[saganite]

And the man who should have been second in command of Confederate forces after Lee.

[lentulusgracchus]

And the man who should have been second in command of Confederate forces after Lee.

Third in command, after Longstreet and Lee. Longstreet should have been Lee's boss and Davis's commander-in-chief and right-hand man in Richmond, because:

• Lee had a theater focus. He thought strategically, but at the campaign level.
• Lee was a better field commander than Longstreet, who had liabilities and tended to plod
• Longstreet had a wider picture of the war and, at Davis's elbow and with seniority, would have been in position to help the Western commanders more to resist the strategic, and fatal, "Anaconda Plan"
• Longstreet, with recent quartermastering experience out West, would have been, in Richmond, in a key position to prevent the atrocious hoarding of the commissary that starved field armies and Union prisoners alike, and he'd have had the expertise to husband, deploy, and extend the Confederacy's precious resources of war materiel and supplies

[Non-Sequitur]

And the man who should have been second in command of Confederate forces after Lee.

Not necessarily. Forrest was a commander who excelled in one particulat sphere or warfare - irregular cavalry commander. Take him out of that comfort zone and put him in charge of an infantry corps, for example, and there is no way of telling how he might have done.

[Badeye]

‘And the man who should have been second in command of Confederate forces after Lee.’

Hardly.