the cavalry off on a raid,so they could start eating and wrecking the available forage in Virginia. The events that Lee had worked so hard to avoid in 1863 were about to take place, if he could not expel the Union army from Virginia.He also dispensed with a good portion of the AOP's artillery and horse trains by sending them back to Washington so as to reduce the amount of horses the army had to feed.Both efforts were designed to do the same thing. Reduced the army's demand for oats and hay, so that roads would not be jammed with wagons carrying horse food.Grant not only decreased the mass of the horse herd supported by the army, but was working hard to control the points from which supplies had to be freighted, to Fredericksburg, White House, and City Point.Sherman also pointed out in his memoirs that the more you march horses and mules each day, the more they need to eat until eventually an army is doing nothing but carrying animal feed.
>>18247512An analysis of the performance of the various corps throughout the Overland Campaign probably merits its own thread at some point.At least based on the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, half the II Corps did pretty well. The half made up of the old III Corps seemed to have been kinda bleh, especially Mott's, which was under Humphrey's in the Gettysburg campaign and was Hooker's originally.
>>18247543i suspect it would turn into a lot of Burnside bashing, but hey, not like he didn't deserve it (^:
>>18247355A War Department memorandum from 1906 determined that 47 Union and 77 Confederate general officers were KIA or mortally wounded out of 538 total Union and 477 total Confederate general officers. That means 8% of all Union generals were killed in the war and 18% of Confederate generals.Bruce Allardice's "Confederate Colonels" states that a total of 1,907 men held the rank of colonel in the Confederate army. Of these 324 became generals. He also says that 252 Confederate colonels were KIA or mortally wounded and eight died in POW camps. That means 15% of all Confederate colonels were killed in the war. I do not have comparable figures for Union colonels.
>>18247575There were quite a few Confederate officers who'd attended West Point and peppered Richmond with demands for promotion because they were only company-grade officers and felt it was a waste of a perfectly good West Pointer to leave him stuck at the rank of captain. Most of these men had been promoted to colonel by 1864 and some even claimed to have become generals without any proof, possibly because of gaps in the surviving Confederate records. Not all of them were in their 20s either, some were as old as their 50s.
This is William Duffield, colonel of the 9th Michigan Infantry. He literally had his nuts shot off at Stones River. Ultimately survived and lived to 83, dying in 1907.
Cpl. Edson Bemis of the 12th Massachusetts was wounded three times, at Antietam in the left arm, in the Wilderness in the pelvis, and at Hatcher's Run where a Minie ball struck his head and lodged in the left hemisphere of the brain. A surgeon extracted the round and he eventually recovered and would go on to father two children, though he had headaches, memory problems, and impaired hearing for the rest of his life. He died in 1900 at age 58.Lucky boy, no one knows how he got out of that one in a pre-antibiotics world.
>>18247648that guy was amazingly hardy to survive all this
>>18247648there are accounts of ACW soldiers trying to stop a rolling cannon ball only to have their foot or leg broken. those rounds were a lot faster and had more mass than they appeared to.
